The centrality of political arguments opposing immigration depends upon ignoring how modern capitalism uses exploited and segregated labour to avoid investment and labour costs, argues Kevin Crane 

For decades, British political discussion and policy about immigration have been a horrible cycle of racist propaganda, false claims and disingenuous actions. Keir Starmer’s outbursts on the issue have been shocking in how much they resemble the language of the far right, but they are also a rhetorical shift in other ways. This is the first time we have heard a Labour prime minister explicitly talk about reducing legal migration, and it is a big break from the way politicians normally seek to both manage and use the issue for their own purposes. It also presents a lot of questions on which, arguably, the left has failed to present its own answers for a long time. 

Anti-immigrationism is a very repetitive topic in our politics and media. The majority of the media rages against immigration constantly, with only a small number of left-of-centre voices disagreeing. Politicians routinely seek to obtain good publicity for themselves by positioning themselves as anti-immigration, often styling themselves as rebellious figures who are ‘speaking up’ or ‘starting a debate’, as if it weren’t one of the most frequently discussed topics. The quality of this debate is always terrible: new arrivals are constantly blamed for things – without evidence being provided – that are caused by the many decades of neoliberalism, such as crumbling public services and high housing costs. 

Successive governments and oppositions, whichever of those positions Labour and Tories have happened to find themselves in, have almost always attempted to position themselves as being the keenest on border controls and their opponents as being most pro-immigration. Labour did not do this during Corbyn’s leadership, but that was a considerable blip (albeit one that does leave some scope for embarrassment for some Labour figures now, like Starmer himself). 

A strange gap between ideology and policy 

A person who just read the official discourse about immigration in Britain – and did know anything else – could be forgiven for assuming that it is a country with a really restrictive and conservative visa application system and very low numbers of people ever being allowed to come and live in the country and newcomers finding it very difficult to settle in. Japan is very much like this, in fact. Such person would probably then be a bit surprised to discover that the real Britain isn’t actually quite like that. Immigration to Britain has been consistently much higher than Japan for a long time. For most of that time, we were under a firmly right-wing Tory government that, among other things, implemented Britain’s exit from the European Union and that was supposedly firmly opposed to any form of free movement across borders. 

The data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that immigration – measured in absolute numbers of individuals settling in the country – to Britain in a twelve-month period in the years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic averaged at 755 thousand, trending upward to 815 thousand when the virus hit. Immigration dropped during the pandemic to an average of under 700 thousand but then climbed sharply as lockdowns ended.  Since then, it has been an average of 1.18 million per year, peaking at 1.3 at the end of 2023 and trending very slightly down since then. Britain’s population has risen from 65.1 million to 68.3 million in the past ten years (again, almost exclusively under very right-wing Tory governments), so these numbers aren’t nothing: birth rates are a bit lower than the “replacement rate”, so the population would drift downward otherwise. 

Why is there such a huge contradiction between a media/political culture that sees immigration as so entirely negative, and the living reality of immigration being fairly commonplace? It does not appear rational. The ONS is able to confirm that the vast majority of arrivals to Britain are doing so with lawful visas, and either work, study or are the immediate family member of someone who is a worker or student in Britain. 

By contrast, the refugees who are so frequently subjected to racist scapegoating and propaganda, are actually far smaller in number than you would expect from the way journalists and politicians talk about them. Prior to Covid, the ONS reported that around 0.45% of immigrating people were refugees as opposed to visa-holders. There was a surge in refugees post-COVID, driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Britan making asylum offers to large numbers of Ukrainian civilians as many Western countries did. Nevertheless, even if the government could ‘stop the small boats’ – leaving aside the serious humanitarian questions that raises – it would not make a difference of quality to immigration as a whole. 

The country’s institutions are, at the very least, taking in people from overseas without much problem, indeed it could be argued that they are relying on them coming. However, if that’s the case, why do the institutions not make a positive argument for high immigration? And what are the extremely negative views of immigrants even built upon if most of them are ‘integrating’ so well that the numbers of them doing so barely even dropped that much during Covid and have surged since? 

The answer to these questions is an elaborate, and very nasty, system of extreme exploitation that has relied on deepening and leveraging inequalities in both British society and the wider world. This system is deeply embedded in how multiple levels of both the private and public sectors have structured themselves over a period of decades, and whether it is the political right, or (we would hope) the left that gets to change these institutions. Either way, change will not be accomplished without considerable social conflict. 

The globalised economy is not just products 

It is often easier for us to talk about the story of globalisation in terms of the movement of products than of people, but both are important. Pre-globalisation, during the post-war boom, immigration served a very direct and obvious purpose: British manufacturing was expanding, and capitalists could not recruit enough workers from the resident population, so they sought workers from the declining British Empire. By the early twenty-first century, things were really quite different. 

De-industrialisation and neoliberalism meant that factories of all kinds had declined, leading to some parts of the country becoming very depressed economically and a growth of inequality both between regions of the country, and within those parts of the country where the new ‘knowledge economy’ and massive financialisation were creating wealth. Incidentally, immigration played a very direct role in contributing to the growth of the so-called knowledge economy, because overseas students became a major source of cash for British universities. However, foreign students are almost never mentioned in any discussion of migration numbers, because they do not suit any establishment narrative. 

Jobs making consumer goods were declining and being replaced with lower-waged and mostly non-union-organised jobs doing logistics or customer service. Public services were widely privatised, particularly in the care sector, which is under local government control and historically a low political priority. This was an opportunity to employ workers in that field on much diminished terms and conditions. Throughout both the private and public sectors, the outsourcing of ‘support work’ flourished, so a small number of massive service companies like Serco and Rentokil Initial would supply workers for jobs like cleaning to other businesses. The effect of all these things was to seriously depress wages in manual jobs, even while the economy was growing and businesses were making profits. 

The experience of this for resident workers was unequal, just as the economic benefits of the new arrangements were. If you were a university-educated white-collar worker, you could experience this period almost exclusively as one of rising living standards and potentially exciting new prospects via free movement. Blue-collar workers in more provincial areas, however, found the situation more challenging, and did not normally have anything like the scope to find work opportunities in other countries. This formed the material basis to very different cultural feelings about borders and migration that would become especially clear in the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. 

Is there a word for ‘apartness’? 

For many businesses, employing immigrants as workers came to be their entire commercial strategy, and this became even more the case when the EU expanded in 2004, and pools of potential recruits expanded beyond the post-imperial ‘Commonwealth’ to states that had been in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Immigrant workers could be paid wages which resident workers wouldn’t regard as high enough or – more accurately, really – couldn’t accept as high enough because this was also the period in which housing costs really began to spiral upwards. Immigrant workers could also be disciplined and deployed in ways that would have been viewed as totally unacceptable or utterly absurd by resident workers: such as employing them strictly for picking season in the agricultural sector or housing them in what are essentially barracks next to workplaces (meat-processing plants and logistics warehouses being prevalent examples) that are otherwise very geographically far from towns and cities. 

Even where immigrant labour wasn’t segregated from the resident population by distance, there was an increasing sense that it is socially distant. As long ago as 2009, I remember the socialist leader of the RMT trade union, Bob Crow, at a speech to promote a unionisation drive of train cleaners, telling the crowd that it was especially absurd to him that cleaners were now viewed as some sort of separate group from the organised workforce because he had been a train cleaner. It was the normal entry-level position for a teenager getting a job with London Underground, in the days before outsourcing, and in Crow’s case, a starting point for him to advance in engineering before he became a full-time union official. Few cleaners would be following any such progression now. This was a really strong example of how the role of the service companies was much more sinister than just cutting costs; it was to foster divisions between workers, and this was a really prevalent theme of how immigration worked in neoliberalism. 

Division is also the explanation for the apparent contradiction between the British establishment’s declared ideological opposition to immigration and its commitment to high immigration in practice. The highly exploitative way in which capitalists use immigrant workers relies on them being separated from resident workers. For many people in Britain, in fact, they are kept to a large extent out of sight and out of mind: ghettoised into parts of the economy few resident people would ever directly work in, doing hard manual work. To ensure these workers stay hidden from widespread public awareness, the media-political establishment has been relying on a cheap trick: exclusively talking about immigration in the context of refugees, even though refugees are an extremely small proportion of actual immigrants.  

When the newspapers or the BBC discuss immigration, it will nearly always be a story about migrant camps, or asylum-seeker hotels, or small boats, all of these framed as people to be afraid of and to view as fundamentally other from yourself. The image of a refugee that is pushed for this purpose is consequently always a person from a Muslim-majority country, leading a way of life that is explicitly made to seem as un-British as possible: the contrast with the way Ukrainian refugees were presented – because they formed a key part of NATO’s messaging about military support for Ukraine – was absolutely stark and very revealing of the racialised attitudes at the heart of the state and mainstream media. 

How ‘British’ are they actually going to make British jobs, exactly? 

A supply of labour from overseas got deeply entrenched into how capitalists expected to be able to make business decisions in Britain, and it didn’t just mean keeping wages down. A lot of the newcomers, and this was particularly true of Eastern Europeans, were not just young and enthusiastic, but had also been educated and trained by relatively robust public sectors in their own countries during the ‘communist’ era. This was taken by capitalists and policymakers in this part of the world as a further reason to treat investment in our care and education systems as an unnecessary overhead. That mindset got even more entrenched as austerity set in in the 2010s. Just as our social elites do not protect our food infrastructure because they arrogantly imagine that they will always be able to import food, they arrogantly fail to invest in skills and training because they assume that the quality of workforce they need will always just turn up to work in Britain. 

We’ve already seen what happened when this supply of bargain labour gets disturbed. In the early months of 2021, in the wake of both Brexit and Covid, the media was suddenly flooded with a very unusual thing: news stories about there not being enough immigration. To be more specific, the food sector was complaining that it could not recruit seasonal workers to pick fruit or work in meat-packing factories. When then-prime minister Boris Johnson queried why they didn’t just employ British residents to do it, since he just assumed that everyone thinks immigration is bad, several shrill statements about British workers being ‘too lazy’ to employ appeared, and there were reports that resident workers would ‘just up and leave’ whenever someone tried to recruit them for such industry. Johnson ultimately relented and allowed the issuing of visas to bring in the personnel. The whole controversy was intentionally forgotten about by the press soon enough, but it really was a very interesting incident, particularly given the current unhinged stance of Keir Starmer’s government. 

During the previous Labour government sixteen years ago, Gordon Brown flirted with a bit of economic nationalism and racism by promising ‘There will be British jobs for British workers!’. It was a source of embarrassment for him almost straight away when his administration was rocked by wildcat strikes of North Sea oilrig workers against their potential replacement by cheaper foreign staff, who threw his own slogan back at him. Brown’s words had been exposed as hollow because, ultimately, as a neoliberal politician, he was never actually going to enforce some sort of protectionist employment policy against the will of big business. That controversy, however, is as nothing compared to what Starmer may be letting himself in for. 

Despite the many, many things I could criticise Gordon Brown for, I don’t think we could call him a stupid man, or a bigot. Keir Starmer, on the other hand, is a blithering idiot heavily motivated by spite and prejudice of all kinds. Enraged by Labour’s heavy defeat in the local elections at the hands of the far-right Reform UK, the current prime minister is using rhetoric that we would have associated with the neo-Nazis of the British National Party in Brown’s time. He tells us that Britain was running an ‘open borders experiment’, which is a straight lie: immigration was high as a design feature of the economic model, not as some sort of mistake or accident. He also claimed that the ‘the damage it has done to our country is incalculable.’ This is really extreme rhetoric that It will be difficult for him, or anyone, to walk back from, which is developing into an ideological crisis for the Labour Party and its base in liberal British society. 

If Johnson couldn’t get through a single year without letting the food sector recruit foreign workers, how does Starmer think he is going to remove immigrant labour permanently from practically the entire economy? The British population is ageing, and it’s getting increasingly unwell due to cuts to public services and rising poverty. There are huge gaps in massive areas of skilled work: Britain has not been training or giving experience to new generations of workers in health care, or construction, or engineering, to name but a few. The reliance on cheap labour in areas like food production and logistics has allowed businesses to get away with shocking under-investment. It would take money, time and skills that aren’t currently there to train staff, automate processes and revitalise our crumbling transport infrastructure to solve all this. We are being asked to entertain a fantasy of somehow doing South Korean-level industrial production, with North Korean border policies, all while retaining the financial rules of an offshore tax haven. 

This ‘We back British Workers’ pose will not work as policy, because British capitalism cannot and will not adjust to it. The Daily Telegraph has already begun to run ‘lazy British worker’ articles to this effect. The likelihood is that what we will get in practice is a brutal theatre of Trump-like attacks on immigrants, while the exploitative use of their labour continues in the shadows, becoming even more squalid as it is forced into the network of the sinister free-trade zones and free ports that are being established around the country. The race riots last summer may, unfortunately, be a hint of just how cruel the treatment of immigrants is going to be: officially the fascist far right has gotten the blame for those riots – with hundreds of their agitators being jailed – but the reality is that they were a consequence of a state project of demonisation and proved that the state can generate consent for brutality through propaganda. 

There certainly isn’t going to be some general increase in wages as a result of such a policy, since capitalists simply are simply going to do less business in preference to paying out for more expensive labour. Nor would there be any decrease in housing costs in regions of the country which aren’t already very economically depressed. 

One thing Resident workers will absolutely not benefit from is a decrease in overseas students, who are significant vector of cash into regional economies around universities. Reducing foreign student numbers is simply going to put even more higher education facilities at risk of closure, and thousands of jobs will go both directly and indirectly wherever one does. This will be catastrophic for many smaller British cities were a university is a tent-pole employer and deepen those severe regional inequalities that have become a massive source of political tension in the country. 

Unfortunately, this is also a really challenging time for the socialist left. A lot of the strategies we inherited from the late twentieth century don’t quite work as they did before: it was one thing to break down the barriers of racism from within large workplaces where workers were thrust together. It’s a different challenge when a lot of the racism is against workers who are ghettoised away from mainstream society. We also need to avoid simply repeating the claims of liberal figures, whose instinct will be to simply try and argue that because, in an internationalist (but also rather abstract) view, immigration and free movement should be positive things, that there is no “real” problem and we should defend the status quo. 

Socialists cannot argue that border controls could possibly be fair and non-racist in a world shaped by imperialism and capitalism, but we can also not accomplish a true freedom of movement in that world. The only way to fight for actual justice is confront organised exploitation itself, for which we need a politics that breaks from neoliberalism to the left, not to the right as Labour is currently claiming to do.