It’s Saturday morning, and I am flipping through the pages of a tired copy of the Guardian I found on a table. As I skim through it, I end up in the letters section, which today bears the title ‘Difficult decisions on immigration’. There, I am met with the views of what Nigel Farage would probably dub ‘decent, sensible’ people, grappling with folk economics to justify measures to restrict immigration. So it is that Yugo, for example, suggests that curtailing immigration will cause ‘the market … [to] automatically raise unskilled wages’. His views are echoed by Randhir, who explains that goods – unlike labourers – have no families and friends to take with them in the place where they land, so that the ‘free flow of labour and free flow of goods are fundamentally different’.
Like the churches of times past, where people could run inside to escape arrest for their crimes, economics today offers asylum to the most abject of views, by clothing them in hypocritical liberal paraphernalia. When economics is stretched to the point of advising a more privileged regime of free movement for things over people – as Randhir’s letter dares to suggest – this is when its violent side emerges in full force. And it’s still the same ugly face Marx denounced when speaking of ‘primitive accumulation’.
Despite economists successfully managing to indoctrinate each other and the wider public about the ‘naturality’ of markets (as exemplified by Eugene Fama’s 2013 Nobel Prize for a theory of efficient markets that excites only the truly deluded), these – like property – are not things that just ‘happen’. Goods don’t flow pulled by some god-like force – the Invisible Hand – that magically moves them from one place to another, whereas people are supposedly subject to a different set of rules. Equally, it’s not like markets ‘automatically’ rebalance if you forcibly remove people, and make them bounce against the rubber wall of national boundaries.
Markets are always created by people. Indeed, they are a way of framing relationships between people. For instance, there was a time when the ‘global’ webs of exchange we take for granted today were ‘opened’, usually with a musket in one hand and the Bible in the other. Goods flow because they have been made to flow, and because those flows are sustained by people and accompanying institutions. It was the British that made tradeable ‘goods’ of the things they found in India, for example. In that case, the flow of goods did not just ‘arise’, it was formatted, put in place by someone, and stabilised through colonial structures to oversee its functioning. To this day, around the world, the fact that agreements on ‘free trade’ have to be signed shows precisely that markets don’t just exist naturally (in the same way that potatoes do: without needing international agreements to invent them). And, as the ample scores of rebellions show, from the Zapatista in Mexico to the protests against seed patenting in India, ‘free trade’ frames relationships between people and things in ways that have to be forced on a pre-existing set of arrangements, and that enforcement is what makes people take to the streets. Markets, therefore, are not the ‘natural’ entity that automatically ‘rebalances’ itself, of economics textbooks. They are social arrangements and – in this respect – they share with borders their artificial quality. This is perhaps why hostility to immigration and folk economics are such frequent bedfellows.
When it comes to justifying the oppressions caused by the enforcement of a market or a border upon people, the liberal formations of ‘economics’ and ‘statehood’ provide the respectable face that insulates many people – like some of the readers in the Guardian letters section – from the oppressive consequences of that very enforcement. Which leads me to the second prong of my argument. After using economics as an apologetic device for the monster that lurks beneath the label of ‘immigration control’, notions of statehood and nationality are often leveraged against the ‘difference’ of immigrants, calling for example for their ‘integration’. In this sense, just like ‘markets’ are one of the things that has been induced through earlier colonial relations, debates about the ‘purity’ of national belonging (marked by rituals such as borders, mythologised national histories – the Life in the UK test leading the way in delusions of Victorian grandeur – and even football competitions) display the same ‘civilising’ drive that came with markets. Little strands of this sort can be picked up in a number of debates. One that is particularly dear to me is the current discussion on banning the niqab in the UK where the irony is often missed that, the (perceived) fear of a brown man oppressing a woman into wearing the garment justifies it for a white man to (actually) force it off. Or similarly, in my native Italy, self-professed Catholic politicians often awake from their interpassive stupor to suggest that migrants ought to be integrated and – when you probe them further – often realise that the request is one to shed anything that makes one different. I really don’t see the break, here, between the civilising drive that was displayed in colonial times, bringing over Gods and markets, and the normalising discourse of ‘integration’ (and, before that, of ‘immigration control’).
In sum, the point I want to drive home is that a different standard of public and popular discourse is needed, where it is no longer acceptable to hide in the church of loose-liberal thinking – under the guise of folk economics and pop coloniality – to make statements that will touch the lives of real people. Markets, like borders, only exist if we feed them with a toothless public debate, that shies away from denouncing the profanations of human life that are carried out in their name.