As the UK polls consistently show that immigration is by far the highest concern of those voters who support exit from the EU, so the Exit campaign leaders continue to elevate the threat to Britain's borders from EU membership. (And pro EU leaders defensively insist they are only committed to allowing in a select few.) Voters are invited to consider the pressures on jobs and our health and social services as well as the wave of EU based terrorists that will come to Britain, if 'the power to control our borders' is not 'returned' to Britain. This is the 'sovereign and democratic right', above all others, that the UK - apparently - must preserve.
Naturally this latest wave of racist drivel is not based on any facts. The UK is a 22nd level nation in Europe, beneath Ireland, for the number of settled immigrants in 2015. Britain's stretched services come from the up to now consensual decision of its political leaders - to tax the rich and their assets at historically low levels. And, since 2001, all of the political and religious based bombings and murders so far organised in Britain have arisen among second, third and even fourth-level generations of UK based immigrant families; while Britain's leaders are plotting yet another provocative military intervention in Libya.
Attitudes across the West are hardening towards efforts by the poor and by the downtrodden of the world to find some hope and life by escaping from their countries of origin. Trump's wall (after Israel's wall, the Berlin wall, Bulgaria's wall, and the other 63 new walls that have been built since the Berlin Wall. See Quebec University; Elisabeth Vallet, August 2015) is the latest insane symbol from History's museum of human degradation. And of course it was ever thus.
No it was not - and is not. Even under the tutelage of the most ferocious capitalist system that the world has ever seen, the USA was built - and continues to be built despite regular efforts to 'stem the tide'- on the acceptance of millions of immigrants.
In 2015 the EU is supposed to have 'taken in' 1m refugees. In fact EU countries have so far agreed to settle only 292 000. Between 1900 and 1915 the USA agreed national status for a million immigrants - a year. And the vast and open US western hinterland which allowed big population expansion? In 1912 three quarters of New York citizens were migrants or children of migrants. In 2014 there were 42.4 million fresh immigrants in the US, 13% of the population. Adding the children of modern immigrants in the US brings the total up to 26% of the US's population. The majority of immigrant families live first in California, next in New York State. After the 28% of modern immigrants of Mexican heritage, most families come from India, followed by the Chinese. In 2014 over 2 million immigrants were from Eastern Europe, and the big majority of immigrants and asylum seekers overall were non English speaking. In other words the USA is still bringing in migrant labour that lives and works mainly in established cities.
In April 2016 the US had 35 habitants per square kilometre and a total population of 324m. In the same month, in the same year, the EU had 33 habitants per square kilometre and 739m inhabitants.
The traditional US rulers act in this way because their enormous home market requires waves of the cheapest labour to keep domestic wage levels low (and profits high) by maintaining a constant and cut throat competition for jobs. Chancellor Merkel's touching humanity towards refugees comes directly from the same source and has exactly the same rational - on an EU wide basis. The material origin of official labour movement organisation opposition to immigration, particularly in the US and in Britain, has also come from that source. The labour movement politics of anti-immigration are a clear sign of the remnants of the old 'aristocracy of labour' that defended imperial preference, fought 'dilution' by women workers and saw unions as a means of upholding a monopoly of a certain craft and a means to maintain privilege in the general workforce.
Today in both the UK and the US while the price of labour is a factor for the poorest workers, access to services has also become a competition - courtesy of austerity.
The latest mass movements of people from the mid Asia, the Near East, and from northern Africa are testing the West's standing politics and economics to distraction. The deep crisis of domestic western capitalism in both the US and the EU has meant that low wage competition domestically is only required in some very specific and narrow directions; in agriculture, in some services and for criminal purposes, outside the regulated market. Huge, riotous and poisonous movements blossom in the fetid air of declining capitalism, poverty and alienation that has been created by the destruction of the old working class organisations. Television and the Internet show the faces of hundreds of crouching refugees, rescued from the sea, staring at the makeshift camp around them, glancing at the uncomfortable soldiers that stand in the doorways.
Europeans, indeed the whole world has seen pictures and heard of movements like this before.
The left (and there is a new left; 27000 attended Bernie Sanders New York rally, huge French demonstrations against austerity have restarted and at least 150000 marched through London on 16 April) links itself across the whole of the West and beyond. It understands that only the most profound, international answers, that drive into the decrepit political and economic system, into its very decaying heart, can deal with the problems of the new world.
A minimum wage for all labour, worldwide. The right of all to live where they wish. Huge new housing and welfare programmes. Marshal plans created to deal with destruction and to encourage peace. Taking and using the $30 trillion from the tax havens to plan and develop the world's needs in energy, in health and in infrastructure. It is all possible. More importantly it is all necessary.
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