Borders are now a means of disciplining a global working class
Mike Phipps reviews Essential Work, Disposable Workers Mostafa Henaway, published by Fernwood
APRIL 21, 2024
Despite the rhetoric adopted by a range of politicians, there is no ‘immigration crisis’, argues the author of this thoughtful new book. Rather, what we are seeing is the normal functioning of the global economy reaching its logical conclusion. Only an internationalist understanding can tackle the destitution of the Global South that this causes.
Since the 1990s, remittances have become the largest financial flows from the Global North to the South and are now integral to the current phase of international capitalism. Rather than seek alternative state policies to redress the inequalities that are essential to capitalist development, “countries are locked into a model of labour export that separates families, destroys communities and lacks concern for workers’ livelihoods.”
The Philippines alone has over 10 million of its citizens living and working abroad, nearly 10% of its population, a process that began with economic liberalisation which devastated the domestic economy. Likewise Mexico, which had healthy growth rates in the 1970s and 1980s, was forced to accept IMF-imposed privatisations and other neoliberal measures which obliterated livelihoods and led to a mass wave of migration to the north. In 2017 alone, Mexicans abroad sent home a staggering $36 billion. In El Salvador, remittances make up a quarter of GDP.
These sums are not just a lifeline to migrants’ families – they also improve the credit rating of financially desperate countries, which can use them as a strategy to access external loans and lower their borrowing costs, which in turn bolsters the unpopular elites that adopted this devastating strategy.
In the Global North, the growing militarization of borders has been accompanied by increased deportations, detention and denial of rights. In this model, borders serve not to deter migration but to discipline a global working class, in which migrants constitute a vast, low-wage, flexible workforce, exploited to undermine trade unions and make all work more precarious.
Despite the official rhetoric, there is a great deal of state collusion in this process. In Spain, the authorities move irregular migrants to areas where labour is needed. They are routinely paid half the minimum wage and risk deportation if they ‘cause trouble’. The US shows similar patterns in maintaining its cheap agriculture labour.
How to organise against the injustices that migrant workers face, in the context of declining union power? Henaway has a number of ideas, based on his experience as a community organiser at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal. But he also draws on the struggles of Latin American cleaners in London, African warehouse workers in northern Italy, the Sans Papiers strikes in Paris, and elsewhere.
While there are undoubtedly objective difficulties to achieving success in these struggles, Henaway is keen to emphasise the subjective obstacles they face – in particular the conservative methods and attitudes of much of the left and its traditional organisations.
A lot of the case studies here are from Canada where the author is a long-standing activist. But the conclusions apply far more generally, so this book should be widely read to understand the driving forces behind, and the consequences of, global migration.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
No comments:
Post a Comment