Europe and equal
rights for
immigrants
The immigrant population within the capitalist countries of Western and Northern Europe is today 16 million people, including both the "illegal" immigrants and those from the former British colonies and their families resident in Britain (2.1 million). Obviously this figure includes many different situations:
• Countries like Denmark or Norway have a small foreign population, while those in what is called "Southern Europe" (Spanish state, Italy, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece) have been up to now primarily countries of emigration. The 15 million emigrants from this area make it the second centre of emigration in the world after the Caribbean.
• Several countries in Northern Europe have traditionally called on immigrant workers and thus have a high foreign population. If we leave aside Britain, this means primarily Switzerland, West Germany, Austria and Luxembourg (one in four of its inhabitants are foreigners), where the foreign population contains a majority of workers. In other countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Belgium, the foreign population, often established for some time, consists as much of young people and spouses as active workers. The particular case of Sweden should be noted where, among the million immigrants, 600,000 have been naturalized. Here immigrants are primarily
114 International Marxist Review Finnish or Norwegian, other foreigners being primarily refugees, Sweden having had until recently legislation which gave a broad recognition to the right to asylum.
In the eight main employing countries, almost 45% of foreign workers are from one of the Common Market countries.
From the end of the 1960s, and increasingly with the beginning of the capitalist crisis of the mid-1970s, all governments adopted restrictive policies closing the frontiers to foreigners from outside the EEC (these restrictions still hold for Portugal, Greece, and Turkey which has applied to join). This has brought about a more or less general modification of the European immigrant population. There has been a stagnation, indeed reduction of the number of active workers, and an increase in the arrivals of family members who, with refugees and those requesting asylum, now constitute the major section of new arrivals. To these should be added two million "illegals" (there are 1.2 million in Southern Europe. The number of refugees is today around 700,000 in capitalist Europe, which receives less than 6% of the world total of refugees. Thus this particular consequence of poverty and war for which imperialism bears the overwhelming responsibility still falls primarily on the poorest countries (Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, South East Asia, Central America). Despite the propaganda campaigns about Europe under siege from refugees, there is only in Europe one refugee for 710 inhabitants on average, against 1 for 24 in Sudan.
In all these countries there is the demand for dignity and an end to discrimination, and for equal rights for immigrants. This obviously is in confrontation with the bosses' wishes. Although they have more difficulty in using these stabilized immigrant workers as a security valve on the labour market, the bosses are still just as opposed to putting on the same footing, with the same rights, as the indigenous workers.
Still more serious is the way in which the children of immigrants, undoubtedly most forcefully in Britain, Belgium and France, pose the question of their place in society. They have more difficulty in accepting their status as a target of racism when they feel themselves totally part of the country where they live. And it is because these young people are in fact integrated into the society where they live that there is a growth of racism challenging this stabilization. Class and state racism Racism is not a phenomenon restricted to capitalism or imperialism, but its
Europe and equal rights for immigrants 115 appearance, its structure and its development are always based on the social relations existing in different systems of exploitation and oppression. From Graeco-Roman antiquity to the capitalist Europe of today, there has always been a ideological framework justifying the state of submission of the slaves, the serfs, the colonized populations. For the dominant social group or class, the principle is always the same: to find a value, a specific character which justifies the situation of exploiter or exploited.
This is the real matrix of racism, which is then fed by the situation or region, differences in culture, language or physical appearance: but it is never these differences which are the real cause of racism.
Class racism also feeds the most pernicious theories which, without making qualitative judgements, explain that profound cultural or ethnic differences are bound to lead to racism and that cohabitation between these groups is not desirable.
The history of all peoples is however the product of the permanent fusion of communities of different origins, except in the rarest cases. And the process of fusions or violent confrontations which mark this history have always been in one way or another the result of the economic conditions, the social relations between these groups, but never the level of compatibility between one culture and another.
The shaping of the Iberian peninsula in the Middle Ages through the mixture of the Judaeo-Christian and Arab populations and cultures, the domination of the latter over the Berber populations of North Africa, the two-century bloody war between Roman and Reformed Christians some centuries later, the anti-Italian pogroms of the beginning of the century in the South of France are events which demonstrate, in a few centuries and in a small region of the world, the inanity of theories explaining these movement on the basis of ethnic questions, and independently of social and economic relations.
A striking example in present-day France is the great moderation of xenophobic campaigns against big concentrations of recently-arrived Asians, of very different culture and history, and living for example in a very separate and distinct way in one area of the French capital at the same time as the intensification of racist campaigns against the North African communities. These same Asian communities were however the object of violent campaigns and pogroms at the beginning of the century and in the inter-war period on the Pacific coast of the United States.
Waves of migration are also as old as the world. Since the 19th century, they have regularly followed the movement of capital. This century has seen cities swell to the detriment of the countryside in the European metropolitan coun-
116 International Marxist Review tries. At the same time, the development of North American capitalism and the constitution of colonial empires provoked enormous (100 million) emigration from old Europe towards America and Oceania, and secondarily to Africa. On the other hand, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, there was the arrival of the workers necessary for industrialization in the European industrial basins, particularly the mines, and, after 1918, the replacement of the 20 million dead and 10 million maimed of the imperialist butchery.
Obviously, the capitalists have always wagered on competition with foreign workers enjoying neither the same political rights nor social advantages. They made considerable profits from a workforce whose education was not paid, and which returned to its country of origin at the age at which it was likely to become a burden on society for retirement or health care.
Racism thus served as a brake to the junction between the indigenous and immigrant working classes, as much for the European as the African workers. This racism was regularly relayed by chauvinist and pro-imperialist leaderships in the workers' movement. Thus the Guesdist current in the French workers' movement at the beginning of the century developed a vigorous campaign against Italian workers.
In the last few years, with the development of the capitalist crisis and the unemployment of millions of workers, these same leaderships have not been slow in justifying the unemployment, the "return home" of workers who have often been living with their families in a European country for more than 10 years. In France, since 1983 the Socialists have not hesitated to use immigrants as scapegoats for unemployment, accompanied with racist remarks when workers dared to defend their jobs as at Talbot in 1984. The new situation inherited from the crisis European capitalism significantly increased its demand on a foreign workforce in the 1960s. France made several agreements with post-independence Algeria to encourage the continuation or arrival of those who were now foreigners in France. Between 1955 and 1966, West Germany made agreements with Turkey, Tunisia, Yugoslavia and southern European countries to encourage the massive arrival of Gastarbeiter (guest workers). In one way or another, Switzerland, Britain, Luxembourg and Belgium developed similar policies. In 1954 Sweden made an agreement with the other Nordic countries for a Nordic common market for employment, making possible in particular an increased call on Finnish workers.
Europe and equal rights for immigrants 117 The economic crisis had complex consequences on bourgeois policies concerning immigrant workers. Almost all the industrialized countries which had made substantial use foreign workers practically closed their frontiers. Thus the 1971 Immigration Act in Britain put citizens from the former British empire, the Commonwealth, on the same footing as other foreigners as regards their right to residence in Britain. France, West German and Sweden took similar decisions around the same time, almost totally blocking the arrival of new workers. The paradoxical effect of these decisions to close frontiers was the geographic and familial stabilization of the foreign workers who had arrived in the 1960s. A mutation took place. These workers, previously mobile, living alone in their hostels, were forced by these policies to rule out a return to their country of origin, to bring over their families or to marry in the country. Thus, even though all governments tried to slow down this phenomenon, to block it by unpleasant laws, the total foreign population has continued to grow since the 1970s, and in 1986 young people under 25 represented 45% of the so-called foreign population of the nine main countries for immigration in Europe, which testifies to the growth of family immigration.
With this situation, two problems are posed for capitalism. How can this section of the working class and particularly its young descendants be maintained in a precarious situation? And how can a mobile section of the work force, which is always necessary even in time of crisis be kept available?
To answer the second question, other than the general precarization of labour contracts, in particular for women and young people, an illegal immigration has developed which has allowed the extension of an informal sector in all the industrial countries, and which has particularly affected Italy, the Spanish state and Greece in the last few years.
To answer the first question, other than the limits on family regroupment there has been the development of a whole arsenal of repressive laws (the Loi Gol in Belgium, Loi Pasqua in France and the Immigration Act in Britain) whose aim is to destabilize, to make the foreign population's situation insecure and precarious and remaining marginalized. The development of this repressive arsenal goes alongside the development of racist, reactionary movements around the traditional nuclei of fascist groupuscules.
The crisis of leadership of the workers' movement, the inability to organize the working class's fightback against austerity policies and unemployment, have allowed the continuation of a stepped-up offensive of reactionary policies and the development of new ultra-reactionary, populist parties, formed on the basis of fascist nuclei, as is the case in France, Denmark, or Flanders.
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This general policy of European capitalists is applied in quite different national situations.
In France, an old colonial country, the bourgeoisie has traditionally used immigration to compensate for the lack of labour power and the demographic deficit. The French laws have always been designed to facilitate, and even force, a quite rapid assimilation of foreigners remaining on French soil, particularly for enrolment in the army. Entire generations, particularly of Italians, Polish, Belgians and Spanish, have been absorbed into this melting pot since the end of the last century.
North African immigration, coming from former colonies, was however considered as temporary in the framework of a permanent exchange with the North African countries. In the 1980s, confronted with the second generation (1.5 million youth under 25 with foreign-born parents), the French bourgeoisie reacted either by rejection or with the desire of "republican" assimilation to the French nation and its traditional values. This relationship to immigration undoubtedly explains why France has traditionally had an open policy on naturalizations but remained until recently very reticent on everything concerning civic rights for foreigners. For any recognition of cultural or linguistic differences, foreigners find themselves considered by the French state on the same level as minorities.
This strictness, coupled with assimilationism, has created a strong identity movement, particularly among young people born in France of Algerian or Moroccan families, who consider that they do not have to prove anything to justify their place in France and envisage with difficulty their elders' denial of their identity. It has been twenty years since the Algerian war of liberation. This phenomenon was moreover totally misunderstood by the old immigrant organizations oriented towards the countries of origin and reflecting their debates.
West Germany is today in a still more blocked situation. Refusing to consider it as a country of immigration, German capitalists since the 1960s have kept immigrants, particularly Turks, in isolation, in complete segregation. The laws on residence and nationality are undoubtedly the most restrictive in capitalist Europe. In the last few years, West Germany has also been confronted with the arrival of many Asian immigrants, mainly from Sri Lanka, against whom a strongly racist campaign has been developed.
At the same time, Turkish immigration is very strongly socially and politically structured. But there again, young foreigners are going to have an all the more important role as they represent the lively force of young people in West Germany, to such a point that the German bourgeoisie has just negotiat-
Europe and equal rights for immigrants 119 ed with Turkey to allow for the integration of a section of these young people, notably by the possibility of effecting military service in the FRG or Turkey.
Britain is in a quite particular situation. A section of the Black - a term including both West Indians and Asians from the former British empire — working class and youth experience segregation with that much more difficul ty as they have formally the same rights as other British citizens. However, even the young generations born and educated in Britain are segregated in ghetto areas, particularly around London, and only have access to underpaid jobs in services, restaurants or the garment industry. There again, the desire of the Labour Party leadership to block any class-struggle orientation against Thatcher has left the field open to a reactionary offensive of state racism. This is expressed directly within the Conservative Party, thus limiting the possible space for a party of the National Front type. European integration and segregation European integration, the introduction within the EEC of regulations facilitating the circulation of capital and persons, in other words the opening up of this region internally, is going to bring out in a more striking fashion the situation of precariousness and segregation experienced by the immigrant populations, particularly those from Africa and Asia, within capitalist Europe, and the desire for dignity and equal rights for the young people descended from those immigrants.
It is edifying to note that all the regulations concerning foreign immigration into the EEC under consideration aim, not to facilitate the circulation of immigrants, but to maintain segregation within each country and, above, all to make access almost impossible from outside the EEC.
With this aim, the TREVI group, bringing together the interior ministers of the industrial countries, has broadened the scope of its work from the question of terrorism to immigration control. It has already had an effect in establishing close collaboration between West Germany and Turkey concerning the repression of Turkish activists in the immigrant population.
Another aspect of the development of what some call "Fortress Europe" is the increasing pressure on Sweden, Turkey and Austria, bordering on the EEC, to bring their legislation into line with the EEC on the question of refusing refugees.
In conclusion, the last few years, in the heart of the capitalist crisis, have seen the development of a movement within the immigrant communities challenging their situation of super-exploitation and marginality. This has
been faced with governments which have refused to take into account the permanent establishment of 15 million men and women in Europe, particularly
This demand for equal rights has found a strong echo among young people, immigrant or not, as is shown by the development of mass anti-racist associations in several countries (France and Sweden notably) which have combined
What is at stake in the months and years to come in capitalist Europe is, in conjunction with the development of action against capitalist plans, the coordination and development of mobilizations bringing together immigrants, young people and the European workers' movement against segregation, for equal rights. The European elections and the approach of 1992 should be
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8 million from outside the EEC.
deies ді 15еЦs with the success of anti-apartheid mobilizations.
opportunities to take some steps forward in this direction.
rui
ANGELA KLEIN