What Is Capitalism?
Free immigration is just free trade applied to labor.
Bryan Caplan, author of Open Borders:
The Science and Ethics of ImmigrationIf borders were open: A world of free movement would be $78 trillion richer.
Economist
For the likes of the Economist and the World Bank, and for commentators like Bryan Caplan, debates about ‘open borders’ tend to hinge on whether migration is good for ‘economic development’. They ask questions like: Does migration increase overall productivity, and how can we ensure that migration works both for the countries that receive migrants and the countries that send them? This kind of economistic thinking underpins dominant policy approaches to ‘managed migration’, which seek to advance the national economies of receiving states and to foster ‘development’ in sending societies. Some argue that free movement can increase the efficiency and productivity of markets, which is an argument not for the free movement of people, but for the free movement of (rightless) labour. It is also noted that migrants send remittances back home, which aids development. But the first question we need to ask is: What do we mean by ‘development’? And why is no one questioning the vast inequalities between national populations in the first instance? For free-market proponents of migration, ‘development’ means capitalist development, and thus the prioritisation of profit over people. Clearly, border abolition needs to be distinguished from these arguments for ‘open borders’, and this requires a more critical account of the relationship between capitalism and immigration control.
Capitalism is an economic system in which people can own private property and exchange goods and services in the marketplace in pursuit of their own rational self-interest. For its proponents, capitalism produces the best outcomes in terms of overall wealth, prosperity and growth, while ensuring personal, private freedoms and facilitating the most efficient distribution of goods and services. The role of liberal-capitalist states and international organisations under this system is to protect the rights of private citizens and maintain an orderly environment for the proper functioning of markets.
For capitalism’s critics, especially Marxists, dominant conceptions of equal exchange in the marketplace obscure material relations of production and the exploitation of dispossessed wage workers. Capitalists own the means of production, and their profits accrue from the difference between how much value is produced by labour and what workers are paid. Capitalism produces vast and widening inequalities between those who own the means of production – capitalists – and everyone else. As a global system, capitalism requires constant growth; new markets must be prized open and expanded. Everything must be commodified; this is why, for the global majority, the goods that are necessary for basic survival – food, water, shelter, electricity and so on – are things we have to pay for. Thus, the global majority, who have been dispossessed of their means of self-reproduction and subsistence, are compelled to sell their labour-power – that is, to be exploited – or to hustle in informal labour markets. The role of states in this system is to ensure the smooth functioning of capital accumulation (otherwise known as profit-making), and to reproduce consent for domination among the oppressed classes (often referred to as hegemony).
Of course, capitalism is not static through time and space: early industrial capitalism in the north of England worked very differently to the gig economies of the twenty-first century. Likewise, the influence of sugar planters and insurance companies at the high point of the transatlantic slave trade is not equivalent to the role of property developers and derivatives traders in contemporary megacities – even though both have shaped the global capitalism of their time. However, capitalism in all its forms relies on the production and management of differences between groups of people – especially racial, national and gendered differences (readers will note that the three chapters on capitalism, racism and gender necessarily overlap). Thus, capitalism is and always has been geographically uneven, producing and exaggerating racialised distinctions and hierarchies.
Marx wrote about how early capitalist development relied upon the violent dispossession of people’s land, rendering them propertyless and therefore leaving them no choice but to sell their labour-power (a process he called primitive accumulation). In the English context, this involved the enclosure of the commons – the removal of communal rights to access and use land, and its appropriation as private property reserved for the sole use of landowners or their tenants. But in a global perspective, the conditions of possibility for capitalist development involved conquest, genocide and enslavement. For example, the global production of sugar, tobacco and cotton relied on first seizing the lands of peoples in the Americas, and later kidnapping and enslaving millions of Africans to work in bondage to produce valuable commodities for global markets. In other words, theft, murder, conquest and plunder made the world of free markets, exchange, wage labour and private property, and these world- making processes continue to shape the geography of racialised global inequality today.
Of course, we now live in a postcolonial world in which formal racial rule is considered illegitimate, and where the explicit legislation of racial difference and hierarchy has mostly been abolished. However, the world made by colonialism has not been transformed or repaired, and racial and national disparities still characterise the distribution of life chances in an increasingly unequal world. Despite many successful struggles for formal rights and recognition, the structural inequalities forged by colonialism remain, mediated more indirectly by immigration controls and restrictive citizenship regimes. This is one of the ways in which we might describe our contemporary world order as racial, or racist: the borders between nation-states perpetuate hierarchies made by colonialism.
Importantly, these racialised global inequalities are maintained by the contradiction between the mobility of capital and the immobility of labour. Capital seeks to overcome restrictive national protections that prevent the accumulation of profit. Thus, large corporations – mostly founded in and operating from the global North – insist on access to the natural resources of southern countries (mining companies, for example), and demand the ability to sell products in their local markets (manufactured goods, food products, financial services, and so on). In this way, capital is enabled to move (relatively) freely, pursuing a kind of borderlessness denied to humanity. Of course, there is nothing natural about this world order: capital moves easily precisely because powerful states, corporations and international organisations have forcibly removed regulations, tariffs and protections that might protect local economies and modes of subsistence in the global South. These processes are central to what is called ‘neoliberalism’.
Meanwhile, labour is contained, and the global majority are immobilised in places of relative scarcity. Importantly, this contradiction is justified through ideas about national, racial and cultural difference. Mythologies around race and nation – which insist that specific peoples belong in specific places – help to justify uneven development and the immobilisation of the global poor (see Chapter 1). Restrictive citizenship and immigration regimes force the majority of the global poor to stay put, where they must accept lower wages (or no wages at all). When people do seek to move from the global South to the global North, they do so with restricted rights – as temporary, undocumented and illegalised labour. Borders therefore produce forms of labour market segmentation and racialised hyper-exploitation in the countries that receive and rely on migrant labour.1 As Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, ‘Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.’2 Any account of how racism enshrines inequality must consider the role of borders in organising racial capitalism at different scales: local, national and global.
Immigration Controls and Work
On the morning of 4 July 2016, two weeks after the UK voted to leave the European Union, workers at the high street restaurant Byron Burgers were called in for what they were told was a health-and-safety meeting. Once in the backroom, they were accosted by Home Office Immigration Enforcement agents and asked for their papers. Thirty-five of them – from Brazil, Nepal, Egypt and Albania – were then arrested, many of them later deported.3 Like Deliveroo and SOAS (University of London) before them, Byron Burgers went above and beyond to assist the Home Office in identifying, and in this case entrapping, their undocumented workers, when they were under no legal obligation to do so.4 Under the ‘hostile environment’ policy, employers are deputised to act as border agents, and face potentially unlimited fines or up to five years in prison if they are found to be employing undocumented workers without having conducted valid ‘right to work’ checks (this does not amount to an obligation to facilitate surreptitious raids against one’s own employees, however).
Enforcement of these employer sanctions is patchy, at best. But working illegally is itself a criminal offence for undocumented employees in the UK, punishable by up to fifty-one weeks in prison, a fine, or both. Meanwhile, migrant workers who are on ‘shortage occupation lists’, or sponsored by their employers, are tied by their visas, which means that if they lose their job they lose their status (as under temporary labour migration statuses in the United States and Canada). Meanwhile, overseas domestic workers have no right to change employer at all, and people seeking asylum are excluded from the regular labour market altogether. On top of this, many people on work visas have to pay significant sums, in addition to income and other taxes, in order to access essential services like the NHS, while also being excluded from welfare support through a provision which gives them ‘no recourse to public funds’.
Anyone genuinely concerned about labour rights needs to understand that these kinds of border controls only strengthen the hands of bosses, making it easier for them to undermine terms and conditions for everyone. It is migrants’ vulnerability to immigration control – especially deportation power – that makes them especially pliable and exploitable. The suggestion that migrant workers drive down wages – popular on the right and parts of the left – fails to account for the fact that immigration systems make workers less free and undermine their ability to assert their labour rights. If your right to remain in the country is dependent on you having a particular job, and if becoming ‘illegal’ means destitution and the threat of deportation, then it is very difficult to ask for a pay rise or call out unsafe labour practices. Similarly, if you have been pushed into the irregular labour market because you cannot survive on the meagre asylum support paid by the state (in the UK, £35 per week), or because you do not have the so-called ‘right to work’, then exposing exploitative practices, or calling the police, is not really an option when the police are likely to flag you to immigration enforcement. And so, the extent to which migrants do in fact drive down wages – however questionable this claim might be empirically – is an effect of their vulnerability to hyper-exploitation due to their precarious and sometimes ‘illegal’ immigration statuses.5
It is worth restating some fundamentals of left politics here: better working conditions come from the struggles of the working class. Despite the prevalence of common-sense claims that the value of wages is determined simply by supply and demand – so that migrant workers, by furnishing more supply, cause the value of wages to fall – it is in fact the capacity, or incapacity, to struggle collectively that determines the value of wages. When leftists accept ideas about ‘supply and demand’, they negate the potential and the force of worker agency and struggle. In short, better wages for all are dependent on the capacity for collective resistance; thus, building such capacity among all workers, including migrants, is critical. Immigration controls only weaken that capacity. Therefore, fighting for the rights and conditions of precarious migrant labourers can improve the lot of all working people. And the most effective way to do this is by building the power of migrant-inclusive trade unions.
Trade unions have often played host to virulent forms of racism; organised workers in both Britain and the United States were instrumental to the introduction of the first immigration controls, targeting Jewish and Chinese migrants respectively. But unions have also been central to anti-racist movements. In the UK, the Grunwick strike of 1976–78, which was led by South Asian women from East Africa, is rightly celebrated for the ways in which it ‘brought people of different races and backgrounds together in support of the rights of migrant women workers, shattered stereotypes about Asian women in Britain, and changed the face of trade unionism’.6 Thousands of union members from around the country supported these strikes with mass pickets, even if the strikes ultimately failed.
Trade unions provide space and structure for the development and articulation of collective demands. In a racist society, these demands must necessarily confront racism. Indeed, unions are able to negotiate and collectively bargain around anti-racist issues at work. Educators, for example, can work within unions to get police out of schools, or to stop education data being used for immigration enforcement, or to refuse to comply with counter-terror legislation that demands the surveillance of mostly Muslim students. By organising to resist these practices in the workplace, trade unions can take a stand against the racist policies of employers and governments. More generally, trade unions constitute an important node in the broad anti-racist movement – supporting campaigns, organising and attending protests, and helping amplify evidence of racialised inequalities.
Unfortunately, however, unions often fail in their mission to support their workers experiencing racism at work, as well as racism from within the union itself. The question of whether and how to support precarious and illegalised migrants has therefore been especially controversial. In the British context, some key figures in the labour movement have actively reproduced anti-migrant narratives. In 2016, McCluskey, then leader of the Britain’s largest union, Unite, invoked the ‘concerns of working people’ to underline his support for ending free movement within the EU, claiming that ‘workers have always done best when the labour supply is controlled and communities are stable’.7 And yet, other large, mainstream unions – including Unison, RMT and others – have made significant efforts to provide better support to migrant workers and resist the ‘hostile environment’. Indeed, there are many migrant workers organising within these established trade unions.
Nonetheless, migrant workers continue to be vastly under-represented in mainstream trade unions, largely because they tend to work in the least protected sectors – in temporary jobs that are poorly unionised and/or on zero-hours contracts. In the UK, it has been the smaller, independent unions – like United Voices of the World (UVW) and Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) – that have best represented migrants: a task that requires organising in particular workplaces and among particular groups of workers. For example, cleaners, security guards and catering staff in London universities successfully organised within IWGB to have their contracts brought in-house; many of these workers were migrants with precarious or temporary immigration statuses. IWGB has also been fighting alongside people working in the platform economy in their attempts to unionise – such as drivers for Uber and Deliveroo – thereby actively supporting and building power largely, though not exclusively, among precarious migrant workers. Meanwhile, UVW has organised with strippers and sex workers, some of whom are especially vulnerable to criminalisation, illegalisation and deportation.
Contests over the place of migrant workers within the labour movement have been just as intense in the United States. Historically, the majority of labour unions within the American Federation of Labor were strongly anti-immigration, and in the first half of the twentieth century sought to extend the terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act to other migrant workers. By the 1960s and ’70s, the United Farm Workers union was actively campaigning against ‘illegal immigration’ from Mexico, reporting strikebreaking ‘illegal immigrants’ to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.8 And yet, at the very same time there was significant support from organised labour for the Civil Rights movement; 40,000 union members were mobilised for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, for example.
Today, unions in the United States remain both sites of racism and migrant exclusion, and at the same time indispensable to the collective struggle against structural racism. To give one small example, while the United Brotherhood of Carpenters admitted to reporting undocumented workers routinely to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), other unions, such as the Painters’ Union, have sought to defend migrants facing deportation, and have campaigned for the release of their members from detention.9 Similarly, the Unite Here union has hosted trainings instructing members on how to effectively stonewall ICE agents, emphasising employees’ right to refuse to answer questions or show identification.10
We should not imagine that workers are supported by unions from on high; rather, workers are the unions. Consequently, when unions expand and organise with and among migrants – especially those with precarious statuses – they are able to develop radical demands that will improve the rights and dignity of all workers and all migrants. With this in mind, there are some important non-reformist reforms that can be pursued in relation to immigration controls, work and trade unions. First, people should be able to access labour rights and protections regardless of their immigration status. States thus need to enforce labour-market standards, such as the minimum wage, in ways that are uncoupled from policing and immigration enforcement. In its 2009 ‘Iced Out’ report, the AFL-CIO – the largest federation of unions in the United States – articulated exactly this priority.11
Second, all non-citizens should be able to unionise, wherever they work, and trade unions should therefore seek to include all workers, regardless of legal status. Unions should also seek to organise groups of precarious and especially deportable workers, such as sex workers, immigration detainees and farm workers. This would help build power among undocumented workers otherwise without rights, and help challenge the idea that ‘illegal immigrants’ and citizens are competitors for scarce resources. Third, we should campaign for an end to workplace employment checks, so that employers are no longer enlisted to perform border-policing functions. In the meantime, unions should pressure employers to refuse to comply with such checks. Fourth, we should seek to abolish all crimes of illegal working whereby non- citizens are criminalised for working without papers.
Finally, we should seek to resist and combat all immigration raids in places of work – and all immigration raids more broadly. By organising with and among non-citizens, it is possible for unions to create places of sanctuary from immigration enforcement at work, pressuring employers to refuse document checks, resisting the incursions of border enforcement, and supporting colleagues threatened with detention and deportation. Building vibrant union movements and growing the membership among precarious migrants offer a key means of resisting immigration controls. This can and should be done while emphasising that migrants deserve dignity not because they work hard or contribute to the economy, but simply because they are exploited people sharing interests with citizen workers.
In short, trade unions are sites of struggle, and we should be fighting for and within them – as so many migrant organisers already are. As prison abolitionists Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba and David Stein point out, trade unions are perhaps the model non-reformist reformers: ‘Socialists do not fight for trade unions in order to institutionalise capitalist social relations or build an aristocracy of labor. They do so in order to create durable structures that undermine the power of employers to exploit workers.’12 In this broad fight, trade unions must ally themselves with those seeking to abolish borders, which in practice means supporting migrant workers subject to immigration controls.
This priority has broad implications for left politics. Rather than pandering to imagined nativist constituencies – the ‘traditional’, ‘white’, or ‘left-behind’ working class – we need instead to focus our efforts on building new constituencies and power bases. Unions will be central here, which means we must expand our understanding of work and workers – to include migrants, domestic labourers and sex workers for example – while building power among the most exploited, especially those with precarious immigration statuses. That said, anti-capitalism is not reducible to industrial relations. The struggle against immigration control needs to be threaded into wider struggles for decent housing, healthcare, education and welfare benefits. Taking the issue of violent borders into the heart of local struggles, where it might not already be a central issue, is crucial in this process. It demands that the position of illegalised migrants should be made central to our struggles on all issues of social and economic justice. As Bridget Anderson notes, ‘if we don’t think about it at the start, then it will be introduced as a means of undermining organising and imagining new futures later on’.13
Border Abolition Is International in Scope
The anti-capitalism of border abolition is inherently internationalist. If abolition means changing all the relations that underpin the permanence of borders, then vast global inequalities, ongoing processes of dispossession and extraction, and the mirage of ‘development’ all need to be contested. Border abolition is therefore planetary in scope, and we should look beyond the nation-state as the default container for human communities. This is easier said than done, but it suggests the need to build connections and strategies with groups working in the global South – especially in the places from which migrants originate and through which they move.
People should be able to remain and flourish close to home, or to wander and travel, as and when they wish. Border abolition thus concerns not only the rights and dignity of migrants living in the global North, but also the plight of poor and oppressed people everywhere. This means the conditions that make people’s lives unliveable where they are must be confronted directly. War, environmental degradation and the dispossession of people’s land and livelihoods all compel migration; border abolition does not pretend that all migration is liberatory. But neither are we concerned with whether alleviating global inequalities will reduce global migration. People have always moved, and will always do so. Our project is not aimed at reducing movement, but at increasing freedom. Such a project can be sharply contrasted with the contemporary politics of development.
Contemporary development policies are defined by logics of surplus, scarcity and containment: too many people and not enough resources. The foundational assumptions underpinning development have changed; there is no longer any suggestion that countries in the global South will progress through several stages before eventually coming to resemble societies in the global North – nor even that the global poor will one day all be included in global markets. ‘Development’ is now a euphemism for surviving existing conditions, rather than making those conditions better. This explains all the present talk about ‘resilience’ (making do with what you have) and ‘informal labour’ (development without jobs). In fact, the dominant impulse among powerful states today is to use development policies to try to contain the global poor in places of scarcity. To give a key example, many African states now receive development funds on the condition that they comply with EU border control efforts. Since the so-called migration crisis of 2015, much of this support has been channelled through the EU Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), which is designed to ‘tackle the root causes of irregular migration’.
Some EUTF schemes provide loans and training to help people find work and set up businesses at home, targeting young people who are thought to be ‘potential migrants’, as well as those recently deported from Europe. Other schemes attempt to dissuade people from taking risky journeys – through campaigns, educational projects and awareness raising – although the effectiveness of these policies is highly questionable. The underlying premise that alleviating poverty will decrease migration is not borne out by the evidence – people who move are rarely the poorest, and tend to be risk-taking young people moving with the support of their families, or because they feel stuck (the desire for existential mobility precedes that for physical mobility). In these circumstances, providing people with small-business loans or propagandising about the perils of the journey are unlikely to deter them.14
Most troublingly, however, EUTF funds are channelled into various ‘capacity-building’ initiatives designed to modernise recipient states’ ability to police, document and surveil people living in or moving through their territories. These schemes help strengthen police information systems, train police officers and border guards, modernise systems of national identification, improve border surveillance, and consolidate computer systems and databases in so-called ‘source’ and ‘transit’ countries of migration. In effect, ‘tackling the root causes of irregular migration’ means supporting African states to police, contain and immobilise unruly populations more effectively – all under the umbrella of development.
More broadly, European borders have been externalised, and prospective migrants are now apprehended long before they arrive on European shores, sometimes before they even leave home. Frontex polices the seas, working with the Libyan coastguard to prevent migrants departing from Africa, while the EU has signed agreements with Turkey to ensure the speedy return of irregular migrants. The immobilisation of the racialised global poor is not simply a national question, then, but a central preoccupation of foreign policy and diplomacy. Development policy is crucial in this project. The violence of this ‘empire of borders’ becomes obscured by the language of development, humanitarianism and care: We stop the boats to save lives.15
We must reject these ‘humanitarian’ conceits, and seek alternatives to development as bordering and containment. One non-reformist reform in this context would be to create and expand spaces and schemes for free movement. While free movement in the EU is broadly limited to European nationals, prioritising the movement of labour rather than of people, it is still worth defending and expanding. At the same time, if borders within Africa, Latin America and Asia were dismantled, creating vast spaces of free circulation within particular regions, then borders, walls and closed national identities might lose their hold over political imaginaries more broadly.16
A World in Common
It is no coincidence that the word mobility refers not only to movement but also to the common people, the working classes, the mob.
Dimitri Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vasily
Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the
Twenty-First Century
As many indigenous scholars and activists have stated: Land does not belong to us; we belong to the land. If no one owned land, there could be no nation-states, only commons – a world in common. Territory, on the other hand, belongs to the state. It is property. Citizenship, too, is a property relation: citizens belong to the state and the state belongs to citizens. Border abolition recognises that the territorialisation of labour is a key tool of racial capitalism. As Andrea Smith argues in her foreword to Harsha Walia’s book Undoing Border Imperialism, ‘[F]or immigration to be a problem, people must live in a propertied relationship to land. That is, [where] land is a commodity that can be owned and controlled by one group of people.’17
It is clear that anti-capitalist projects must seek to unmake sovereign territory. There can be no freedom within the confines of the nation-state, and the demand to abolish private property is necessarily a call to abolish the nation-state system itself – a call for border abolition. Ultimately, capitalism is a system that seeks to manage and control the uneven mobility of people and things. Anti-capitalism must therefore seek to provide people with greater means to exercise autonomous movement via the politics of border abolition. As William Walters reminds us, ‘In certain respects the power of autonomous movement has been the hidden secret of the history of class struggle.’18
Anti-capitalists should remember that there can be no socialism in one country, and no progressive labour movement that puts ‘natives’ first. Because walled workers cannot unite, anti-capitalism is necessarily internationalist, which means committed to border abolition. Left-wing nativisms, on the other hand, offer only further means of justifying the immobilisation of the global poor, by which unknown foreigners suffer and die – but ‘at home’, where they belong. Migrant justice cannot be secured under capitalism. Capitalism relies on the constant reproduction of social differences and hierarchies, and trades on geographically uneven development. Global inequalities are therefore inherent to capitalism, and they are only getting worse. Thus, there can be no nice or fair way to manage migration; there is no way to make borders sufficiently ‘liberal’, or to put all the people in the right boxes.
Ultimately, border abolition and anti-capitalism are one and the same, and both must be global and internationalist.19 To abolish capitalism, we must abolish borders – and vice versa. There is no other way.