Anarchist Positions and Work on the Question of Immigration (Historical and Current)

the WSM wrote some good stuff on immigration a while back, with some useful information from a study on the abolition of border controls between first and third worlds.

I can't seem to access the site I think it is on right now, but I believe it was a review of the text "open borders: the case against immigration controls".

I've been thinking about trying to write a decent text on this, because there have been some very worrying murmurs on this recently from around the anarchist movement.

Mostly from individuals in the periphery around the IWCA and that sort of crowd, which tries to argue that elements of big business want lax immigration controls so they can use cheap labour in the UK, and so keep wages in the UK down. For this reason, we should not support relaxing immigration controls.

One guy in particular who posts on another forum as Durruti 02 posts about this sort of thing constantly.

This is an extremely bad development - an abandoning of the basic socialist/anarchist principle of "the working class has no country." Furthermore it's a completely illogical argument, and it does forget that the working class is international.

For example, while Polish workers coming to the UK en masse has helped push UK construction workers wages down significantly, the shortage of labour in Poland has meant that workers there are now in a much stronger position than previously, and have managed to push wages up significantly. This article has good information on this:
http://libcom.org/library/poland-export-platform-takes-dive

Basically, the only sensible position to have is that wherever possible we should try to organise together with migrants in order to push wages up for everyone, so that they are not super exploited, and are not used to undercut better wages and conditions native workers have won. And that ideologically we should all have complete freedom of movement, as the rich do already.

I saw that some US anarchists were involved in this issue. Most recently there were actions around immigrant May Day and the border actions.

In Europe I think there is a fair amount of anarchists working on this. Look on this site for some news from Greece. Some anarchists work in non-specifically @ networks such as No Borders.

In Poland we have done some things around this issue. If you are interested, we ask you also to send an email, even in English about this case: http://cia.bzzz.net/chechens_threaten_hunger_strike_and_even_suicide
http://cia.bzzz.net/chechens_under_arrest
The situation for these people is very difficult. We try to help from time to time in a humanitarian way - to get medicine, work, housing or something. We helped with this modest protest: http://cia.bzzz.net/refugees_protest_in_warsaw

Check out the English section of CIA - there is a search function, There is a lot on the actions in Lesbos. You can seach "Pagani".

Russian anarchists published a booklet for immigrants. But I don't find it online. Unfortunately, much of the archives from eastern europe have not been kept up and are off-line. But here is something about Chechens: http://noborder.org/chechnya/display.php?id=85

People in Russia, Ukraine and Poland were involved in work with Chechen refugees.

We had some pamplets for foreign workers, but also in Russian.

Somebody from the CNT in Spain was saying they do some things with immigrant workers. There were immigrant workers in Mercadona. There are immigrant workers on construction sites. KRAS was also spreading propaganda among such workers for a couple of years. We are also in the midst of a campaign with foreign construction workers and helped some Chinese workers who had a strike this summer and some Ukrainian construction workers. We helped some Ukrainian bus drivers last year and fruit pickers some years before.

So I think probably there is some work going on with immigrants.

The Portuguese AIT was on some solidarity actions.

Besides this, there were plenty of actions which could be called "no border actions". I could send links lots of links in foreign languages, but let me just pick a few in English:
www.noborder.org - with a big archive in English
http://deletetheborder.org/
http://www.noborderpatras.org/en/
http://noborderswales.org.uk/tag/south-wales-anarchists/
http://zspwawa.blogspot.com/2008/06/shut-down-eu-migrant-hunters.html
(There's an English section here: http://frontex.info.pl/ )
We did 4 border camps, but that's just something extra. Here's about one: http://alter.most.org.pl/fa/antiborderkrynki.htm

There's much more but too tired to search. Take the hints I gave, search yourself and you can see there is activity, although it is sometimes poorly documented.

Yikes! Not true. I mean, if you look at the article carefully, it doesn't even really say that. I would disagree even slightly with what the article says. But this is how it looks in construction:

Between 2006-2008, there was a speculative real estate bubble plus an inflow of cash from the EU for public construction projects. There was also a shortage of labour, since after 2004 there was mass immigration, to, among other places, the UK and Ireland. So, it is true that there was a labour shortage for some time and that, because of this shortage, some jobs were paying 10, 20 or even 30% more. But, sometimes these increases were not as much as they could seem: much of this is contract work, with no health benefits, days off, sick leave, or seasonal work. In addition, the cost of living rose more than that.

But the main reason it is not true today is that legislation was adjusted to make it much easier to hire workers, in particular Asian workers for such temporary work; prior to 2008, there were far more legal barriers. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians got even more simplified procedures.

Anyway, just a small correction.

Now, we see exactly how things look at the construction site of the National Stadium. There are two categories of local workers and a number of categories of foreign workers. The local workers are divided into skilled workers, for example machine operators, and non-skilled ones doing physical work. In addition, since there are a number of subcontractors, you can see that there are better and worse subcontractors, so even two people doing relatively similar jobs for two different firms may have different conditions. Oh, and Polish workers from the countryside agree to work for less money than locals. As for foreign workers, there are Austrian and even German specialists, who get decent salaries. Then there are foreigners who were in Poland, were employed in Poland and get a better deal that foreigners who were hired through work agencies with agents in Poland and Ukraine. The latter tend to pay two middlemen and get less. Also, there were incidents of non-payment and problems with "housing" (containers with insufficient or no heat).

Question of Immigration (Historical and Current)

I found this 1890s article a very interesting read and regardless of the 100 odd years that has passed , still relevant .

Voice from the Aliens

Well, if we talk about historical there is the famous negative history of the IWW and Chinese workers.

Unfortunately in E.Europe there are some nationalist elements which sometimes crawl into the @ movement and in a couple of instances there were articles from the protectionist point of view, describing Chinese workers as if a "threat". So I think that in this part of the world, where there are more poor, long-term unemployed and certain xenophobic traditions, it is especially important to support both internationalism and the immigrants.

Slightly off topic, but statistics on salaries in construction were published today: http://www.pracownik.net.pl/salaries_for_construction_workers_can_vary_dramatically

Yeah, I know L&S pride themselves as having a fresh and original position on immigration as far as I can tell is quite close to the IWCA/Durruti02 one, but they're not very keen to spell out exactly what it is. I think No Borders and the Calais camp are definitely the most prominent contemporary example of anarchist activity around immigration.
I also wrote a leaflet attempting to give a class position on migration issues for an local anti-deportation demo recently that I can send you if you want, but it's two paragraphs long and not very interesting (basically it's just saying the same as the last paragraph of Steven's post), so not that much point really.

Surely even though the "the working class is international" as a condition that doesn't mean individual workers should welcome the pushing down of wages just because it pushes up wages somewhere else?

Not that i fundamentally disagree with some of the positions here (i.e. organising with migrants to stop undercutting etc.) but the above argument doesn't seem the most appealing.

You were saying? Anyway, yeah, I do think the critics of No Borders do have a point, in that they tend to frame their arguments in very liberal/moralistic terms ("migrants should be able to stay because they should have freedom of movement"), rather than in class terms (spelling out how the national divisions within the workforce keep conditions down so it's in our benefit, as "native" workers, to have migrants fully integrated into our class on equal terms with everyone else.) I do support freedom of movement for its own sake, obviously, but I think that by not tackling the "migrants ruin jobs/housing/conditions" arguments head on we effectively lose the argument - when the anti-immigration side are arguing that immigrants make life worse for ordinary British (or American) people, we're not going to convince many people by just talking about someone else's freedoms.

And for the record, I'm a jewish and so don't do christmas, so it's not mad for me to spend Christmas eve thinking about this, honest.

Farce, I don't think Class War Speed Dating was in any way patriarcal; it was organised without any division of gender so everyone met everyone; the flier did show a woman with her shirt off but there was also a flier with a man with his shirt off.
No Borders A - Z
Racist oil workers? – Blame Nationalism! (not the people). Lindsey Farm, Total and the Media. A comment.

I've only heard vague allusions to this before. Do you know of an article about it? I'd like to know more. Obviously the IWW was much better racially than other US unions at the time (1900s/1910s I assume) but that's not saying much.

Good discussion to take up, I have nothing to add right now, but some info on some groups inside sweden

http://www.ingenillegal.org/

No one is illegal/kein mensch ist illegal is a network that many libertarian activists in sweden work inside. In sweden it has existed since the early 90s with 6-7 local groups currently. They hide asylum seekers and illegals, help out with money, contacts, as well as try to prevent police expulsions, do public campaigns etc.

Inside SAC there are over 6-700 illegal immigrants organising unions despite their legal status, fighting and winning strugges foremost in the restaurant, cleaning and building industry

Hi why has noone mentioned LAWA yet?: http://libcom.org/library/latin-american-workers-unite-heroes-pariahs

OK so they're not "anarchists" but hey, I think the question's framed wrong so I may as well try to divert it in a more interesting direction, otherwise it's just cockwaving on "historical positions" by Trots and Wobblies!

Sorry, I will retract what I said about the IWW and Chinese workers. This did not relate to the official position of the IWW, which was different, but to some stories about problems with some rank and file members of the IWW. Upon re-reading this, I see my wording is completely wrong. Also, these are not "famous incidents", so I needn't have brough them up. I do not recall where I read about this and probably it was years and years ago. Upon reflection, my comment might not have been fair because it did not reflect the IWW's position as an organization.

If I am not mistaken (please note, I am working on what I remember from many years ago and probably also from private conversations with old-time wobblies), there were sometimes problems with convincing members to an inclusive position. If I recall correctly, there was, for example, a problem that some were claiming that Japanese workers were getting more money, or taking jobs, but the leading people in the IWW papers were trying to convince workers that they are not organized, so this is why that happened. On the other hand, even people who were for inclusion were using racist language at times, so from today's point of view, this was at least sending a mixed message.

In one incident I recall, a Hop Pickers Strike in California, Japanese workers were squeezed out since the IWW felt that the hostility of other workers towards the Japanese would backfire on the IWW.

However there was much positive contact between Japanese anarchists who visited the US at the beginning of the century and the IWW, so I suppose such incidents were not representative.

Sorry.

Early part of the 20thC the Socialist Party of Canada had a dispute about the west coast "orientals" with some members calling for exclusion of Asians from Canada , a position hotly opposed by other members . The SPGB had to disassociate itself from the anti asian view of those SPC members and the SPC eventually accepted the case that we are "all slaves together" .
Mentioned in the book The Impossiblists by Peter Newell

There's also this, which is (apparently) in the new Black Flag: On Class and Migrant Solidarity

Maybe, maybe not. You could say that as soon as you frame migration issues in class terms it stops being an abstract single-issue demand, in which case obviously not. But I do think it's the case that a) anarchists should be involved in anti-nationalist/anti-migration control/migrant solidarity work, and b) they could be doing it better than most No Borders propaganda appears at the moment.

Though not strictly anarchist, the xborder site (and group) emerged from no-border/anti-capitalist people based in Australia at around the time of the substantial 'anti-summit' event (S11) in Melbourne, with some anarchist involvement. In any case, the site has a bunch of materials (and links) relevant to this discussion.

Liberal/moralistic noborders propaganda? Maybe i'm just become a dirty wishywashy liberal without realising it. I'll post below the text of the recent leaflet we did for westmids (ex-brum) noborders -- would be grateful for more enlightened ur-anarchist comrades here to point out the errors of our liberal ways.

As for the issue of single-issue campaiging ... sure noborders is a single issue issue. In my activist lifespan i've worked on many "single issues", e.g., housing campaigns, anti-gentrification, organising a freeschool, antifascism and antiracism, workplace struggles, gender struggles, sexuality, etc etc etc
None of these (in my view, no, not workplace organising either, i'm no marxist) involves all dimensions of the struggle -- there are many many fronts to fight on, all around us all the time. I get involved in some struggles that particularly excite me, and spread my time out as best i can. At the moment it happens I'm particularly involved in migration questions at the moment -- from direct solidarity work to campaigning, direct action, whatever. Why? I guess partly because i think there are a lot of potent intersections of class issues (migration i think is exposing new economic faultlines of the globalised economy), with community resistance, questions of nationalism and racism, gender questions, and more. Also i note that anarchism has many historical roots and ties with migrant struggles -- just off the top of my head i could mention the IWW, or the chicago anarchists, or italian and spanish anarchists in argentina, or rudolf rocker and arbeter freynd etc. in whitechapel, or andalucian migration to catalunya ... in fact i'd be tempted to say (as does the argentinian anarchist historian Cristian Ferrer) that historically anarchism has largely been a migrant movement. Then there's also just the facts of my personal circumstances -- we fight where we are -- living where i do right now in a very immigrant area in the west midlands, these issues are shoved in my face every morning. And having spent the last few years travelling and dealing with this shit myself (tho being a 1st world passport holding illegal in the 3rd world is a very different question from the other way round), borders get me seriously riled.

BARBED WIRE BRITAIN (side 1)

Britain is being swamped ... by tabloid lies
In fact the UK is home to less than 2% of the world's 16 million refugees. The vast majority of refugees live in third world countries. Pakistan is the biggest home to asylum seekers -- mainly from Afghanistan, victims of a war the UK helped start.

Prison island
The UK has one of the world's toughest border regimes. Nearly 3000 people are currently locked in UK detention prisons awaiting deportation. Unlike prison, asylum seekers can be locked up without warning, for no crime, and kept indefinitely without reason. That includes over 2000 children detained each year. And the Government is planning to expand the detention system with room for 1700 more inmates.

Whose benefits?
Actually most migrants to the UK are not entitled to any state benefits -- or at least not until they have worked for a year or more. Though others are not allowed to work at all -- some asylum seekers can be sent to prison if caught trying to earn a living. The result is homelessness and destitution.

Colonialism, on it goes
So why would anyone come to the UK? Some migrants come as refugees from wars started, funded, or armed by the UK Government. Increasingly many migrants are fleeing climate disasters. Others come to just try and make a living in UK and other European countries, countries made wealthy by centuries of sucking resources and profits from the rest of the world. One reason some migrants choose the UK is the English language, spread around the world by colonisation.

sources and more info: http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/practice/basics/facts.htm; http://noii.org.uk/; http://noborder.org/

WestMidlands NoBorders (side 2)

We are a group of activists who stand against all forms of border control and struggle for freedom of movement for all people. We are part of the the No Borders network in the UK and worldwide.

Freedom of movement for all
Money knows no borders -- the wealthy can move freely from one tax haven to another. The real burden of the border regime falls on working class people unlucky enough to be born in third world countries -- third class non-citizens of globalised capitalism.

Taking action
Our struggle is against all border controls, and the inequality and repression they create. The immediate focus is often on the front line of migrants' struggles against deportation, detention, and destitution. We give direct practical support to migrants in their daily battles. And we struggle against the border regime, campaigning and taking direct action.

Principles
The border regime is just part of a global capitalist system of oppression and domination working on many levels. We are fighting for a world without borders, states or capitalism. We put our principles into practice right now, organising on a non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian basis, using consensus decision-making.

Join the resistance
find out more: http://www.noborders.org.uk/
email us: wmnoborders@googlemail.com

PS -- i haven't been up there myself yet, but i've heard some good things about the Unity Centre's work on building solidarity between "locals" and "migrants" in a working class area in Glagow. Maybe others here know more already, or are interested in checking it out further: http://unitycentreglasgow.org/

Yeah, I've heard good stuff about the Unity Centre as well. My criticism of your leaflet would be that, while it does a good job of describing the plight of migrants, it doesn't do much to convince the reader that they have any interests in common with said migrants, or even that they're not in competition with them. If you added a bit about how migrants are blamed for shortages of housing and jobs, but these problems are actually a result of the workings of the free market, and how we can struggle for the things we need much more effectively if migrants and non-migrants stand united together, it'd improve the text considerably, in my opinion. Of course, there is also the question of length to consider, but I think you should be able to at least briefly tackle those issues without making it unreadably long.

Farce, I think it would be useful if you were to say what extra wording you think should be added to this leaflet, rather than treating No Border groups like you're the teacher and we're your students.

I think this is far too simplistic to describe the No Borders position or what NB groups are trying to do.

For a start, it entails very consciously a non-moralistic argument against migration management. This is how NB groups differ from human rights based campaigns or charities (as can be seen clearly in the involvement in Calais or in anti-deportation campaigns for example). True, it is sometimes very hard to avoid a moralistic language when a specific campaign has actually got a chance to suceed if it is framed quite liberally. But there is always a recognition of its limitations.

And while No Borders is an abstract principle it affects very practical politics; Groups have not just done work about migration, but also population management, racism, ecology, work, surveillance etc, all informed by this principle.

If this does not get across like this to many anarchists, that's of course a problem we have to address, but it's just silly to call No Borders activists variably liberals or capital's apologists.

New to this site and forum. Have been wondering for ages what the Anarchist position on immigration would be. Delighted to see that there is general agreement on a "no borders" ideal.

As some have mentioned, though, it is not something that is likely to sit well with the annoyingly short-sighted masses.

People tend to have short memories in be very selfish in their views on the subject. It's a "No-one gets in after me" approach.

All of which reinforces the idea that the only thing that can break the power of the State is complete economic chaos, something that actually might not be all that far away.

@Farce -- thanks for your suggestions. There's a bit of that in the section on work and benefits, i think you're right, it could do with more. And if you have good ideas for catchy ways to phrase -- in a sentence or two -- the idea that we should blame markets rather than migrants, that'd be great.

At the same time, i think there is an important role too for informing people about basic facts of migration, which are well hidden under tabloid hyperbole. And also letting people know about the conditions migrants face -- again, many people just aren't aware of the detention regime etc.

Actually, maybe this digs in to some of what the accusation of liberalism is about, but I don't think it's necessarily "liberal" to appeal to solidarity and indignation -- as well as just self-interest. My motivations for my own political actions are not based just on my direct economic interests -- so why would I expect that other people don't also have a range of complex motivations for their actions?

Also, i think we could have some interesting discussions about the economic and class issues. I certainly agree that "we can struggle for the things we need much more effectively if migrants and non-migrants stand united together". But if we are going to make that more than rhetoric we need to be sharp on some of the complexities of the situation.

E.g., sad but true, it is often in the immediate economic interest of more privileged groups of workers to collaborate with capital in maintaining entry controls to labour markets. That's the old staple of trade union politics and the closed shop in particular industries. At a national level, migration controls. Historically, i think migration regimes are related to the compromises or pacts which capital made with the representatives (political and industrial) of the working class in europe (and elsewhere in the first world). This kind of divide and rule is not just a matter of brainwashing or "ideology" -- there are real economic interests involved. If we want to oppose those divisive interests with solidarity we need more than just rhetoric -- we need real alternatives. On the other hand, those old pacts are breaking down faster and faster, for various reasons to do maybe with declining power and profitability of first world capital relative to the developing world, and/or just the inability of states to control increasing migration flows, etc etc. Thus why i think migration is becoming one of the new front lines of class conflict, and a place where we can do a lot as anarchists.

There is some Anarchist involvement in the more union orientated Campaign against Immigration Controls

An interesting article about the struggle in France:
A ministry like no other...

(London) A No Borders Perspective on Regularisation:
Regularisation For All