‘If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does
not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class
and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for
none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a
snare.
Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the
international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be none the
weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear
conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the
revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the Socialist movement while
they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.’
Eugene Debs
People should have the right to work anywhere to earn a
living and feed their family. Labour must have the right to cross borders. It
is up to unions to organise them, as they seek to organise all non-union workers.
Immigration controls are a weapon used by the ruling class against the whole of
the working class. All politicians both
on the right and the left have indulged in attacks on migrants and immigration
for years. It is necessary for them to have a scapegoat to blame for the ills
of the political system that we live under and the immigrant, present
throughout history, has always served as such a scapegoat. Whenever we have
high unemployment, or cuts to the welfare states social services, those
representing the interests of big business attempt to cover up their own
responsibility for this situation by blaming working people. The question of
house prices, rents, and long hospital waiting times and full class-rooms being
the fault of immigrants is balderdash. Yet many workers do say these things
and, if not exposed to the true facts, will tend to believe them. The Socialist
Party is unafraid to take an unpopular position that is nevertheless a correct
one. We in the Socialist Party have a job to do to educate all workers to
realise the need to end capitalism and build socialism. It is the system of
capitalist production that produces unemployment, homelessness, destitution and
crumbling social facilities, not to say incessant wars – not workers, be they native-born
or newcomers. The rich are happiest when workers are squabbling among
themselves for the crumbs. The rich feel safe as long as people argue about
crumbs and not about the loaf because they know that no embarrassing questions
will be asked about who made the loaf?
We in the Socialist Party know that in
capitalist society bad housing, crowded hospital conditions, inadequate
transport and the like – are caused by a system of society which plans its
priorities and makes its decisions in the interests of profit and a minority
who benefit from that profit. We stand for the free movement of workers from country
to country. We say that immigration controls are against the interests of
workers everywhere.
Capitalists want to see migrants with second-class status
because they form a layer of the working class that is most easily
exploited—they have a much harder time fighting back against rotten conditions
and sub-minimal wages. Having such a layer of workers bound to miserable
conditions weakens the whole working class, since other workers face the threat
of replacement by this underpaid sector of the workforce. In all capitalist
societies, a tiny class of people owns the means of production and profits by
exploiting the workers’ labor. United, the overwhelming tendency of the working
class would be to fight for a decent life for all, which is incompatible with capitalism.
Powerful united struggles of the working class would inevitably demonstrate the
need to overthrow capitalism altogether. Since the working class is the only
class with the power to overturn capitalism, the capitalists use every possible
divide-and-conquer tactic to prevent this development. The bosses hope to keep
the worst-off sections of workers—Blacks, Latinos and other immigrants—fighting
with each other over shrinking pieces of a small pie instead of uniting to
fight for a decent life for all.
The working-class cannot be defined by their place of birth,
the place where they live, the language they talk, the clothes they wear or the
colour of their skin. Our fellow-workers are the plundered all over the world and
they speak a multitude of languages and have many different shades of colour to
their skins. It is the common factor of their exploitation which binds them
together far closer than the trivial differences of colour or language. Socialism
is the antidote to racist and nationalist poison. Xenophobia is part and parcel
of a capitalist system which divides people up into classes in the interests of
the minority in charge of industry and finance, the
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