Attacks on migrants are an attack on us all

Charlie Jarsve argues that Labour’s attacks on migrants and plans for a Danish style immigration system are an attack on all of the working class

We are under attack, in our workplaces, in our homes, in our communities. This is the norm within the capitalist mode of production, but on every front this Labour government has chosen to intensify those attacks; cutting the winter fuel allowance, criminalising protest, cuts to disability benefits, seeking to introduce ever expanding surveillance for big tech under the guise of ‘Digital ID’. In every area of life, this government is committed to a war against us, not just at the level of propaganda, but through material, concrete measures of repression and deprivation, and we don’t hate them enough for it.

Not content with these other assaults, last week Shabana Mahmood announced plans for a ‘Danish-style’ immigration system, including the confiscation of jewellery from refugees and a whole host of other attacks on migrants, including threats to deport the British-born children of immigrants.

As has already been pointed out, with these measures, and with Keir Starmer’s racist ‘Island of Strangers’ speech this summer, the cruelty is the point. The point, as Richard Seymour wrote last week, is about saying: ‘no one can accuse us of not being Nazi enough’.

This cruelty is red meat for the racists and bait for liberals and those to the left of Labour. It is about the Labour government pinning their colours to the mast and distinguishing themselves from the ‘luvvies’ who care about human rights, or suffer the ‘defect’ of empathy for others. Of course, in this vein, it can’t be separated from the normalisation of the genocide in Palestine.

But, amidst all of this noise, there is a danger of only seeing this at the level of propaganda. Racism is not just propaganda – it is concrete, it is material. It is very important to identify that attacks on migrants are also attacks on the working class.

This isn’t just because many workers are migrants.  It isn’t just because the right to cross borders is a right we should fight for for the class. Although both are correct.

Generally, leftists and liberals will frame attacks on migrants as a propagandistic ‘distraction’, a means of getting workers to blame ‘the wrong people’; to ‘punch down’ rather than ‘punching up’; to look the other way whilst the rich pick their pockets. The received wisdom is that racist anti-migrant politics is used to sow ‘division’ and undermine ‘unity’.

Even though it is  correct, the problem with this way of seeing things,is that it is both a little too abstract and also that it continues to present migrants as a charity case. Either a group separate to ‘ordinary’ workers, or an oppressed group separable from ‘ordinary’ workers to be conveniently scapegoated. The appeal to reject racist politics is still an appeal to those non-migrant workers to reject the scapegoating and focus on the ‘real enemy’.

What needs to be better articulated, and is understandable even for non-Marxists, is that border controls are not just part of racist propaganda which encourages workers to blame the ‘wrong people’ – they are a direct attack on the ability of the working class to organise. They are a means of engineering sections of the working class as more precarious, creating castes within the working class for employers to exploit, and ensuring that, for a large number of workers, the stakes of being victimised at work will not just be disciplinary warnings or unemployment, but also severe destitution, imprisonment, or deportation. As anyone who’s tried to organise at work knows, getting workers to overcome the fear of reprisals and victimisation is one of the key obstacles to building power, and non-migrant workers are weaker when their migrant colleagues are scared into passivity.

We need to be better at articulating to all workers; these are not just attacks on migrants, they are attacks on you, on your class, on your ability to organise and live a dignified life.

We are under attack, but we have the means to fight back. Doing so, however, requires a focus on the battles that have to be fought, and the capacity to articulate the ways we are all being attacked.