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The New Untouchables
Immigration is seen as a serious problem by the vast majority of people. A Professor of Development Studies at London University, Nigel Harris argues that if the West is to advance as its people age, and if the poor of the world are ever to gain, governments will have to ensure the freedom of people to come and go as they choose. Harris concludes that migration is a necessary response to changes in the world economy.
272 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1995
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May 12, 2012
This is a classic example of a book so ahead of its time when it was published in 1995 that it’s central arguments seem other-worldly and quite utopian. Harris makes the case that controls on immigration run counter to the interests of a modern working class which is bound to struggle for its subsistence in a world of thoroughly globalised world capitalism. If there ever was a case for placing limits on people crossing frontiers it was limited to the time when the historical conjuncture of capitalism’s development allowed for a close coincidence between the interests of the national state and the then dominant form of capitalist business enterprise. This had allowed working class struggle to obtain concessions in the form of welfare policy from the political elites, encouraging the belief class interests could be advanced in purely national contexts.
For Harris the full life span of this alignment of state and economic interests had ended by the commencement of the final quarter of the 20th century. The 1970s decade of crisis, precipitated by the OPEC oil shocks of 1973, made it clear that the inescapable vulnerability of firms to the conditions of international markets meant that they could no longer shelter behind the increasingly ineffective protection of national states for their survival. Their commitment to an existence on the terms and conditions set by global markets was now essential if they were to acquire resilience to the turbulence of the new phase of the internationalism of capital.
Paradoxically though, at exactly the point when capitalism was slipping loose from the embrace of the national state, states chose this moment to embark on a new phase of immigration control. The ‘immigration stop’ policies that rolled over Europe during period marked the deepening rationalisation of employment practices which the energy crisis required of them. The old ‘Fordist’ use of armies of un- and semi-skilled workers tied to assembly-line discipline gave way to slimmed down operations with greater use of automated systems in the developed heartlands of capitalism. It was these mass employment policies which had driven the demand for migration in the post war period and their reversal meant that the firms which operated in the old industrialised nations could report to the political classes that they no longer needed migrant workers.
But the rationalisation of mass employment practices was not the only thing going on with the capitalist business model at this time. Harris devotes pages to explaining the significance of the ‘off-shoring’ of business operations which swept across the world at this time. Whole lines of manufacture were switched to Asian, and in the case of the US, Latin American countries, with their super-abundances of exploitable manual labour ready to be drawn into production processes built for the needs of western business. The communications revolution which allowed instantaneous real-time contact between line-managements across the globe allowed a level of integration of operations which covered not just manufacturing, but through the establishment of global call-centres and business hubs, the more intelligence-driven sides of customer service and retailing.
Harris comments that the effect of these developments has been to confuse the very idea of who is and isn’t a national worker. The production processes which generate the profits of a firm which is branded in conventional terms as ‘British’ are as likely to depend on the exploitation of proletarians in far-off lands as on its native heath. The labour processes which produce the surplus value on which capitalist firms depend for their profits have become as routinely internationalised as the global business operation itself.
At this point, given the time period this book was being written, Harris is obliged to project into the future to consider the tensions likely to arise from an economic system in which the factors of goods, services and capital are allowed to freely cross frontiers, but labour is restricted. He argues that the effect of confining workers to the countries of their citizenship will limit their options to provide for their welfare and support at the point when this is jeopardised by dislocations caused by the movements of capital. But further than that, he explains how workers who depend on services produced in their countries of their residence to support their standard of life, such as health and social care, will see these eroded if immigration controls prevent the arrival of workers who are prepared to do jobs in these sectors at rates compatible with the state’s capacity to provide the. The full radical implications of this argument is that, rather than migration threatening the basic living standards of the ‘native’ working class, is actually essential to maintaining it. The continued ability of states to support welfare programmes and a regime of social benefits requires inputs of labour and skills at costs which can be borne by a revenue system based on taxation.
In 1995 this looked like a proposition propounded on the basis of a theory which had yet to be tested by practice. Immigration controls had remained in place across the whole of the 1980s and their negative consequences, if any, had not yet been read into cutbacks in the quality of the public services of the level of social insurance working class families received from a benefits regime which subsidised them in times of ill-health or unemployment. Moreover, a ‘New’ Labour government lay just on the horizon – in many parts of the rest of the developed world, ‘third way’ administrations – which offered the assurance that its clever tactics of technocratic administration would permit demand to be managed in global markets without the disruptions of large-scale, short-term, movements of production factors.
But it was precisely in all these areas of governance which revealed, by the mid-00s, that the paradoxes and tensions that had been nurtured within the system for a quarter of a century were finally bubbling to the surface. Modern capitalism in its developed heartlands had not squeezed out its demand for migrant labour, but merely dammed it off for a period. Pressure had built up on these retaining structures, first of all forcing open cracks to allow in streams, but eventually more forceful gushes as workers whose life circumstances had been disrupted by global capital markets, sought re-balancing measure in the realm of global labour markets.
In his final chapter Harris speculates that this is a situation which would require new strategies from labour if it is to resume its forward march under the conditions of modern capitalism. The state is largely absent from this perspective, as he instead considers what concessions might be obtained directly from firms which do their business on a global scale. For victories to be won in this direction, the historical structures which the working class has used to advance its interests – primarily the trades unions –will have to adjust their outlooks to move from national state dependency towards global action across the frontiers of the world.
It s a bold vision which, regrettably, has not come to pass in any significant form in the 12 years since the book was published. That might be the fate of any book written ahead of its time – the years have to pass before its readers cotton on to the fact that they what they were baffled and confused by at the time, was all along a roadmap of the future.
For Harris the full life span of this alignment of state and economic interests had ended by the commencement of the final quarter of the 20th century. The 1970s decade of crisis, precipitated by the OPEC oil shocks of 1973, made it clear that the inescapable vulnerability of firms to the conditions of international markets meant that they could no longer shelter behind the increasingly ineffective protection of national states for their survival. Their commitment to an existence on the terms and conditions set by global markets was now essential if they were to acquire resilience to the turbulence of the new phase of the internationalism of capital.
Paradoxically though, at exactly the point when capitalism was slipping loose from the embrace of the national state, states chose this moment to embark on a new phase of immigration control. The ‘immigration stop’ policies that rolled over Europe during period marked the deepening rationalisation of employment practices which the energy crisis required of them. The old ‘Fordist’ use of armies of un- and semi-skilled workers tied to assembly-line discipline gave way to slimmed down operations with greater use of automated systems in the developed heartlands of capitalism. It was these mass employment policies which had driven the demand for migration in the post war period and their reversal meant that the firms which operated in the old industrialised nations could report to the political classes that they no longer needed migrant workers.
But the rationalisation of mass employment practices was not the only thing going on with the capitalist business model at this time. Harris devotes pages to explaining the significance of the ‘off-shoring’ of business operations which swept across the world at this time. Whole lines of manufacture were switched to Asian, and in the case of the US, Latin American countries, with their super-abundances of exploitable manual labour ready to be drawn into production processes built for the needs of western business. The communications revolution which allowed instantaneous real-time contact between line-managements across the globe allowed a level of integration of operations which covered not just manufacturing, but through the establishment of global call-centres and business hubs, the more intelligence-driven sides of customer service and retailing.
Harris comments that the effect of these developments has been to confuse the very idea of who is and isn’t a national worker. The production processes which generate the profits of a firm which is branded in conventional terms as ‘British’ are as likely to depend on the exploitation of proletarians in far-off lands as on its native heath. The labour processes which produce the surplus value on which capitalist firms depend for their profits have become as routinely internationalised as the global business operation itself.
At this point, given the time period this book was being written, Harris is obliged to project into the future to consider the tensions likely to arise from an economic system in which the factors of goods, services and capital are allowed to freely cross frontiers, but labour is restricted. He argues that the effect of confining workers to the countries of their citizenship will limit their options to provide for their welfare and support at the point when this is jeopardised by dislocations caused by the movements of capital. But further than that, he explains how workers who depend on services produced in their countries of their residence to support their standard of life, such as health and social care, will see these eroded if immigration controls prevent the arrival of workers who are prepared to do jobs in these sectors at rates compatible with the state’s capacity to provide the. The full radical implications of this argument is that, rather than migration threatening the basic living standards of the ‘native’ working class, is actually essential to maintaining it. The continued ability of states to support welfare programmes and a regime of social benefits requires inputs of labour and skills at costs which can be borne by a revenue system based on taxation.
In 1995 this looked like a proposition propounded on the basis of a theory which had yet to be tested by practice. Immigration controls had remained in place across the whole of the 1980s and their negative consequences, if any, had not yet been read into cutbacks in the quality of the public services of the level of social insurance working class families received from a benefits regime which subsidised them in times of ill-health or unemployment. Moreover, a ‘New’ Labour government lay just on the horizon – in many parts of the rest of the developed world, ‘third way’ administrations – which offered the assurance that its clever tactics of technocratic administration would permit demand to be managed in global markets without the disruptions of large-scale, short-term, movements of production factors.
But it was precisely in all these areas of governance which revealed, by the mid-00s, that the paradoxes and tensions that had been nurtured within the system for a quarter of a century were finally bubbling to the surface. Modern capitalism in its developed heartlands had not squeezed out its demand for migrant labour, but merely dammed it off for a period. Pressure had built up on these retaining structures, first of all forcing open cracks to allow in streams, but eventually more forceful gushes as workers whose life circumstances had been disrupted by global capital markets, sought re-balancing measure in the realm of global labour markets.
In his final chapter Harris speculates that this is a situation which would require new strategies from labour if it is to resume its forward march under the conditions of modern capitalism. The state is largely absent from this perspective, as he instead considers what concessions might be obtained directly from firms which do their business on a global scale. For victories to be won in this direction, the historical structures which the working class has used to advance its interests – primarily the trades unions –will have to adjust their outlooks to move from national state dependency towards global action across the frontiers of the world.
It s a bold vision which, regrettably, has not come to pass in any significant form in the 12 years since the book was published. That might be the fate of any book written ahead of its time – the years have to pass before its readers cotton on to the fact that they what they were baffled and confused by at the time, was all along a roadmap of the future.
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