BOURGEOIS ECONOMIST AND IMMIGRATION


In a recent survey entitled the 'New Americans' in the Economist magazine March 11th-17th certain statistics come to light as well as certain political arguments which may enlighten people as to the nature of the globalisation process underway and the way in which illegal immigration is a new slave trade like its official predecessor at the birth of capitalism:

A bigger wave?
1900's - 8 million arrivals
1990's - 11 million new arrivals
p. 4 The New Americans

And still they come
Foreign population as a % of total
USA 9.3%
Germany 9%
Canada17.4%
Britain 3.6%
Switzerland 19%
p. 5

Invasion by stealth
Mexico 2.7 million
El Salvador 335,000
Guatemala 165,000
Canada 120,000
Haiti 105,000
Philippines 95,000
Honduras 90,000
Poland 70,000
Nicaragua 70,000
Bahamas 70,000
p.7

"Since 1990, the number of foreign born American residents has risen by 6m to just over 25m in the biggest immigration wave since the days when newcomers from Europe crowded onto Ellis Island around the turn of the 20th century. Half of the 50m new inhabitants expected in America in the next 25 years will be immigrants or the children of immigrants."

"Indeed; the effect of the current wave of immigration seems likely to be very bit as momentous as that of the last great wave a century ago."

"The rise of these new Americans is being fuelled by immigration (see above charts) Every year roughly a million new people arrive (700,000 legally, 300,000 illegally) more than in any other country in absolute numbers, though not as a proportion of the population"
"Immigration plainly has its losers as well as its winners and in economic terms the easily measurable pluses appear to be small" (p.4)

Who Gains?
"Look around Il Fornaio restaurant in Palo Alto and the whole idea that immigration might be controversial seems as passe as analogue radio. In 1970, whites accounted for 80% of the population of Santa Clara Country; last year they became a minority. One in four new businesses in Silicon Valley is started by someone of Indian or Chinese origin. The valley's success is based on merit: it depends on taking the best, wherever in the world they were born. The only debate is about how the authorities can be persuaded to let in more foreign talent.
"daniel Stern takes a different view. The head of the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform argues that his country is being 'held hostage by a group of globalists who want nation states to dissolve into some net-zen Utopia"

…The $300,000 question
Apart from the overall effect on the economy, there are also specific winners and losers from immigration. The most conspicuous winners are legal immigrants. A new study of this group in the 19990's by Mr Smith and others shows that for any male newcomer the immediate effect of getting to America is equivalent to winning $10,000. Over a lifetime, the gain comes out at an impressive $300,000.
"Perhaps surprisingly, some of those who lose out are highly paid workers. Some of the computer p[rogrammers ingesting their pasta at Il Fornaio would be paid even more if there were no Indian to snap at their heels. But many of the losers are the poor Americans. The NAS study reckoned that competition from immigrants (mostly the illegal sort) brought a 3% cut in the wages of locals who had only a high school certificate. It also concluded that the worst hit group were usually immigrants from the previous wave"
The real problem with immigraiton is not its overall economic impact but its redistributive effect, says George Borgias. A liberal Harvard professor whose parents fled from Cuba, Mr. Borgias is har to caricature as a nativist, but he has become one of the stronger voices arguing for more restrictions on immigration. The rich he argues gain from having cheaper nannies. But for Americas poor the arrival of unskilled workers has made it harder to find jobs in an economy that demands ever more education." (p8-9)

Nora, Maria and the American Dream
"Freer trade should certainly help to narrow the present day three to one wage gap between the United States and Mexico"
"Change, surely is not a problem but an opportunity. Thanks to immigration, America has once again assembled a team of people who simply by having made the journey to their new country have shown their willingness to compete and their belief in the American dream. Look around the United States - not only at the affluent Indian programmers in Silicon valley and the newly self-confident Latino middle class in LA, but at the undernourished Uzbek children in Queens or the wretched Tejanos in Cameron Park - and you will find the drive is still there. The rest of the country must not waste it."

An analysis of the above excerpts obviously must depend on what class position one holds on immigration and globalisation. What is striking is that the Economist recognises we are living through an immigration influx as great as the one in the last century and has produced the evidence to show this. We may refute the evidence saying it is fabricated but reality itself by what is going on around us is difficult to disprove.

If the US's borders are closed what explains 11 million new arrivals in the 1990's alone? One cannot argue the borders are closed and at the same time 11 million new Americans have arrived, unless one is trying to fit reality into pre-conceived ideological schemas. Where have they all come from?
From areas which have been devastated by US big business. Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua etc. Wherever US imperialism has supported the local gangsters in power they have destroyed the countries, broken hundreds of thousands of families up turned them into virtual beggars overnight and then promised them salvation with the American dream (read nightmare). In Ancient Rome slaves could be 'freed' if they fulfilled certain criteria, in our modern Rome, free people are turned into slaves by becoming immigrants. There wasn't any mass emigration out of Central America until the US started to destroy the region for their own political reasons (to crush the US working class).

What does an immigrant to the US go through?
No status. Work like a slave with no rights apart from the right to be fired on the spot. Viewed as a new threat by other immigrants whose wages he is undercutting. Bosses have absolute control over your life like the legions of imported labour in the oil rich sheikdoms of the Gulf and can report you to the immigration authorities at the drop of a hat. Lose community, solidarity with your fellow man, told to look after your butt and your butt alone. This is now the 'status' of modern slave. Those few that manage to be 'free' ie land a good job or open some type of business end up working all hours under the sun to sustain this 'dream'. How many on the way actually never make it anywhere and become prisoners of a society not of their own choosing.
What is globalisation if not to turn all and sundry into immigrants-slaves? Having no rights ensures the bosses aquire them all at the expense of the vast majority of the population.
If Open Borders is a policy the 'left' campaigns for then this means it wants to turn the whole of society into illegal immigrants. If people have no nation, no country, nothing apart from their 'contract' with a boss, then the whole world becomes footloose, like capital before it.
A new internal neo-colonial Empire is being built in the US and by implication elsewhere, by modern immigration, which is nothing more than a refined form of the old slave trade. Instead of Blacks it has Latinos, instead of Turks it has ex-Yugoslavs, instead of South Koreans it has Phillipinos.
A struggle which aims to block the ability of capitals mobility will not only have a scope in gaining rights for immigrants but blocking the permanent oversupply of labour and undercutting of wages. Only such a struggle which has man before profit before it has a hope of winning not the Open Border policy so aptly described by the bourgeois mouthpiece the 'Economist'.