An article I wrote for the CelticAnarchy.org site, I figured I’d re-post it here as well.

One of the big topics nearly everywhere I turn these days is Immigration – in the US news it’s Latino immigrants from Mexico and South America, in UK news it’s Islamic immigrants from a range of countries, and in Irish news it’s Polish immigrants; but in all three the complaints are the same: there are a lot of them, they’re hard to understand, they’re different, and they’re taking our jobs! Similar debates rage throughout the rest of the world as well. Everywhere one looks one sees populations in flux, Diasporas in the making.  Now this is a big issue, no doubt about it. Waves of immigration into the US from our neighbors to the south are literally re-shaping the political and ethnic map, much the way waves of immigration from Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere have redrawn the political landscape in the past.

You’d think North Americans would be used to it by now, but apparently not. It’s not a left or right issue either – Big Business’s puppets in both parties love immigration, after all supply and demand dictates that the bigger the pool of labor they can hire from the less they have to pay, and when they get going about how much immigration “stimulates the economy” you can practically hear them salivating at the thought of a workforce of millions willing to work for starvation wages and no benefits.

The populist portion of the republican party holds the opposite opinion of immigrants for the same reason – supply and demand. While the Corporate wing of the party is salivating over cheap labor, the working-class base of the party is getting worked up into a truly righteous fit of xenophobic fury over the same cheap labor since, as working class people, their own labor is only worth whatever he highest bidder is willing to pay and low pay for anyone undercuts pay rates for everyone. Instead of making common cause with the immigrants their response is to slam the door shut - the rallying cry is “deport ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out!” And they do mean “all”, even the ones with under-age children who are US citizens or who’ve lived here practically their whole lives. Unfortunately for them, there are far more Latino voters in America today then there were last time a major ’round ‘em up and throw ‘em out’ operation was carried out (in the 1930’s) so such an operation is pretty unlikely. Which is great for the republican party machine because it means they can paint the democrats as “soft” on immigration and use the issue to keep the angry-poor-white base of their party energized while completely failing to do anything coherent on the issue. By contrast the democrats - or at least democratic party officials - seem happy to let latinos (by far the most visible group) keep coming. It’s not like they’re particularly interested in standing up for immigrants rights or anything, but the fact is that outside of Texas, Latinos overwhelming tend to vote for Democrats, so their party leaders are happy to sit on the sidelines doing nothing while Republican blowhards ensure a solid (and un-earned) Democratic majority among Latinos for generations to come. So rich people get cheap wage slaves, working class people get lower wages, and both the major party machines get to build and maintain their bases while they both do precisely nothing to actually address the issue.

In the UK the debate is remarkably similar, only there the scary brown people aren’t Latino’s fleeing repressive US-backed regimes throughout Central and South America, they’re Muslims fleeing repressive governments in countries throughout the middle east and North Africa that were traditionally tied to the British Empire. All the same actors are in place – capitalists who love the cheap labor and who ensure that the immigrants keep coming, opportunistic politicians pandering to all the new potential voters, and ordinary working-class people who’s reactions typically mix some degree of sympathy for the plights of their new countrymen with an equal portion of xenophobia and fear over what effects this will have on the value of their own labor and on the ethnic, religious, and ideological makeup of their own country. Add to that the fact that many within the UK’s Islamic community see nothing wrong with bringing their own interpretations of Sharia law with them, and you have a potentially explosive situation with no easy solutions.  It's precisely the type of situation that neo-fascist groups like the BNP thrive in, and it should suprise no one that their influence is growing and they now even have members in Parliment.  This is scary shit.

Even in Ireland, which has traditionally sent migrants out all over the rest of the world there is growing resentment against all of the immigrants coming in from Poland and other Eastern European countries(1 and 2) . Here the immigrants are the same color as the natives, and most are even members of the same Catholic faith that the majority of Irish people still cling too. And yet still, there is tension. Why, after all, should Ireland be employing thousands of non-Irish people when there are literally millions of Irish people living abroad who left their homes in search of work? It’s a real question that deserves to be answered. And yet, if all those millions of Irish people had the right to scatter across the globe in search of better lives, don’t the Poles have that same right? The 5 million current residents of Ireland would be less then thrilled if America (impossibly) decided to re-assert native sovereignty, kick out all it’s immigrants, round up the 50 million Irish Americans and deported us all back to our country of origin. After all, most Irish people don’t particularly like Irish Americans and they’d really hate us if we all moved back to Ireland and outnumbered them 10 to 1. So how can any Irish person talk with a straight face about ending Polish immigration? The old Irish Republican slogan of “Ireland for the Irish” which sounded so militantly anti-imperialist and leftist just a few short years ago when it was aimed at the 800 year old British occupation suddenly sounds downright xenophobic.

At the end of the day, all these issues boil down to imperialism and power, it’s no accident that the immigrants coming to the UK and USA are coming from countries that have been historically tied to those empires. Every study done on the subject shows clearly that the stronger the economic and political linkages between countries the more populations will move between them, and that if capital is moving in one direction, the population movement will move in that same direction. As the old Irish-American folk song put it

“Ah and I mind the time when old Ireland was flourishing,
When lots of her tradesmen could work for good pay
But since our manufactures have crossed the Atlantic
It’s now we must follow to Amerikay. “
- taken from “The Green Fields of America”, lyrics at
http://academic.evergreen.edu/w/williams/songs/green_fields_of_amer...

It shouldn’t be surprising that after over a century of British impirialism in India and the middle east that the people who are still suffering under brutal western-backed governments there would seek a way out.   Nor should it be surprising that people fleeing from corrupt regimes backed by America’s Monroe Doctrine would end up in the country with the wealthiest economy in their hemisphere. As for Ireland, Ireland has (finally) built up its economy by adopting an export-led model within the EU system, and Polish immigration is a direct result of Ireland’s engagement in the EU. This is not an argument against Trade per se, but rather an argument against the type of trade that dominates in a neo-imperialist world order. Neighbors trading and specializing freely and voluntarily and on a level playing field is one thing, but that is not the type of trade that advocates of capitalist “free trade” promote. They want trade that is anything but free and a playing field that is anything but level or fair. They want, in other words, to get rich. Just ask the Jamaicans. And when your economy is based on systematically draining wealth from the rest of the world you can’t be surprised if the people who are left impoverished by your actions follow the money and move in next door.

As anarchists, we obviously must support the individuals right to move anywhere they want without regard for State borders or boundaries – boundaries that (as I pointed out last week) very rarely correspond with national boundaries and which always serve as a tool to divide working class people from each other. As anti-imperialists we are likewise obligated to oppose neo-imperialist systems of power that allow the global corporate elite to use their surrogates in Washington, London, and elsewhere to prop up despotic and oppressive regimes in other parts of the world. Let us be clear, mass migrations of the kind we are seeing today – and which we have seen at regular intervals ever since the founding of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – are not “voluntary” in any traditional meaning of the word. They are the direct results of Capitalist Globalization, an interlocking global system based on the rule of corporations, from the East India Trading Company to Royal Dutch Shell - which divides the world into markets and then shuttles goods and people back and forth between them, extracting wealth with every move. At every turn population exodus’s leave opposition movements flat as the people with the strongest reasons to fight instead flee, and when they arrive at their destinations popular movements are again flattened as declining wages divert working-class people’s attention into reactionary xenophobia.

While the names of the corporations involved may change over time, the game itself remains fundamentally un-altered. It is divide and conquer, winner take all. It is this system, this interlocking global system, that is our enemy. Not our working-class brothers and sisters from other parts of the world. They come, and will continue to come (to America, to the UK, to Ireland, and to all of the worlds other industrialized countries), for the same reasons that our ancestors did – economic necessity. No border wall or dangerous desert crossing will stop them. 3 out of every 4 Irish immigrants to the America’s died on the Coffin ships en route during the famine, and yet they continued to come because staying at home, fighting for their own country, had become impossible. And as long as the root causes remain unsolved, immigrants will continue to come.

So what do we propose? Well, unfortunately, there is no coherent “We”. Most anarchists begin and end their criticisms of the mainstream immigration debate by asserting the right to freedom of movement and the absurdity of borders. And they’re right. People should be free to move and State borders are absurd. But massive population migrations have very real costs as well – to the people who are forced to move, to the communities they leave behind, and to working-class people in the places they move too who suddenly find their labor devalued. And that’s before we even get into the very real danger that mass immigration poses to national minorities such as the Basque. Remember that one of the most potent weapons that the Fascist Franco regime had against the Basque resistance was encouraging non-Basques to emigrate en masse into the Basque country, rendering the indigenous population a minority in their own homeland. Native Americans, Australians, and other indigenous peoples from around the world who’ve seen their cultures driven to extinction by waves of immigrants from Europe might have a few choice words on this topic as well. Even within the developed nations population shifts have the potential to wipe out minority cultures.  In Cornwall the problem of migration has become so acute - driven by a wave of wealthy English people buying up housing there for summer vacation houses - that many Cornish people can no longer even afford housing in their own country, which has truly catastrophic implications for the survival of the Cornish language. Irish speakers in the Gaeltecht similarly face a severe housing crunch as increasing numbers of people who don’t speak the Irish language or don’t speak it fluently move in. Leftists, who love to decry gentrification but tend to be supportive of immigration find themselves in an odd spot here, since what is happening is clearly both.

My solution, and the solution that I’d like to see embraced by the anarchist movement as a whole and by thinking people everywhere is fourfold – first solidarity with working-class immigrants and strong support for immigrant rights. These are our brothers and sisters, after all, and we owe them the same solidarity that we’d like for them to show to us. As a Celt in North America – the descendant of refugees – this is the only morally tenable position and the only one that squares with the Anarchist vision of a free humanity. Frankly, even if you’re a knee-jerk reactionary who hates immigrants you should support their rights. After all, if Capitalists are no longer able to exploit immigrants with impunity they have much less of an incentive to encourage large-scale migration. The only people who benefit from making immigrants easily exploitable are the corporations that exploit them. That doesn’t mean we have to roll over and do nothing when people - immigrants or anyone else - try to impose their culture or customs on others. But it does mean that we should make sure that all elements of the working class have the same rights at the negotiating table when it’s time to march on the boss. An injury to one is an injury to all, after all.

Secondly, we need to be actively engaged in support and solidarity work with people who choose to stay in their own countries and fight against the imperialist machine that’s forcing their neighbors to flee their homes, families, and communities. There is a large network of networks in place already of people doing exactly this, Anarchists should be a visible part of that movement.

Third, anarchists in the "developed" world need to take the fight to the Capitalists here – in the core of the Empire. Oppose wars, intervention, and support for despots from the governments of our own countries. This one is so obvious it should need no explanation.

Fourth and finally, stop bickering with each other in all our various radical “scenes”, stop acting like fringe extremists, and get down to the deadly serious business of building a broad-based popular anarchist movement on a global scale that has the power to address the issue at it’s root, put an end to capitalist Globalization, and replace it with free and open Internationalism of the kind that Anarchists have long advocated. A world based on local control, community-level autonomy, cooperative control of the economy, and where borders and boundaries only exist as a relic in our history lessons.