Immigration: The Big Surprise

Immigration: The Big Surprise
Susan George
Outline for a talk
TNI Website, June 2006

Due to a certain lack of communication on the part of the organisers and at least one mistake of my own, I finally did not attend the Madrid Forum on Immigration. These are the notes for what I would have said.

First we see that the streets are not paved with gold. Then we notice that the streets are often not paved at all. Finally we discover that we will be doing the paving.
Adapted from a presentation by Justin Podur [immigrant to Canada of Indian origin] at the Z Magazine seminar in Wood's Hole, Massachusetts, June 2006].

The argument

The North has done everything in its power to make immigration the only viable solution for millions of people from the South. After years of policies making all other outcomes unlikely in the extreme, the same governments are wringing their hands about immigration. Their "solutions" do not look at root causes but are, as usual, confined to 'security' and police responses [return charters and holding pens in Europe, the wall going up on the US-Mexico border...]

Confronted with large numbers of desperate immigrants attempting to land on their shores or cross their borders, Northern governments feign surprise. This is about as convincing as pretending to be surprised when it snows in Norway in December or there's a heatwave in Madrid in August.

Who do they think they're fooling? These same governments and the international institutions they dominate have for decades done everything possible to force people to emigrate.

Mass migration should not be seen as a "normal" phenomenon. People who talk about "open borders" surely have their hearts in the right place, but perhaps do not understand what they are promoting, what they are encouraging people from the countries of emigration to accept. Not only must people from the South risk their lives; if they make it to the North, they must then start all over again under the worst possible conditions, usually living in clandestine, no-papers insecurity, facing prejudice, racism, all kinds of discrimination; often having to make their way not just in a new place but in a new language. They must leave their homes, their families, their childhood, their friends, their culture, their food and drink - in short, everything that makes life worth living for anyone. All this they must exchange for a mere chance at economic survival and if they are 'lucky', a rotten job. How many would accept all this if they were not absolutely forced to do so and had absolutely no alternative?

The North's immigration-inducing policies

1. Refusal of any political solution

During and after the decolonisation process, formerly colonised and/or dependent countries produced many highly intelligent and charismatic leaders [present at Bandung and beyond….]. These countries formed political groups like the Non-aligned Movement or the G-77 [which later numbered well over 100 countries]. From the 1970s in particular, the fought for a New International Economic Order; various UN documents like the "Brandt Report" seconded some of their demands. It looked for a time as if there might finally be a fairer distribution of power in the world. The North was obliged at least to pay lip-service to the demands coming out a a newly confident South.

In 1974 at the World Food Conference, Henry Kissinger [fresh from engineering the fascist coup in Chile] intoned that "Within a decade, no child will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day's bread..." Other conferences followed and the South thought, with some justification, that it was getting somewhere. Gradually, however, the North got the situation back under control. Other fascists besides Pinochet were set up and supported by their outside masters. In Jamaica in 1981, the newly elected Ronald Reagan put a stop to the process of New Economic Order and greater autonomy once and for all. As Michael Manley remarked at the time, "Reagan smiled and said No, smiled and said No - to everything".

2. The debt trap

The North could make its move because the silent debt crisis was already underway. Interest rates were spectacularly raised in 1981 by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, guaranteeing that indebted countries which had borrowed under the illusion they would be paying low, or even negative [because of inflation] interest rates suddenly found themselves saddled with real interest rates of 8-9 percent. The first victim of the ensuing debt crisis, in 1982, was Mexico; many others followed. A book by John Perkins called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man makes clear that pushing poor countries into deep and unpayable debt traps was conscious policy [as it seemed to many of us at the time]. The multilateral institutions, including the development banks, individual Northern governments and private banks all "pushed the money out the door" as then-World Bank President Robert McNamara so memorably demanded of his staff.

With debt came structural adjustment, put in place by the Bank and the IMF, working in close cooperation with the US treasury. The elements of SA have been frequently described: high interest rates, export orientation, privatisation, "cost-recovery" [fee-paying] including fees for schools and health care. All these caused chronic unemployment and hardship. The informal sector offered the only hope for millions. People who had never benefited from the borrowed money [which went to the middle and upper consuming classes, to white elephant projects, to arms spending or private accounts abroad] were obliged to pay it back with their blood, sweat and tears. In particular:

• Loans to oppressive regimes estimated at about $500 billion [including $22 billion to apartheid South Africa]
• Loans on the books to LIC [low income countries] $523 billion
• Africa's external debt has reached $300 billion [this includes N. Africa]. This sum is small by international standards but insuperable for Africa
• LDCs are paying back $100 million a day/ about $70.000 a minute
• Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] will take 100 years to achieve on current trend lines

Campaigns in the North like the Jubilee 2000 led to pressure on the creditor governments, yet from 1996 to 2005, only $30 b has been cancelled for only 19 countries. G-8 and other meetings tend to make triumphant announcements which turn out to be false on closer examination [for instance announcing cancellations which had already been announced - but people falsely believe they are additional].

At least 65 countries need complete debt cancellation in order to have enven a chance of meeting the MDG targets. This would cost the creditors about $80 billion/yr. We must note, however, that this is not necessarily in the interests of the governments of sending countries. Why not? Think what would happen if their immigrants massively came home, whereas they now send back at least $90 billion every year to their home countries. The local governments need these people to be outside, not at home. Don't expect them to discourage immigration - although some may cynically profit from cooperating with the North by supplying "holding pens" for people caught in the act of wanting to get out.

When debt cancellation does occur, the money is on the whole well-used, for schools, clinics, immunisation, access to water... [data from Tanzania, Uganda, Benin, Mozambique...]. One could insure that it always would be, by using schemes of democratic conditionality, requiring governments to associate their own people in the choice of priorities for spending the saved money.

Debt cancellation can be paid for. Much is owed to the IFIs [Bank, Fund]: the IMF could sell a good part of its gold without upsetting markets [the work of Sony Kapoor shows how]. The Bank could simply return to its capital levels of 1997, when it was flourishing. It could then write off the debt owed it by all the LDCs. The Bank has 400% more capital than it needs to keep the triple AAA rating for its bonds [all three of the best-known rating agencies gave its bonds AAA in 1997]. In addition, for the past 15 years, the Bank has made over a billion dollars a year in profits.

In exchange for cancellation, the North has a right to demand that the recipient governments be accountable to their own people [but not to outsiders] for spending the savings ["democratic conditionality"]. A small UN Agency could do the dispensing to insure transparency. Such a method is already in place for dispensing the international "airline ticket tax" proposed by Jacques Chirac and accepted so far by about 15 countries; the agency is called UNITAID.

Debt cancellation would create huge numbers of jobs in the LDCs as well as allowing for spending on health, education and other necessities. It would also contribute to job creation in the North, as countries began to be able to spend on other goods, rather than merely sterilising their incomes through interest payments.

3. Commodity prices

One of the most perverse impacts of debt is the export syndrome: many countries are forced to export the same small range of primary products with the result of lower prices for everyone. Commodity prices have been declining since the 1970s. Lower prices paradoxically encourage overproduction because countries strive to keep their income stable by exporting even more. Subsidies in the North, e.g. US cotton subsidies, contribute to ruining small farmers.

The share of commodities in world trade has declined from one-third to one-quarter in the past decade. Because of mass privatisation [a primary "Washington Consensus" policy] governments no longer manage trade or control quantities produced. 50 countries are dependent on 2-3 commodities; 39 are dependent on just one. The terms of trade are massively against raw material producers [this means they have to export 1/3 more today than in 1975-85 to buy the same quantity of manufactured goods].

Although China's purchases have improved the prices of primary products somewhat, particularly for metals [which are not produced by smallholders] the declines for farm products have been consistent, e.g. an average 5.1%/year [coffee]; 6.9%/year [cocoa] 3.4%/yr [cotton] since 1977. A Ugandan coffee farmer receives 14 cents a kilo for beans; the coffee in a UK supermarket eventually cost the consumer $26.40/kg. Tariffs are low on raw materials but high when these are processed into more elaborate goods. Poor countries cannot compete in processing their own commodities because they face high market barriers in the developed countries.

4. "Free Trade" ruins farmers

Regional trade agreements like NAFTA have decimated Mexican farmers as cheap industrially produced US corn has flooded Mexican markets. At least 350.000 peasants have lost their farms. Similar situations in Philippines, Central America, Africa. Even the World Bank has now admitted that Free Trade is not going to benefit the poor countries [perhaps a 1% increase in GDP over the next 10 years]. The WTO is now pretending that the current "Doha Development" Round is proposing real gains for the South. This is another lie: the North is only proposing to grant access for 97% of each southern country's goods and can easily put what that country can produce economically in the 3% remaining.

African cotton farmers in Mali or Benin are placed in direct competition with US cotton farmers. A Malian would need about 400 years of income to equal a single year's average subsidy paid to a US cotton farmer. When these farmers, and their families, are utterly ruined and see no solution but immigration, the North will again turn its back. Furthermore the WTO has ruled that even mildly preferential regimes like a set quantity of bananas that Europe will guarantee to purchase is WTO illegal. Europe does not have the right to give any privileges to ACP [Africa Caribbean Pacific] countries and must accept for example the bananas produced on plantations by US transnational corporations like Chiquita Brands, ex-United Fruit, in Ecuador or Central America.

The end of the Multi-Fibre agreement, announced years before but not planned for, has given China a huge advantage in textiles. It has had a large although certainly not life-threatening impact in Europe, but in the South, the effect has been devastating. Textile industries in places like Bangladesh, Cambodia or Central America are unlikely to recover. In Morocco, the industry has already shed hundreds of thousands of jobs. These unemployed workers are going back to kif [drug] production or - you guessed it - attempting to emigrate. Who can blame them.

5. Financial crises destroy jobs and livelihoods

The ILO has estimated that over 90 "serious financial crises" occurred between the beginning of the 1990s and 2002, with great loss of economic security, jobs, livelihoods and savings. The definition of "serious" is that the value of the currency dropped by at least 25% in a single month and that this drop was at least 10% more severe than that of the previous month. So we are talking about declines in the value of peoples' bank accounts, insurance, social security, etc. of at least 40% in two months.

Transnational corporate and financial globalisation has ushered in a new era of capitalism. Today, hundreds of millions of people are of literally no use to the system. They do not contribute to capitalist production and they are too poor to contribute to capitalist consumption. The most convenient solution for the system would be that they disappear [cf. my Lugano Report, Pluto Press 2000 and many other languages subsequently]. But disease, hunger, conflict, HIV and so on are not eliminating enough of these "superfluous" people to satisfy the needs of capital. They seriously inconvenience the system because instead of docilely getting out of the way and dropping off the map, they try to come to the North. The other name for the superfluous is Immigrants.

Northern militants for immigrants' rights must of course continue to fight for these, because these people are here, right now. But militants must also consider themselves responsible for their own governments' irresponsible policies and fight against those whose actions force so many to risk so much for so little.