World Without Borders

There are examples where groups and individuals who claim to be indigenous to the land, so to speak, lash out against those they consider to be “interlopers”, “aliens,” “foreigners,” and “outsiders” - immigrants. Few issues today so sharply differentiates the revolutionary socialists and nationalist reformists as that of the cross-border migration of workers. The issue at stake is a challenge to the very existence of the national State and its prerogatives in the control of a territory and the inhabitants. Some of the Left care only to gain control of the State and acquire  its power over its citizens not with abolishing the State, per se. Accepting the right of the State to control immigration is accepting its right to exist. When some on the Left deplore the ill treatment of immigrants it is seen, not as an attack on the powers of the State, but as an argument for ending all immigration. Demands for a “humane immigration policy” rival the fantasies of liberal NGOs make to send capital to the countries from which the immigrants come, not immigrants to the countries where capital exists. If the reformers had power to direct capital to new locations, then it has the power to abolish capital. To permit the expulsion of illegal immigrants is to take one step nearer to the expulsion of immigrants, which in turn is a step closer to the expulsion of selected sections of natives and we already see the early signs with “terrorists” being deprived of passports and hence their nationality, made stateless.

The U.N. estimates that 79.9% of children in Guatemala, 78.9% in El Salvador and 63.1% in Honduras live in poverty. In Honduras, rates of malnutrition reach 48.5% in rural areas, while almost half of Guatemalan children are moderately or severely stunted in growth. Honduras is the eighth most unequal country worldwide, and Guatemala isn’t far behind.  According to a report from the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, since the Zelaya coup in 2009 the economy has plunged, poverty has increased, social spending on health care and education has been slashed, economic inequality has worsened, and 100% of all real income gains have accrued to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans. The  economic policies of the so-called “Washington Consensus” – centered around privatization, trade and financial liberalization, and diminished social spending. In Honduras and Guatemala the bottom 50% actually experienced a decrease in its income share during this period. Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have been kept under the jackboot of murderous regimes, with U.S. support, for much of the twentieth century. Superimposed on this has been a devastating wave of gang violence. Honduras is now the murder capital of the world. El Salvador and Guatemala have also some of the highest homicide rates in the world. The immigrants eager to cross the US-Mexican border for security and sanctuary are refugees of inequality.

Nationalism and socialism are contradictory. Socialism must be international or it can not exist at all; it is a sham. In the end, not socialism but nationalism and the national State will have to disappear. The world is irresistibly being driven to internationalism and interdependence, the only race remaining, that of the human race as a whole. The capitalist system has freed people from the soil."Where I fare well, there is my home”. Workers journey often with their families in order to settle wherever conditions are most favourable. Everywhere, human beings are the same, no matter where they come from or where they go to in search of their bread and butter. He is but a nomad. They leave behind unemployment but only too frequently they find  discrimination. They constitute a large section of the workers in transport and on building sites. They staff our restaurants, our laundries, work in factories. They also face hostility at work, in schools, in pubs, because of where they were born.

The new land is usually one in which the laws and their administration are more favourable to the workers than those of their original home. And  co-workers have no motive for depriving them of what little protection they can get from the law the struggle against exploiting employers. Their interest lies rather in increasing everybody’s  ability to withstand the common enemy. Prejudice, of which he or she allows him or herself to be made a victim, does as much harm as it does the newcomer. The capitalist artificially stimulates antagonisms in order to be able to control.

Intimidatory immigration controls has nothing to do with the specific characteristics of the foreign worker concerned, but rather is related to the need to secure the loyalty of the natives. It is a ruling class strategy of directing blame for the failures of capitalism onto the “newcomers”. While it is workers which leads the attack on foreign workers, the ruling class can sleep easy  in their beds.

Over the  years the demands of the working class for better living conditions have not been met and accusing fingers are pointing at the  people who have emigrated from their home as if this were an answer to these demands. No doubt the world mobility of labour is a great hardship for the workers in countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of labour are comparatively good. In such countries, naturally, immigration will exceed emigration. As a result the labourers with the greater standard of living will be hindered in their class-struggle by the influx of those with a lower standard and less power of resistance. Under certain circumstances this sort of competition, like that of the capitalists, may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred of foreign workers on the part of the native born. But the conflict of nationalities, which is perpetual among the capitalists, can be only temporary among the proletarians. For sooner or later the workers will discover that the immigration of cheap labour is as inevitable a result of the capitalist system as the introduction of machinery or the forcing of women into industry. Wages always come down when two are after the same job. That’s the fault of competition, not of the person who cuts the price. When they say: - “The immigrants are taking your jobs,” we answer: - it is the capitalist system which causes unemployment.

 It is also learned that the workers of each nation that their success in the class-struggle is dependent on the progress of the working-class of other nations. For a time this may turn them against foreign workers, but finally they come to see that there is only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward nations: to do away with the backwardness itself. German workers have every reason to co-operate with Asia’s workers in order that they may secure higher wages and a shorter working-day; likewise the English workers have the same interest in relation to the Eastern Europeans, and the North Americans in relation to Latin America. The dependence of the working class of one land on that of another leads inevitably to a joining of forces by workers of various lands.

The national hatred which the working class absorbed from the capitalists steadily disappears and the working-class frees itself from national prejudices. Working-people learn more and more to see in the foreign labourer a fellow-fighter, a comrade. How necessary is the international solidarity of the class-struggles was recognized in the beginning by the authors of the Communist Manifesto. This historic document is addressed to the workers of all lands and concludes by calling upon them to unite. The working class must remember that in their unity is their strength. That the strength of the working class is all powerful because it is based on the determination to end all oppression, all exploitation of man by man, and to oppose all subjection of man on grounds of nationality, colour, or creed. Unlike the unity of the capitalists it is based on a total and enduring unity of interests. But in the absence of working class unity, the strength of the capitalists is greatly increased.