Why Labour must be the party of migration justice.

AuthorAkehurst, Nathan

In a world where progressive and conservative governments alike are clamping down on migrants, Labour must prioritise a radical commitment to justice for migrants.

The story so far

In its 2015 election campaign, the Labour Party revealed an eight-foot headstone bearing the words 'controls on immigration'.

It was a fitting artefact for the tomb of a miserable campaign. The slogan was devoid of policy: controls on what or whom? It was dog-whistle politics: controls on those people, and--as a mixed-race child born to a mother who was given up for adoption by her struggling immigrant parents and a father barred by the Home Office because I wasn't legitimate proof of their marriage's integrity--I couldn't help but hear it.

Vacillating on migration is a long Labour tradition. Shortly after its formation, the new parliamentary party split down the middle over the Conservatives' Aliens Act of 1905, the first modern migration controls. By 1924 the Conservatives claimed that Labour would 'let them all come' and Labour furiously countered that Conservative governments had naturalised more foreigners. After 1945, the Attlee government made no systemic changes to the rules on migration. Labour initially opposed, but eventually supported, the Conservatives' restrictions on Commonwealth migration in the 1960s. The system remained punitive; virginity testing in migration control only ended in 1979. The 1983 Labour manifesto's explicit condemnation of Conservative migration policy as racist was a rare moment.

New Labour oversaw a sharp increase in migration but maintained an increasingly grim policy regime and stoked anti-migrant rhetoric. There were moves towards framing a multicultural British identity, but these were caveated by Blair's warning, 'adopt our values or stay away'. Labour's former immigration minister was barred from office over an openly racist, migrant-baiting campaign aimed at 'getting the white vote angry', and elsewhere party leaflets read 'Labour is on your side, Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers.'

The Labour left, while not perfect, has been the most consistent Labour voice in the movement for migrant solidarity. Jeremy Corbyn set the tone for his leadership by attending a refugee solidarity demonstration the day he was elected leader. Diane Abbott has outlined serious thinking on progressive migration policy. Critics alleging Labour has gone backward are often cynical and disingenuous. Nevertheless, thinking remains mixed and confused, for example in the leadership's flip-flopping on the Immigration Bill in 2019. The racist leaflets may be gone but Labour often remains cautious about vocally prioritising issues of migration, seeing it as too serious an electoral risk.

But it is necessary--both morally and strategically--for Labour to prioritise migration justice, in a way that puts community building and class power at its heart; and to frame local and national identity inclusively, while avoiding nationalism.

What does migration justice look like?

Migration is necessarily about race because the debate is driven by anti-migrant panic, which is in turn driven by racial politics. We cannot separate open prejudice from the fear of resource scarcity, because resource competition has always driven racism. Modern racism developed not out of simple 'prejudice', but as a justification of economic expansion, colonisation and slavery, and this continues to be a frame through which questions of distribution are resolved. This raises a strategic point, too; when the left raises questions of unequal distribution, the right redirects the argument into questions of racial distribution ('foreigners are taking your housing'). Economic radicalism that fails to negotiate this attack is doomed.

Migration is therefore also about class. One illustration: the Muslim population of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has been subjected to blizzards of bigoted headlines about the area being a 'no-go Islamic state'. Needless to say, none of these refer to the Islamic state of Qatar which operates a privately-policed estate in the borough's south, the finance capital of Canary Wharf. Within its bounds, while foreign capital freely operates in a speculative playground, foreign labour faces low wages and poor conditions, backed by the iron rod of the hostile environment.

Migration controls exist primarily to divide the foreign working classes from the domestic working classes, and Labour's response must centre class. Liberal narratives of migration justice often fail because they accept existing premises; racism is seen as a problem of white working-class ignorance not structural divisions, and the value of migrants is based on their ability to contribute (and, at worst, to accept tougher labour discipline than domestic workers).

Addressing migration must be central to Labour's wider programme for several other reasons. First, migrants are canaries in society's coal mine; repression and surveillance deployed against 'illegal' people is later deployed against the rest of us. Second, any programme of national transformation will necessitate the swift deployment of multidisciplinary skills and ideas from around the world.

Third, given that Britain's national wealth has been, and continues to be, dependent on both colonialism and continuing extraction from the global south, migration policy is one way through which those who have built Britain's wealth can share in it. Any money that is redistributed can be seen as long overdue repayment. But migration is by no means a fix for international distributive inequality. We should also seek to reduce involuntary migration. This means a wider programme of tackling climate change, a peace-based foreign policy, tackling the arms trade, development work that promotes genuine independence, trade justice and support for labour standards, and regulating the behaviour of British capital overseas.

Finally, we live in a more interdependent world than ever. Most migration is currently within the global south but that will change. The global north has sought to deny this, and has mostly succeeded in keeping the wretched of the earth drowning off our beach resorts, being repatriated into slavery in Libya, or scorching in the Arizona sun. Western governments may try to meet surges of climate migration with...

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