End of the election offers no respite for migrants

Dave Landau writes.

You could be forgiven for thinking that after the election the great anti-migrant furore would retreat. No. Instead we can expect an increasing campaign of legislation and rhetoric against migrants.

The overall Tory majority means that the referendum campaign and the negotiations with the EU are dominating the political landscape, with immigration at the centre of these. Further, the fact that UKIP got the third largest share of the vote – about 12%, 4 million votes – means that all the mainstream parties will be working on winning votes back, not by challenging UKIP’s ideas, but by appeasing them. A further trigger for this has come from the latest immigration statistics which show that net migration has nearly doubled since last year.

The Tories cannot put a cap on immigration from the EU without breaking the freedom of movement principles. They are trying to get around this by making Britain an undesirable place by changes in benefit rules. This will still require negotiation but governments of some other countries will be happy to be able to make the same changes and might block with Cameron.

It is important to understand that the EU’s version of ‘freedom of movement’ is itself racist. This freedom only applies to EU citizens and the EU was making restrictions within that towards Romanians and Bulgarians, although they have now been lifted. At the same time the EU is draconian in its opposition to migration from outside the EU. The extreme result of this has been the drownings in the Mediterranean and the Aegean Seas that have been going on for decades and have got worse as anti-migrant patrols by individual member states or by the pan-European Frontex have forced migrants to take more and more perilous routes.

This EU racism is also reflected in the ‘Dublin agreement’, which makes asylum seekers make their application to their first country of entry into Europe. This means that the northern European states (including the UK) can deport people seeking asylum to southern states such as Italy and Greece. Farage picked up on this, arguing that the mainstream parties are happy with EU migrants but not others.

People question whether opposition to EU migrants is racist as they are usually white Europeans. Well, we can get into semantic arguments about the difference between xenophobia and racism but the same motifs are used – ‘coming over here with a different way of life, different languages, religions, taking our jobs, criminals…’ Also telling is that particular groups are singled out for demonisation who in turn stand as symbols for all European migrants. This is clearly the case in terms of anti-Roma/Gypsy racism, which is prevalent both here and in the countries in Eastern Europe where the Roma people are coming from, to flee discrimination and attacks.

Cameron announced that they will be confiscating money earned by ‘illegal immigrants’. Here is an irony – all the parties, even UKIP, have included a pseudo-compassionate argument in their anti-migrant armoury, saying that they want to stop the exploitation of ‘illegal immigrants’. So the state will take the pittance these super-exploited people have managed to earn. Not much compassion for the exploited after all! Surprised?



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