No Human Being Is Illegal

I just posted something on Irish Indymedia. The article is here, my comments are below. One thing I forgot to mention is that immigrants without documents are going to come here no matter what, especially until the conditions that exist in many countries improve, and that is something which European/European-descended countries could contribute to (I'm not saying those countries are totally responsible, but to a large degree they are). Also, what I say about this is primarily about immigrants from majority non-white countries, but even though the Indymedia.ie article mentions Italian workers in the UK, my comments are still fairly universal, even when Italian workers in the UK are being talked about, there's still some problems there- even if it's not racist for British people to complain about Italians, that sort of thing still fuels racism in general.

Anyway, below are the comments I made.

SWP= Socialist Workers Party, Ireland and the UK (they're sister orgs, if not closer to being the same organization)
BNP= British National Party, basically fascists
The author of the original is with the Socialist Party of Ireland

"I'll be honest, I'm open-minded, through lack of information, about how quickly and to what degree the tone of the strike was changed, and therefore how wrong McCann and Boyd Barrett are. Also, although I'm fairly fond of McCann, even with what he says in recent years about SF and the GFA, in general I'm not an SWP supporter, and to whatever degree I am, that's largely because of McCann.

But in one of the comments the article's author DOES say it was a response to the use of immigrant labor, although he specifies how employers were using that labour to affect wages. I'll be honest, I'm not sure about Britain or Ireland, but in America, as far as I can tell, undocumented and probably to a very small degree documented, workers can have that effect, but that can be negated through union solidarity and anti-racism. As far as the undocumented, if the employer can threaten you with Immigration, you'll shut up about your wages, and if you help organize, Immigration will be called- I'm not sure how often that happens, but it does. More generally, for both documented and undocuemented, the employers would probably have less luck driving down wages if the immigrants had more support in public- if there were more people saying that immigrants should be welcomed and paid what native-born workers are paid for doing the same job, and then put preassure on bosses identified as not doing that. This talk of "British jobs for British workers" does not have the appropriate effect.

Also, even if the BNP were run off, that talk is what the BNP is saying and is more or less racist and some of workers then get the idea that there might be something to what the BNP says. If this anti-immigrant stuff fuels racism during tough times, some of the people affected by it who become racist will not abandon their racism when things improve, just one more reason to not say that stuff. It's not clear if the article author is admitting and defending that it was about immigrants or not. If it's about immigrants at all, that's bad. More generally, the racism it fuels weakens the labor movement. So, overall, it really is bad for labor to be anti-immigrant. And for those of us who are internationalists, we should welcome immigrants. My advice to people who still want fewer immigrants coming to their country- work to change the behavior of your government and the corproations based in your country in other parts of the world so there will be fewer things like intense poverty and/or persecution driving people out of their countries to yours. And doing things which weaken the labor movement make it less likely that that will happen. (and if your country is perfect on this, it's still a bad idea to bash immigrants, and you can probably do things to address the behavior of other governments and corporations) (some of this is not aimed at more than a small number of Indy readers, but I like to practice refuting racist shit)

As far as McCann and Boyd Barrett saying the same thing, I imagine that's a reference to the mention in the article about them calling for local workers to get jobs. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they mean Cork jobs for Cork people, Galways jobs for Galway people, which seems significantly off for socialists but not racist (assuming their statement is not being totally mis-represented). I'd be very surprised if they meant Irish jobs for Irish workers.

I think that's it.

Tom"

UPDATE 4/4/09 To some degree, in wierd ways, some anti-immigrant people are already sort of saying the right things- probably about 1/2 are anti-NAFTA, but they're not calling for globalization to be renegoatiated to weaken corporations and they're not calling for American corporations to behave better abroad and they rarely say the right things about American foreign policy.