Who are the outsiders?

The answer to people fleeing conflict, deprivation and brutal regimes is to remove the root causes of such misery—minority ownership and control of productive resources which generates rivalry. Not only does this global minority ownership and control of productive assets cause people to flee and seek better lives elsewhere, it also influences where such migrants try to reach. Politicians and the media accuse asylum seekers for not staying in the “first safe country” they reach, alleging them of seeing Britain as a “soft touch”. Those travelling long distances through fear or desperation are people no different to ourselves. Multimillionaires and billionaires, thanks to exploitation of the working class, re able to fly first-class anywhere in the world at a whim and are the real migrant “spongers” who need to be kicked out.

Xenophobia flourishes with new-comers subjected to racism and abusive languages by the host nation's population as "bloody foreigners", "parasites", "aliens", "refugees" and "patriotic” citizens are quick to assert, nationalistically, that the "outsiders" have come to take their jobs, their houses and what have you. However, though the grievances of the masses may be related to economic factors, it is unreasonable to blame it on their fellow poor workers. It is often objected that migrants move from one country to another in order to claim benefits and live off the backs of ‘indigenous’ people. But there is no reason to think this is true in the vast majority of cases. Benefits are low, and most migrants are not entitled to them anyway. The migration journey can be expensive and hard, often indeed fatal, with many dying at sea on leaky boats or while trying to cross a frontier. Migrants are rarely well off in the country they move to, forming an underclass with little if any security of employment or housing.  In order to ward off unrest various tactics are employed by governments. One of them is creating divisions among the poor workers by, for instance blaming foreigners and whipping up nationalistic feelings. In response to the official propaganda, the masses who are hungry and illiterate are taken in by the government policy. Since anger is emotional it often overpowers reason. Many workers will be misled by those squawking about the need to defend British jobs, by politicians bleating about defending Britain from being swamped by scroungers; but local workers will be no better off for siding with British capital against their fellow workers. As soon as the going gets tough, the capitalists will without hesitation pull up their money and send it elsewhere to make better profits without the slightest regards for the workers who would be swamped by the resulting unemployment. Migrant workers are a convenient scapegoat, and can be blamed for everything from unemployment to inner-city riots. Politicians therefore find it all too easy to play the immigrant (usually, race) card and claim to defend the national way of life. The truth is that it is not fellow workers who cause poverty and unemployment, but capitalism and its unyielding drive for profits.

In its quest for profits, capitalism is prepared to look anywhere for cheap labour power. One consequence has been the massive growth in numbers of migrant workers, who travel, (legally or illegally) to another country for the sake of employment. Capitalism relies on immigrant labour, despite all the anti-immigrant noises its political representatives make. Migration is part and parcel of the global economic order. Nationalist, protectionist and anti-foreigner views flourish when people, who already mistakenly consider themselves to be a nation, feel economically insecure. They tend to turn to the ‘nation-state’ to protect them from world market pressures and the competition of other states. It is all too easy to blame immigrants for causing or at least aggravating problems such as unemployment, bad housing or crime. Whether it is a matter of people from Eastern Europe or South Asia in Britain, or Hispanics in the United States, or Germans in Switzerland, a finger can always be pointed at ‘them’ for making things worse for ‘us’. People are right to protest about their situation, but they need to be more discerning and choose the right target. It’s not migrants who are to blame for their plight. It’s the world-wide capitalist system of production for profit. That’s what they should target.

Capitalism cannot work in the workers' interests. Its creed is profit. Capitalism is a society of haves and have-nots, of winners and losers. The working class should not side with any of our class enemies. It should stand for its own interests—freedom from wage slavery and exploitation; socialism: a society of production for use and free access, where all will contribute according to their abilities. We're compassionate; our capacity to empathise with others is nothing short of amazing and is surely the key to our unity and social order. Why would we do things to others that we wouldn't want done to us? If we rediscovered our empathy, imagine the impact on the treatment of refugees. The task confronting us is to build up a union of the working class, organised to put an end to the property system that divides and oppresses us. Working people, whether migrants or not, face a common enemy, the world capitalist class and their system. Instead, to free ourselves we need the World Commonwealth of Humanity.