To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.
Marshall Berman
To believe that the immigration debate has only recently turned ugly is to have a short view of history. As early as the 12th century there were anxieties about Flemish weavers coming to England, despite the fact that the technology and expertise they brought ensured that England dominated the cloth trade for several centuries, and built a large amount of her medieval and early modern wealth on it. Later, the popular press of the nineteenth century was full of fear about Jewish immigration – people fleeing the wave of anti-Semitic persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe brought with them strange customs, diseases (trachoma and TB were routinely blamed on migrants) and would undercut the domestic workforce. More sinisterly still, they brought the potential of political radicalism, anarchism and different religious practices. No doubt it was possible to walk through much of the East End in the 1890s and hear Russian, Polish, Yiddish – and no English – spoken.
During the nineteenth century Irish immigration created other tensions with the indigenous workforce. Thomas Carlyle wrote about how Irish workers would undercut the domestic, as ‘he [the Irishman] needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch…roosts in outhouses and wears a suit of tatters…The Saxon man, if he works on these terms, cannot find any work.’
The hostility towards migrant labour, and its ‘otherness’ in terms of custom and lifestyle – especially in times where working men and women are underrepresented by unions or other collective forms of expressing their power or concerns, and have genuine and legitimate fears for their financial security – is, in its most basic form, an expression against the uneven and divisive experience of modernity. The migrant, into which the immigrant and the refugee is conflated as a category type, is the signal figure of the experience of modern life, and for some, all that is wrong with it. Thus the body of the migrant is the blank slate onto which all collective anxieties about job and wage protection, access to necessarily limited services like education and healthcare, can be written.
For the comfortably-off, the experience of migration is often (although not always) two-way. Through opportunities to travel, study and work abroad, the relatively recently found freedom to cross borders at whim, via cheap air travel and paid holidays, sabbaticals and conferences, is a tremendous aspect of contemporary life. Other cultures can be sucked up, savoured and enjoyed. The elite experience of career development, academic study or international business is by its very nature globalised, internationalist and cosmopolitan in outlook. In addition – low-cost domestic labour for such essentials as childcare, elder care, nursing, cleaning and maintenance jobs is of huge benefit to those with large incomes.
For those on the sharper end of the economic divide, the fruits of globalisation are remote, and, if global statistics about increasing wealth gaps are accurate, getting remoter all the time. Regardless of whether or not the statistics about the indigenous workforce is or is not undercut by newer arrivals to the labour market, the feeling of precariousness for those on minimum wage or without work is very real. Reports from economists, academics and think tanks can highlight the benefits of open borders, fluid migration patterns and flexible markets, but if you have been on the tough side of these so-called improvements to the global economy it is hard to welcome any threat to your already minimal stability.
Just as history teaches us that immigration is sometimes, if not always, perceived as a threat in some communities, it also demonstrates that integration and common cause is just as much part of our collective heritage. By the turn of even the eighteenth century Britain had Jewish people in Parliament, Indian doctors, lawyers and civil servants, and senior German and Italian businessmen. The history of the Chartists and early trades unions shows working people getting together to make common cause to improve their access to the franchise and their working conditions – showing that where anxiety about insecurity is turned into a deeper critique of a system of exploitation, solidarity can be forged, even from people of quite different backgrounds. Later, a cry at the Battle for Cable Street against Black Shirt fascists in 1936 was ‘Not our Jews!’ Within a generation or two, the East End was a community that united its collective identity, in spite of the religious and cultural differences so fearfully reported by the Daily Mail and others just a few decades earlier.
There is a real, serious critique to be made about the insecurities and inequities of the present economic order, and how these disproportionately fall on the shoulders of the most vulnerable. Fear of immigration, and of migrant workers undercutting the domestic labour market, unfortunately suits political elements of both left and right to exploit and always have. But progressive politics should not ever blame those who, whether to improve their material and social lot, escape oppression (including poverty) or to experience something different, take the opportunity to work and live away from their country of birth. Instead it should tackle unscrupulous employers, exploitative landlords and fight against a race to the bottom for pay and conditions. There is room for all, but not at the cost of squeezing the already squeezed, and this is the distinction to be made. Employers cannot have cheap labour at the expense of destroying hard-fought for workers rights; and workers – from wherever they come from – should unite to understand the true oppressor is not their colleagues, but a system that is not operating in their collective interests.