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Capital & Class
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DOI: 10.1177/030981680107500113
2001 25: 149 Capital & Class
Teresa Hayter
Open borders: the case against immigration controls

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149 Open borders: the case against immigration controls
M
IGRANTS to Britain, including refugees, are
being made to suer in unprecedented ways. They
are being stigmatised, pauperised and forced into
illegality by the policies of the Labour government, which
is engaged in a shameful competition with the Tories to
demonstrate that it is tougher than they are towards asylum
seekers. In the process asylum seekers, and anybody else
who looks foreign, have become the targets of racism which
is worryingly on the increase. Even the police have
recognised that the politicians repeated criticisms of so-
called bogus asylum seekers, and their reection in the
media, have on each occasion been followed by an increase
in racist attacks.
The suering imposed on refugees and migrants is
deliberate government policy. Its intention is to stop people
coming here, either to exercise their right to claim asylum
or to work. The government now openly admits, and in fact
claims, that its toughness is intended to reduce the numbers
of what it says, often with outrageous disregard for the truth,
are unfounded asylum applications. It is casting around for
ever more brutal ways of deterring political refugees, as well
as others who may be seeking work, and even of making it
impossible for them to leave their countries at all. This
implies that is not much good arguing for better treatment
of refugees unless one also argues that immigration controls
are unnecessary and should be abolished.
Immigration controls have their origins in racism. They
legitimate racism, feed racism, and are explicable only by racism.
Their introduction, far from appeasing racists and the far right,
as was supposedly their intention, has strengthened prejudices
Open borders: the case
against immigration controls
Teresa Hayter
Capital & Class #75 150
and created demands for more controls. Immigration controls
currently discriminate between immigrants on racist grounds.
Ending such discrimination would mean either applying
controls to all foreigners, including cc citizens and patrials
(mostly white Commonwealth citizens with British parents or
grandparents) who now have the right to settle in Britain, or
granting this right to everybody. Immigration controls are,
in any case, inherently racist. Even if they did not discriminate
between immigrants they would still discriminate against
foreigners in general.
Nation states have lost some of their powers in the face of
so-called globalisation. They cling to one of their last
prerogatives: their power to exclude from their territories the
persecuted and the poor. But the escalating repression and abuses
of human rights involved in the attempt to keep people out of
Britain are not having the desired eect. The number of asylum
seekers has not declined. What will the government do next?
Will it send ghurkas to Calais, as one commentator suggested?
Will it lock up all asylum seekers indenitely? Sooner or later,
immigration controls will be abandoned as unworkable, too
expensive in suering and money, too incompatible with the
ideals of freedom and justice, and impossible to maintain against
the pressures of globalisation. At the economic forum at Davos
Blair talked about an open world, by which he presumably
meant an open world for goods and capital but a closed one for
people. Governments will not for ever be able to maintain the
peculiar position that the movement of people, but not of goods
and capital, must be controlled by the state.
The current international situation has parallels with that of
apartheid. The rich industrialised countries need workers from
the rest of the world, but subject them to the equivalent of pass
laws, conne some of them to hostels, deny them the rights
enjoyed by their own populations, and crack down savagely on
those who try to evade controls. In South Africa the attempt to
maintain white privilege proved untenable; it is likely to become
so internationally. In France, Belgium, Germany and other
European countries, autonomous movements of Sans papiers
(the undocumented) have raised demands for legal rights for
all migrants; they have moved on to increasingly widespread
demands for open frontiers and freedom of movement.
Many people in Britain nevertheless now think of
immigration controls as a matter of common sense, an
unavoidable reality. But immigration controls are a recent
phenomenon. A hundred years ago they did not exist. They
151 Open borders: the case against immigration controls
followed agitation against Jewish refugees by Tory :is with
links to the far right, including Major Evans-Gordon :i,
one of the founders of the British Brothers League. Like
others before and after him, he accused immigrants of
importing disease, crime, overcrowding and sweating and
threatening a stormslurs which have been used against
Jews, Flemish, Lombards, Huguenots, Irish, Caribbeans,
Asians, Roma and most new immigrants. In 1o the rst
Aliens Act was passed, allowing the new Immigration Service
to refuse entry to certain categories of aliens; this power
was later extended to all aliens. The right of asylum remained
in theory, but did not stop the refusal of many thousands of
Jewish refugees in the 1os who were thus, shamefully, driven
back to the concentration camps.
Commonwealth citizens had free entry until the rst
Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 16z. Throughout the
1os and early 16os mainstream politicians of all parties
eloquently denounced any notion of controls on Commonwealth
citizens. Labour under Hugh Gaitskell vehemently opposed
their introduction in 16z. But openly racist organisations
such as the Birmingham Immigration Control Association
and the Southall Residents Association campaigned for
controls. In private the Conservatives were trying to devise
ways of excluding black Commonwealth citizens while
admitting white ones, and encouraging the continued much
larger immigration of Irish people whose labour was needed.
Ocial reports failed to nd any reason for excluding black
Commonwealth citizens apart from their supposed non-
assimilability; immigrants were needed for the expansion
of the economy, and were not prone to either disease or crime.
Eventually the 16z Act made admission conditional on the
possession of job vouchers. These did discriminate, but
between skilled and unskilled workers; the government hoped
the former would be white. The Irish were exempted from
controls. Job vouchers were granted in diminishing numbers
and abolished in 1;1. They were replaced by temporary
work permits for certain categories of skills and for domestic
servants, and free admission for patrials and cc citizens.
The right of refugees to seek asylum is currently embodied
in the 11 United Nations Geneva Convention and its 16;
Bellagio Protocol. But governments retain sole right to
decide whether or not to grant it. Rates of acceptance of
asylum claims in Europe declined from nearly half in 18(
to less than 1o per cent in the 1os. From the 18os
Capital & Class #75 152
onwards refugees came in increasing numbers from wars
and repression in the Third World and now capitalist East
European countries. ;6,ooo people applied for asylum in
Britain in the year zooo, mainly from Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran,
Afghanistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, the former cssn, China
and Turkey. The numbers claiming asylum are roughly similar
to the numbers of cc citizens and patrials entering Britain
to work. The British Home Secretary Jack Straw now
proposes that European governments should nance
reception camps in countries neighbouring the refugees,
from whom governments would select a favoured few for
asylum in Europe. Under his proposals, the Geneva
Convention would be revised so that any refugees who still
attempted to exercise their right to enter Europe and apply
for asylum there could be promptly returned to these camps.
By far the strongest reason for opposing immigration
controls is that they impose harsh suering on migrants and
refugees, in the hope of deterring others. They undermine a
long list of human rights: the right not to be subjected to
inhuman and degrading treatment, the right not to be
tortured, the right not to be arbitrarily arrested and
imprisoned, the right to a fair trial by a properly constituted
court, the right to family life, the right to seek and nd work
wherever it is available. Oddly and illogically, they do not
contravene the 1(8 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This states that people should have free movement within
the borders of their own countries and should be allowed to
leave any country, including their own. It says nothing about
the right to enter another one, unless it is to claim (but not
necessarily obtain) asylum from persecution. Governments
build razor wire fences on frontiers and multiply their
sur veillance and detection techniques. They extend
surveillance to the interior of countries, where they give
powers of search and arrest to immigration ocials. The
democratic and human rights of the rest of us are threatened
too, in what some have called a creeping fascisisation of society.
To deter people from coming to Britain for refuge or
perhaps for work, the state imprisons an undisclosed
proportion (in the 1os it was around 1 per cent) of the
people who arrive at ports and airports and claim asylum. It
does so on the say-so of junior immigration ocials, with
no trial, no automatic right to bail, no time limits and no
discernible criteria, apart from lling spaces in detention
centres and prisons. These spaces more than doubled between
153 Open borders: the case against immigration controls
1 and 1;. From 1; to zooo they more than doubled
again. Currently over 1,oo asylum seekers are detained at
any one time. The government has announced that by next
year the number will increase to (,ooo. Other asylum seekers
are freed and given temporary admission but not allowed
to work for six months, and often longer; this concession is
itself under threat. They must survive on less than the
minimum considered necessary for the natives. This means
food vouchers spendable only at certain supermarkets, and
dispersal to one no choice oer of accommodation, often
away from existing communities, lawyers and even families.
The system is administered by a new Home Oce
bureaucracy, the National Asylum Support System. It
functions badly, sometimes for example leaving people
without food for several weeks. Dispersal is creating such
hardship, and subjecting people to so much racism, that many
of them are returning to London, to survive as best they
can. Because people do not have access to lawyers, and may
not get their travel expenses to interviews paid in time, many
are refused asylum for non-compliance: failure to ll in
forms on time or to attend interviews. Nass costs the
government o per cent more than allowing asylum seekers
to claim ordinary benets, let alone allowing them to work.
In addition, in an attempt to stop people escaping at all,
governments impose increasingly restrictive visa requirements
on the nationals of countries in which there are wars and
major represssion. There is no such thing as a refugee visa.
Students or visitors visas can be obtained only by
deception, and with diculty, supposing the refugee already
has a passport. Therefore practically the only possibilities
are to travel on false documents, bought from agents, or
clandestinely, usually also with the help of agents. By posting
ocials at airports abroad and imposing nes on airlines
and others who carry people without the correct documents,
governments are making even travel on false documents
increasingly hard. Therefore refugees travel clandestinely.
Many thousands suer and die in lorry containers, the holds
of ships and even the undercarriage of aeroplanes, or drown
trying to cross seas in small boats. Ministers then have the
gall to shed crocodile tears about this suering, and to lament
and vow to suppress the billions of prots made by criminal
networks, for whose creation they are themselves responsible.
Immigration controls have a smaller eect on the number
of people migrating and settling than is usually supposed. If
Capital & Class #75 154
the abolition of controls was likely to cause people to migrate
in overwhelmingly disruptive numbers it might perhaps be
understandable to support them. But it wont happen. As
Gaitskell, opposing immigration controls in 1962, said: It is
in my opinion an utter and complete myth that there is the
slightest danger or prospect of millions and millions of brown
or black people coming into this country. Anyone who is trying
to put that across is only trying to frighten people into believing
it. People who have the means to do so ee in desperation
from war and oppression. Or, if they are exceptionally
enterprising, they may migrate to work. But, much though
it may surprise the racists, most people prefer their own
countries and cultures and do not want to uproot themselves
and face hardship elsewhere. Few of the very poor, the sick,
the old or the very young could migrate even if the removal of
controls reduced the costs. There are no controls on migration
to France and the csa from their Caribbean dependencies, and
in Britain there were none until 16z. Between 1o and 18o
o.6 per cent of the population of the Caribbean emigrated per
year. Caribbean emigration is based on exceptional historical
and geographical circumstances. Bob Sutclie, in his book
Nacido en Otra Parte, has estimated that in the unlikely event
that these Caribbean rates of emigration were repeated
worldwide, there would be an extra z( million migrants per
year, or a possible growth of z.( per cent in the population
of the industrialised countries. A United Nations Population
Division report published in zooo estimates that in western
Europe alone 1. million net immigrants per year would be
needed over the next fty years merely to counter the eects of
ageing and declining populations.
If people were free to come and go, they would probably
do so. Ironically, immigration controls may have increased
the number of people migrating to Britain and settling here.
Until the threat of immigration controls, migration to Britain
correlated almost precisely with job vacancies. The Act ended
the possibility for young men to come for short periods and
then be replaced by younger family members. Well over half
the Indians and about three-quarters of the Pakistanis who
arrived in Britain before controls did so in the 18-month
period before the 16z Act; for the rst time Caribbean arrivals
did not correlate with vacancies. The Act allowed
dependents to follow their men. By 16; over o per cent
of all Commonwealth immigrants were dependents. There
are similarities for refugees. In a survey of Sri Lankan
155 Open borders: the case against immigration controls
refugees, the vast majority said they would like to go home
if only they could be sure of being able to return if the
situation in Sri Lanka worsened again. Governments
creation of people trackers, through their denial of legal
means of escape, has created a market and a source of large
prots which may possibly also cause people to be induced
to migrate who otherwise would not have done. Once in
Britain, many people are trapped and cannot return, even
supposing they wish to. In any case the great majority of
those whose asylum claims governments reject, after months
or years of suering and cruel uncertainty, are not deported,
often because their governments will not take them back.
Immigration controls are supposedly in the interests of
the current inhabitants of the rich countries. The assumption
of a moral right to impose suering to preserve the privileges
of a rich minority of course needs questioning. But, as it
happens, controls are probably not in the economic self-
interest of either capitalists or the working-class in the rich
countries. Migrants work was needed in the post-Second
World War expansion, and will be so again as west European
populations decline and age. It is also needed for the jobs
the natives shun. Without migrants some industries would
probably close or be relocated abroad, with a knock-on eect
on other jobs. Contrary to prejudice, the eect of immigrants
on the jobs and conditions of the natives is, if anything,
positive. After the Second World War there was net
emigration from Britain, and net immigration to France
and Germany; the right-wing economist Charles P.
Kindleberger argued that this phenomenon explained the
greater economic success of the latter. And wages are now
higher in France and Germany than they are in Britain.
Similarly with the eects of migration on public
expenditure. Because migrants are self-selected as young t
adults, rich countries obtain labour cheaply. If, eventually,
migrants settle with their families, their cost to welfare
services is no more than other workers. In January zoo1
the Home Oce published a report on the economic and social
eects of immigration which estimated that in 18-
foreign-born residents made a net contribution to public
nances of 2.6 billion. The supposed burden imposed by
asylum seekers derives almost entirely from the fact that they
are not allowed to work. Nevertheless the abolition of immig-
ration controls would create vast savings. In Britain the attempt
to keep people out costs at least 800 million a year, and
Capital & Class #75 156
possibly much more. The money could be better used to help
with any initial problems experienced by traumatised refugees.
Some argue that immigration controls protect the interests
of the Third World. The argument ignores the interests of
migrants as individuals, and their freedom to ee persecution,
to seek work where they can nd it, or simply to enjoy
themselves. In addition, migration makes a small dent in
the current extreme polarisation of wealth internationally.
Remittances (the money sent home by migrant workers) are
for example bigger than ocial foreign aid, and superior to
it since they come without conditions and do not have to be
repaid. The current policy of British and other governments
of recruiting skilled workers on temporary contracts, which
leave them open to extreme forms of exploitation, while
cracking down with ever greater harshness on the movements
of people whose skills are not desired, is the worst of both
worlds. But the existence of such exploitation and creaming
o of skills is not an argument for restricting the movement
of people, skilled or unskilled.
Nevertheless many people who now migrate from the
Third World do not do so out of choice, but because they
are forced to by wars and political repression. If the
governments of the rich industrialised countries object to
migration, they should recognise their own part in causing
it. Most of the recent increase in asylum applications is the
result of the break-up of Yugoslavia, for which the West bears
at least some responsibility. The West should stop using the
World Bank and the i:r to enforce privatisation and extract
payments on an unjust debt. It should stop enforcing the
access of its multinational corporations to the markets and
resources of Third World countries. It should stop propping
up right-wing repressive regimes, and should not crush
attempts at reforms and the redistribution of wealth. It should
not supply arms to participants in civil wars, or at all. The
current situation ought to be reversed. The world should be
open for people, but investment should be planned and
controlled, so as to create more justice and less inequality. A
more just world order would be one in which no one is
forced to migrate, but everyone is free to do so if they wish.
Resistance forced the abandonment of apartheid . I believe
that we should campaign for the abandonment of immigration
controls too, before the suering they cause to innocent people
escalates further.