No 29 Asylum, Refugees and "Fortress Europe"
Fortress Europe
Immigration and the plight of refugees are never out of the news. Throughout the world those fleeing from persecution, poverty and war find themselves in displacement camps, forced to move from country to country to face the dangers of people smugglers, sea crossings and the cruel state violence of barbed wire, border guards, attack dogs, tear gas and water cannon.
The authoritarian government of Poland, for example, is refusing to allow the migrants from Belarus into its country and is being backed by the EU, and the governments of Britain and the US. The Polish government's racism is primarily directed at Middle Eastern refugees where they are depicted as a threat to "national security and Poland's Christian culture". Poland's politicians routinely describe Muslims as "an existential threat". The Polish administration led by the populist Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, pumps out a daily diet of racist propaganda: "...which brands refugees from the Middle East as parasites"
(Ian Dunt, Ukraine is Europe's Next Big Test, INDEPENDENT 16 November 2021).
In November 2021 Poland's border guards used tear gas and water cannon against refugees trying to cross into the country from Belarus. Poland declared a state of emergency along its border with media, aid agencies and NGOs banned from the area. The refugees, including children, had been living in makeshift camps in freezing conditions just inside Belarus.
Another weak point in "fortress Europe" is Lithuania. At the border with Lithuania distressing film was shown of an attack dog mauling at a refugee. The Lithuanian government has already decided to erect a 300 mile long steel wall topped with razor wire on the Belarus border to prevent migrants crossing (BBC 10 August 2021).
The use of anti-immigration security forces is also happening on the borders of Croatia, Greece, and elsewhere. Greece has completed a 25 mile wall on its border with Turkey and installed a surveillance system to prevent possible refugees entering into the country. The EU spends £16 Billion Euros on "asylum migration and border management". The EU pays Turkey to keep refugees out. Libya has EU funds for coastguards to prevent refugees trying to get to Europe. Niger is given aid to detain refugees. The immigrants are contained in barbaric conditions and some find themselves traded as sex slaves, tortured and murdered.
The violent images of the state terrorism of refugees had been anticipated in Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film CHILDREN OF MEN: a case of life imitating art. In the film, all of Britain's troubles have been blamed on asylum seekers, who are locked in cages, and then bussed to barbaric shanty towns. "Poor fugees," says Theo's hippy friend Jasper (Michael Caine). "After escaping the worst atrocities, and making it all the way to England, our government hunts them down like cockroaches."
The UK and Detention Camps
And in the UK we have the Home Secretary Priti Patel wanting to stop and return the rubber dinghies on which so many risk their lives in trying to reach the English coast. The Government's Nationality and Borders Bill, now passing through Parliament, is the biggest assault on UK refugees ever. She wants small boats pushed back into French waters even if it means refugees drown. And Channel arrivals could be flown out of the UK to countries like Albania within seven days to be held in detention camps, a cruel policy adopted from Australia where refugees are sent to processing centres in the Pacific island of Naura.
Priti Patel's latest desperate wheeze to outsource the UK's immigration policy mirrors the “out of sight out of mind" detention centres with their litany of abuse, racism and violence. The Brook House detention public inquiry a public inquiry into the mistreatment of immigration detainees has heard a BBC PANORAMA documentary revealed "shocking" treatment which had "no place in a decent and humane" system (BBC NEWS 23 November 2021). Well, we do not live in a "decent and humane system". What is not remarked upon is that the facility is now run by Serco; so there is profit to be made from the misery of refugees. How convenient.
Then there is the controversial Yarl Wood facility. Yarl Wood is one of ten holding facilities detaining people about to be deported, situated out in the sticks of Bedfordshire. One caseworker who has worked in this immigration detention centre said:
"The vast majority of detainees have experienced or are at risk of rape and torture. Many have been trafficked to the UK and coerced into criminality. Why would you put a group of highly traumatised people together in a facility that is not appropriate for them to be in?" ('Detention breaks families and causes trauma', INDEPENDENT 18 November 2021) Why, indeed? As graffiti sprayed on the perimeter wall of Yarl Wood rightly states: "No Borders".
The UK is not alone in wanting to set up offshore processing hubs. There are currently 21 detention centres in Libya holding an estimated 3,000 migrants. Their history can be traced back to when the country was run by Muammar Gaddafi. All were established to deter onward migration to Europe. And Denmark is in talks with Rwanda to host a processing centre (TIMES 18 November 2021). Other EU states will follow to shore-up "fortress Europe".
The Racist Poison of the Capitalist Media
Why is all this time and money spent on anti-immigration policies? One reason is because the Tories fear the popular racism of UKIP, reflected in the Brexit vote, and what the Tories perceive as a sizable anti-immigration electorate they have to pander to following a sustained and successful drip-drip poisoness propaganda campaign from the tabloid media. The Tory government is being blamed for its failure to reduce immigration numbers by the Labour opposition. Tory MPs are running scared that they might lose votes at the next election.
And the capitalist media run anti-immigration head-lines, creating more division within the working class. Articles are regularly published blaming refugees for lack of housing, unemployment, overcrowded schools, for leading idle lives on the dole or pressurising the NHS. If there were no refugees these social problems facing the working class would still exist. Workers are saturated by capitalist propaganda. They become carriers of ruling class ideas and beliefs which they uncritically disseminate to friends, family and their children.
These ideas and beliefs are put in the mind of workers and encouraged by the capitalist media for a very good reason - to distract the working class from recognising our own class interests and to divert us away from class struggle and the urgent need to replace capitalism with socialism.
The success of this anti-immigrant propaganda can be seen in the daily audience response to reactionary radio and television stations like LBC and GB News. Anti-refugee sentiment is encouraged by the radio and television presenters, usually from the SUN, DAILY MAIL or DAILY EXPRESS. The audience hear no alternative viewpoint to counter the irrational racism. There is no platform for socialist ideas based on reason and facts. We are uninvited, deplatformed, and prevented in the capitalist media from challenging racists propaganda against refugees.
Not that it's new. The observation of the capitalist media in THE COMMONWEAL, edited by William Morris, that: "To make something out of nothing, and much more out of less, Is the function and prerogative of the writers for the press" (July 16 1892) has not changed. In the 1890s the capitalist media was blaming the Jews fleeing persecution in Russia for "poverty, and taking jobs" and being "physically and morally enfeebled" ('Emigration, Immigration and Migration in Nineteenth-Century Britain', A Lloyd, CUP 2007). Now it is the turn of the refugees from the Far East and Afghanistan to bear the brunt of the capitalist media's anti-immigrant propaganda.
In fact, the media's politics of hate has got worse than anything else its 19th century counterparts could muster. Fear, anger and deliberate disinformation make up the daily diet of articles penned by the likes of Richard Littlejohn. Littlejohn's anti-refugee novel, TO HELL IN A HANDCART (2001) was, described by The INDEPENDENT's David Aaronovitch as "a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the British National Party" (13 June 2001). No wonder you have to have a cleansing shower after reading the DAILY MAIL.
The plight of refugees is caused by capitalism
No one asks the important question why there are tens of thousands of refugees living in cold and disease ridden circumstances on the borders of 'fortress Europe'. They are not there for fun. The answer is simple: capitalism: a social system based upon commodity production and exchange for profit. A social system that has divided the world into competing nation states that periodically go to war over raw resources, markets, trade routes, spheres of influence and strategic points of control.
Capitalism causes war and poverty. About 9.15% and 9.4% of the world's population live in extreme poverty, defined by the United Nations as those living on less than $1.90 a day. Then there are the wars - the on-going civil war in Syria with millions dead, the war in Yemen which has killed 100,000 people and displaced 4 million others, the consequence of the war in Iraq and Libya following a NATO-backed rebellion that toppled Gaddafi's regime. These wars have resulted from the policy decision of the US and its allies on the one hand, and Russia and Iran on the other to invade, destabilise and interfere with countries in Africa and the Middle East.
And increasingly there are the floods and drought conditions caused by global warming, which has affected crops and living conditions in countries like Bangladesh. Never in human history has there been so much movement of people trying to escape endemic poverty and war. Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 per cent of the world’s population (International Migration 2020 un.org).
The Socialist solution to the question of asylum seekers and refugees
All this movement of the poor and the desperate is totally unnecessary. Abolish the capitalist cause of war, poverty and homelessness and production and distribution can be moved across the world without frontiers, border guards and razor wire to solve hunger, disease and poverty. Society has the potential to feed, clothe and house all humankind adequately and well. It is only the profit system that is standing in the way.
And for the working class it is a strategy of divide and rule. Workers are told by politicians and the media that immigrants are the enemy; that migrants just want an easy life on social security, that they are a threat to "Our British values and way of life". The working class and capitalist class have no common interests. Class unity is the antidote to class division.
However, socialists have a warning to those who believe the streets of the UK are paved with gold.
One in 10 UK families - about 3m households - are facing "a cost of living crisis" this winter, unable to cover even basic bills such as food and heating, according to a survey by the consumer charity, Citizens Advice (GUARDIAN 26 November 2021).
One in five of all adults had cut back on their food shopping or turned off their heating. One in 10 anticipated having to use food banks. Citizens Advice found that even when placed on a strict "minimal budget" - the financial plan used by the charity to support clients through a debt management process - more than 3m households were unable to meet basic living costs. A further 400,000 were left with just £50 a month once bills were paid.
The UK is a class society in which a working class majority are exploited by a capitalist class minority producing more in wealth than they receive in wages and salaries. The working class do face poverty, poor housing, second rate education and health care and when unprofitable to hire, made unemployed. Those coming to the UK will be part of that working class. They will be part of the class struggle over the intensity and extent of class exploitation. And they will have to struggle for the abolition of the profit motive and establishment of socialism.
Capitalist politicians are adept at dividing the working class against itself. Workers should see immigrants and refugees as members of our class. Workers should also take a historical perspective of becoming a class; a memory of class struggle and how they have been used by the capitalist class and their politicians against their own interests. Workers have been persuaded to blame other workers, usually workers elsewhere in the world. We should be a united world working class taking democratic political action to replace capitalism with socialism.
Currently our class is fragmented within artificial borders; thousands of our class are surrounded by razor wire, guards and attack dogs, eking out an existence within refugee camps. And on top of this we are an exploited class abused through the wages system to provide the capitalists with their unearned income in the form of rent, interest and profit which allows them to live the life of privilege and luxury they think they deserve.
We produce all the social wealth but do not have our needs met. We are fragmented by artificial borders unable to solve pressing social problems of poverty and disease. It does not have to be the case. There is an alternative. There is socialism. In world socialism, where production takes place to directly meet human need, no one would be forced to leave where they lived. The abolition of nation states and borders would make immigration meaningless. If there were natural disasters those affected would not have to wait for charity and resources would be immediately and directly sent.
Socialism is a practical solution for the problems caused by capitalism. As the banner of the 1892 Commonweal stated "Have you not heard how it has gone with many a Cause before now: First, few men heed it, Next, most men condemn it: Lastly, all men ACCEPT It - and the Cause is Won". The socialist cause can be won with the political and democratic determination of a socialist majority. Acting in unity instead of division we can establish a wageless, classless, borderless, harmonious world system necessary to abolish poverty and national boundaries: that is, the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.