ES3206: Week 9

1
ES3206 Week 9

• Xenoracism, Education Immigration 2

2
The immigration myth exposed

• This weeks session will look at some of the
  complex and controversial arguments around the
  proposed Marxist solution to the question of
  racism encapsulated in the slogans no borders
  and no one is illegal.
• Our theorists are
• Steve Cohen,
• Teresa Hayter,
• Nigel Harris.

3
The immigration myth exposed

• Immigration problems are not a problem of
  excessive numbers of immigrants. They are a
  problem of the racism of Europeans, North
  Americans and white majorities elsewhere, who
  more or less explicitly harbour notions of the
  superiority of the white race, whatever that
  may mean, and the undesirability of destroying
  the homogeneity of their nation. (Hayter, 2000,
  p.4)
• We should not assume that high rates of immigrant
  labour in a country necessarily result in high
  levels of racism.
• The arguments of Harris, Cohen and Hayter should
  be seen as a subtle and provocative application
  of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory to this
  difficult arena, drawing out some of the
  complexities and possibly some of the
  contradictions in Miles approach.

4
The immigration myth exposed

• It is a favourite argument of political
  leaders that control of entries to the country,
  especially in the case of black workers, is the
  precondition for reducing racism and xenophobia.
  It is a most unkind argument since it blames the
  victims for their condition, not those who
  victimize them. It repeats the old anti-Semitic
  argument of the Nazis antisemitism existed in
  Germany only because Jews lived there removal of
  the Jews would thus end anti-Semitism. (Harris,
  2002, p.53)
• Though Harris probably goes too far in suggesting
  that there is a strong correlation between the
  strength of racism and xenophobia and those
  regions where there are the fewest foreigners,
  there may be some truth in this what do you
  think? To follow the proper logic he suggests,
  the way to conquer racism in eastern Germany
  for instance would be to increase the number of
  black workers there, and to end xenophobia to
  allow in more foreigners. (Ibid.)

5
The immigration myth exposed

• Harris sees a kind of inevitability about the
  ways in which capitalism is developing towards
  greater international mobility of labour.
• Marxists argue that it is the logic of capitalism
  which drives migrants to leave their native lands
  and it is capitalism itself which undermines
  immigration controls and must ultimately result
  in their collapse
• The liberalisation of trade was the first great
  transition (1850-1980 and beyond), and of capital
  movements the second (1980 onwards). These
  processes reflected and speeded integration, the
  creation of a single world economic system.
  Although neither process is anything like
  complete, the third and greatest transition, the
  freeing of people to move, has hardly begun.
  (Harris, 2002, p.93)

6
The immigration myth exposed

• Contradictions are thus opening up in developed
  countries around the reproduction of racist
  ideology in a context shaped by the need for and
  inevitability of greater migration
• The control of migration is the last great
  bastion of the old order of national sovereignty.
  Indeed it is in precisely as the period of world
  economic integration has accelerated that the
  great powers have made efforts to block the logic
  of integration of workers, to dam the flows,
  creating closed national pools of labour.
  (Harris, 2002, p.124)

7
The history of immigration controls

• Steve Cohen writes of the ideology of controls
  rather as Miles writes of the ideology racism.
• For the former, as for the latter, a historical
  analysis of economic conditions can help to
  explain the emergence and reproduction of
  ideology
• For Cohen, the ideology of controls arose hand
  in hand with racism to the extent that it is
  almost inseparable

8
The history of immigration controls

• Immigration controls are a relatively recent
  phenomenon. Britain had no such controls until a
  century ago.
• During its period of rapid industrialisation and
  of Empire-building, labour was formally free to
  move as it wished into and out of the nation
  state.
• Cohens argues that, since their inception ,
  immigration controls have served primarily a
  racist, and we might add racialising, function.
• He goes further and asserts that while
  immigration controls are not in themselves
  fascist.it is shown that at least in the UK
  there exists an historical and inextricable
  relationship between immigration controls and
  both fascistic thought and fascistic
  organisation. (Cohen 2006, p.7)
• Tightened immigration controls have consistently
  followed on waves of militant racist and/or
  fascist organising in response to changed
  immigration patterns.

9
The history of immigration controls

• The first wave of anti-immigrant reaction
  resulted in the 1905 Aliens Act. This act was
  designed to stem the flow of Jews fleeing the
  pogroms of Eastern Europe and Russia.
• The transmission of the ideology of controls
  through the class collaborative mechanism of the
  employed and unemployed masses is only half the
  story. The other half of the story is that the
  individual components of this ideology both
  popularised and synthesized at the turn of the
  century all the aspects of racism which have
  since dominated the rest of the century. The
  struggle for the Aliens Act legitimised racism by
  making it lawful. It gave it the authority of the
  modern capitalist state. It did this through
  invoking the central myth of ancient feudalism,
  the myth of Jew-hatred, the myth of antisemitism.
  There had been previous unsuccessful demands for
  controls not least against the Irish. (Cohen,
  2003, pp.62-3)

10
The history of immigration controls

• Cohen illustrates how the myths of anti-Semitism
  were constructed, just as Miles did for the
  fuelling of anti-Irish racism.
• The difference is that antisemitism actually
  became a constitutive element of the way in which
  the state and the individuals within it defined
  themselves through the introduction of
  immigration controls aimed ay excluding Jews.
• Many now familiar devices were put to use in
  creating a racialised type the Jew which
  could be targeted and vilified as part of the
  justification for their exclusion.

11
The history of immigration controls

• The first immigration controls coincide with the
  height of the biological racism.
• Allied to this, the pseudo-science of Eugenics,
  based on a reading of Darwins survival of the
  fittest was becoming more influential.
• Cohen argues that it was the campaign for the
  Aliens Act which galvanized and popularised
  eugenic ideas around the racialisation of the
  immigration debate.
• This played into ideas about maintaining racial
  purity and white supremacy, and reinforced lines
  of demarcation between white and non-white.

12
The history of immigration controls

• The press has consistently played a part in
  reproducing the common-sense of immigration
  control ideology.
• In the 1930s the Mail and the Express led the
  charge against Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi
  Germany, Cohen quotes the Daily Mail from 1938
  To be ruled by misguided sentimentalismwould be
  disastrous Once it was known that Britain
  offered sanctuary to all who cared to come, the
  floodgates would be opened and we would be
  inundated by thousands seeking a home (Daily
  Mail, March 23, 1938 in Cohen, 2003, p.116). And,
  from the Daily Express in the same week, blaming
  Jews for antisemitism
• There is powerful agitation here to admit all
  Jewish refugees without question or
  discrimination. It would be unwise to overload
  the basket like that. It would stir up elements
  here that fatten on anti-Semitic propagandaThey
  would ask What if Poland, Hungary, Rumania also
  expel their Jewish citizens? Must we admit them
  too? (Daily Express, March 24 1938, in Cohen,
  2003, p.116)

13
The history of immigration controls

• The second major phase of immigration into
  Britain came in the postwar period. This too
  heralded far-right racist agitation which
  resulted in further tightening of controls In
  the 1950s and 1960s British politicians tried
  to work out how to exclude coloured
  commonwealth citizens without excluding white
  Commonwealth citizens. (Hayter, 2000, p.4)
• Hayter and Cohen agree that
• In Britain there have been three main
  historical phases of anti-immigrant agitation,
  leading in the first two cases to the abandonment
  of what were thought to be inviolable principles
  of free movement, and potentially doing so in the
  third, current phase. In the first phase controls
  were introduced in 1905 to restrict the entry of
  aliens, mainly Jewish refugees from eastern
  Europe and Russia. In the second controls were
  introduced in 1962 to stop the entry of
  coloured British Commonwealth citizens. In the
  third, while entry for political refugees is
  still in theory allowed, the principle is being
  undermined. (Hayter, 2000, p.6)

14
Immigration controls and racism

• The well known phrase workers of the world
  unite does not mean only workers with the
  correct immigration status unite. (Cohen, 2006,
  p.151)
• Cohens position is clear and uncompromising
  immigration controls cannot be made just and are
  always racist Racism and justice are
  incompatible. The latter can only be achieved by
  getting rid of the former. And that means getting
  rid of immigration controls. (Cohen 2006, p.4)
• Immigration controls are never about what
  they and their apologists present them as
  overcrowding, lack of housing, no jobs, drain on
  welfare, whatever the latest justification
  happens to be. Rather they are about racism and
  the identity of the British state based on who
  can come and who can stay that is based on the
  states construction of population and therefore
  of itself. (Cohen 2006, p.33)

15
Immigration controls and racism

• How does Cohen justify this marginal political
  position?
• 1) As long as there are immigration controls
  some will be excluded and these some will be the
  poor and impoverished, the colonised and
  neo-colonised workers from outside the
  imperialist heartlands. (Cohen, 2003, p.47)
• 2) Controls are the historic consequence of
  nationalism, and forms of racism arising out of
  imperialism. They cannot be stripped of their
  historic roots and made racism-free.

16
Immigration controls and racism

• The vast majority of people in Britain support
  some forms of immigration control, indeed a large
  proportion want these controls to be tightened.
  Most of these people would not consider
  themselves racist, but would justify the
  exclusion of some groups of people from the UK on
  economic, practical, or, more problematically,
  cultural grounds.
• Cohens argument is that such thinking is
  shrouded in ideological fog. In asserting the
  principle workers of the world unite, he forces
  us to consider that we cant see the wood for
  the trees we cant see the racism of the state
  because of the complex justifications which have
  built up around bourgeois statist ideology
• Immigration controls do not survive and thrive
  just because of institutional and state
  repression, just because of bodies of armed men
  and other material adjuncts. There is also a
  whole series of ideological constructs within
  civil society that ensures their popular
  acceptance. In turn this popular acceptance has
  enabled the twentieth century British state and
  nation to define itself in terms of who is
  allowed to come and stay here. Black people are
  excluded from this self-definition. It is
  immigration controls as much as Empire that have
  given Britain its national identityImmigration
  restrictions provide the British state with its
  own brand of identity politics. (Cohen, 2003,
  p.57)

17
Immigration controls and racism

• Immigration controls, then, function to racialise
  not only the other, but the British
  themselves.
• Cohen argues that the ideologues who support
  controls very clearly understand how controls
  shape national identity in a way calculated to
  completely obscure class allegiances between
  metropolitan and third world workers, between
  white and black workers. (Cohen, 2003, p.57)

18
Immigration controls and racism

• Hayter argues that the existence of immigration
  controls have indirectly strengthened
  institutional racism in the enforcement arms of
  the state in policing in particular as some
  police violence against black people has been
  made possible by the need to deport them.
• Racism in the police, whilst a reflection of
  patterns of belief in society more widely, is
  especially important in reinforcing societal
  racism, seeming to condone it by, for instance,
  failing to take hate crimes seriously.

19
Immigration controls and xenoracism

• Hayter echoes Sivananadans sentiment that the
  primary targets of racism and xenophobia
  xenoracism are now refugees. (Hayter, 2000,
  pp.4-5)
• Most recently, anti-immigrant hysteria has been
  whipped up, not only against black, Asian and
  Romany refugees but also against white east
  Europeans.
• It was in 1999 that the tabloids turned asylum
  seeker, previously a neutral term, into a swear
  word, a racist epithet as repugnant as nigger
  or Jew (Harris, 2002, p.135).
• Terms such as asylum-seeker now have an
  ideological weight and can play an ideological
  role in reinforcing commonsense
  (xeno-)racialised understandings of the other.

20
Immigration controls and racism Common-sense

• Common sense is regarded by its adherents as
  politically neutral.
• Cohen draws an interesting parallel with Arendts
  observation regarding the passivity of the
  onlooking citizenry in the face of the Nazis
  final solution.
• Whilst immigration controls are not morally
  equivalent to the death camps, the moral status
  of the silent, passive bystander who eventually
  looks away, is exactly the same. (Cohen, 2006,
  p.25)
• The racism inherent in systems of immigration
  control is regarded as neutral because such
  racism remains fundamentally unquestionable.
• Arendts description of the banality of evil of
  the Jewish genocide is paralleled by Cohen with
  the amoral, administrative mindset which can be
  seen to be also underpinning the evil of todays
  immigration laws Just as the liquidation of
  European Jewry was sanitised as the final
  solution so today the brutal arrest, imprisonment
  and deportation of the undocumented is translated
  into the bureaucratic speech of managed
  migration. (original emphases) (Cohen, 2006, p.7)

21
Non-people sans-papiers the racialisation of
asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants

• Once they left their homeland they remained
  homeless, once they had left their state they
  became stateless, once they had been deprived of
  their human rights they were rightless, the scum
  of the earth.
• Their plight is not that they are not equal
  before the law, but that no law exists for them.
• The prolongation of their lives is due to
  charity and not to right, for no law exists which
  could force the nations to feed them their
  freedom of movement, if they have it at all,
  gives them no right to residence which even the
  jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course and
  their freedom of opinion is a fools freedom, for
  nothing they think matters anyhow (Arendt, in
  Cohen, 2006, p.8)
• Hannah Arendt is referring to the heimatlose, the
  displaced Europeans of the inter-war years, but,
  Cohen asserts, her words are as true of todays
  refugees and illegal migrants.

22
Non-people sans-papiers the racialisation of
asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants

• The illegal or undocumented migrant
  (sans-papiers), as a non-person, becomes a
  kind of blank slate onto which residents of their
  receiving countries can draw a character.
• This character will reflect prevailing
  prejudices, racisms, and historical factors far
  more than it does the individual humanity of each
  person.
• In the absence of an identity, the migrant
  becomes that overdetermined, racialised category
  of asylum-seeker.
• Hannah Arendt proposes that it is perhaps only in
  being criminalised that the undocumented can gain
  the status of a person by committing an actual
  crime and becoming an actual criminal.
• Furthermore, Cohen argues that it is into this
  vacuum created by the abrogation of basic
  universal human rights for those who fall between
  states that fascistic agitation has stepped.

23
The racialisation of immigrants

• Looking back over the history of immigration
  controls since 1905, Cohen asserts, we can see
  common patters emerging which shape the debate
  about immigration, and the ideology of
  controls, and which reveal the features of the
  racialised categories which emerge.
• For example, the history of immigration controls
  is bound up with the creation of racialised
  sexual identities.
• Agitation for the first piece of immigration
  control legislation in Britain, the 1905 Aliens
  Act, depicted Jews and Jewish sexuality as a
  threat to the white nuclear family. Jews were
  demonised as either pimps or prostitutes.
• Similarly in the post 1945-period, black people
  were again often stereotyped as either pimp or
  prostitute. Some of these kinds of
  characterisations arise out of fears about
  overpopulation and migrants giving birth to many
  children (Cohen, 2003, p.9).

24
The racialisation of immigrants

• Long associations have also been made between
  racialised immigrant identities and disease.
• The ascription of race as a cause of, for
  instance, unsanitary social conditions results in
  the attribution of an inherent uncleanliness to
  a racialised group.
• Again, in agitation against Jewish refugees from
  the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the early
  twentieth century, the evening standard demarked
  Jews as a filthy, rickety jetsam of humanity,
  bearing on their evil face the stigmata of every
  physical and moral degradation. (Evening
  Standard, 5 January 1905, in Cohen, 2003, p.10).
• We are reminded here of the Dover Express
  (referred to by Cole in last weeks readings)
  which, on October 1, 1998 published a front page
  editorial entitled We Want To Wash Dross Down
  Drain identifying refugees and migrant workers
  as human sewage.

25
The racialisation of immigrants

• Criminality has also frequently been associated
  with the racialised identities of
  asylum-seekers.
• A Daily Telegraph article from 1909 explicitly
  conflates criminality with the alien a term
  synonymous with Jew aliens of the very worst
  type in their own county the Russian burglar,
  the Polish thief, the Italian stabber, and the
  German swindler people whom this country would
  be glad to get rid of (Telegraph, 22 February
  1909, in Hayter, 2000, p.26)
• Hayter discusses the way in which newspapers give
  prominence to instances of crimes committed by
  immigrants, whilst offering little coverage of
  those committed against them, e.g., the Daily
  Mails 1998 banner headline BRUTAL CRIMES OF THE
  ASYLUM SEEKERS (Hayter, 2000, p.30) clearly
  attributing characteristics of brutality and
  criminality to this racialised category in
  toto, and, in doing so making asylum seeker a
  term of abuse.
• Such headlines tend to appear in frenzied
  clusters around single news items which spawn a
  run of associated stories, stoking racism with
  ever more outrageous hyperbole. The last of such
  frenzies was before the 2005 general election,
  and before that in the autumn of 1998. The public
  pedagogy of immigrant-fear is stoked by such
  crime stories, reinforcing the identification of
  racialised minorities with illegality and threat.

26
The racialisation of immigrants

• The xenoracialisation of the other naturally
  tends to focus on the most recent arrivals to a
  country, shaping and reforming the malleable
  characteristics of the racial type in question
  the Roma, the Kurd, the Albanian, the
  Somali whilst previous generations of
  immigrants can be idealised no less a form of
  racialisation as different from and better than
  the new ones, a practice sometimes engaged in by
  established immigrants themselves.

27
The racialisation of immigrants

• The role of terror in constructing a set of
  negative characteristics around a racialised
  type of immigrant is not new, nor is it unique
  to Muslims.
• Following the killing of six British paratroops
  by the Lehi Zionist group in 1947, the Daily
  Herald and Sunday Pictorial ran stories about
  Jewish terrorists infiltrating Britain, whilst
  the Sunday Times took a position of collective
  guilt and demanded that all British Jews denounce
  terrorism in Palestine. (Cohen, 2006, p.68)
• Subsequently, as a result of an upsurge in
  attacks on Jews and their businesses and property
  in London, Liverpool, Salford, Manchester and
  Liverpool further restrictions were imposed on
  the immigration of Jewish refugees.

28
The racism of economics

• Would a points-based immigration system like
  Australias eliminate racism?
• Cohen argues that this system merely serves to
  reinforce common-sense notions of immigration,
  masking race behind an ideological fog of
  economics
• The inextricable link between economics,
  nationalism and racism was emphasised in the
  parliamentary review of A Points Based System
  Making Migration Work for Britain. The Home
  Secretary justified this on the grounds that the
  country will operate on the basis of the number
  of economically active people who are in this
  country. This is a spurious Marxism in reverse
  rendering economics the prime force within
  society but expelling those unable or deemed
  unfit to contribute. It is economic chauvinism.
  (Cohen 2006, p.106)

29
The racism of economics

• Cohen (2003, pp.74-5) makes a distinction between
  economic and social racism.
• Capital sees the need for labour of a particular
  type, either low-waged and unskilled, or skilled
  in specific ways (e.g., medical or technical), as
  we saw clearly explained by Miles this comes
  cheap if it is the labour of black people.
  However, whilst capital requires black labour, it
  does not want its presence within its national
  boundaries, for ideological reasons this is
  economic racism.
• Social racism, by contrast, wants neither the
  labour nor the presence of black people, and
  comes into conflict with the economic racism of
  sections of capital.
• Cohen further argues that official
  multiculturalism praises the contribution made to
  society by immigrant labour whilst implicitly
  limiting this category to two types the skilled
  and the sweated (2003, p.76) a further
  articulation of economic racism.

30
Xenoracism and schooling

• Cohen (2003,p.32) outlines the NUTs opposition
  to attempts at educational apartheid children
  of asylum seekers are not a problem, but offer
  an opportunity for all children to learn about
  empathy, respect and kindness as their teachers
  help them develop positive attitudes which
  challenge racism and stereotyping.
• Cohen reads then Home Secretary David Blunketts
  case for separate education for refugee children
  as explicitly racist schools are being
  swamped by asylum-seeking children, said
  Blunkett. (Cohen, 2003, p.32)

31
Xenoracism and schooling

• Ofsted (2003) suggest that by and large schools
  can provide a community within which refugee
  children can grow and become accepted.
• This sense of togetherness is another strong
  reason for the Government to attempt to avoid
  integration of refugee children into mainstream
  schools, because once a sense of belonging has
  developed it is much harder for children to be
  deported.
• Once children have accepted a new friend among
  them they are willing to fight to prevent that
  friend from being torn away. Witness, for example
  the recent case of the Soleiman family in
  Mayfield School in Portsmouth.

32
The smashing of immigration controls

• Cohens Hayers is a Marxist vision of a world
  without borders, within which the workers of the
  world can, indeed, finally unite.
• There is no doubt that it is utopian, but it is
  also a principled application of some of the
  theoretical positions we have discussed in
  relation to racialisation and migration in
  previous weeks.
• Cohen notes, honestly, that it is certainly
  the case that the smashing of controls because
  such action will be required as they will not
  disappear spontaneously will probably require a
  revolution. (Cohen 2006, p.5) But, the refusal
  to contemplate a world without restrictions on
  movement, is a refusal to challenge the
  fundamental racism represented by immigration
  controls. (Ibid.)

33
Bibliography

• Buchanan, M. (2007) Are We Born Prejudiced New
  Scientist, 2595, pp. 41-43
• Cohen, S. (2003) No One is Illegal asylum and
  immigration control past and present, Stoke on
  Trent Trentham Books
• Cohen, S. (2006) Standing on the Shoulders of
  Fascism from immigration control to the strong
  state, Stoke on Trent Trentham Books
• Cole, M. (2004) Fuck You Human Sewage
  contemporary globalism, capitalism and the
  xeno-racialization of asylum seekers,
  Contemporary Politics, 10 (2) 159-165
• Harris, N. (2002) Thinking The Unthinkable the
  immigration myth exposed, London I.B. Taurus
• Harris, N. (2007) Workers of the World
  Welcome!, Red Pepper, 152, pp.20-22
• Hayter, T. (2000) Open Borders The Case against
  Immigration Controls, London Pluto Press
• Ofsted (2003) The Education of Asylum Seeker
  Pupils, Ofsted Publications Centre