Capitalism and immigration
by Katherine Grzejszczak with Todd Gordon
Canadian capitalism is very dependent on cheap immigrant labour. This article ties the imperialist policies of countries like Canada to the international rise in global migration, and examines the Canadian state’s use of racist immigration policies to create an extremely vulnerable class of Third World migrant labour. It argues that activists must make anti-racist solidarity organizing with immigrants central to their work.
Whether in search of refuge or a more prosperous economic future, people are increasingly crossing state borders. According to the United Nations there are currently 175 million people, or three percent of the world population, who reside outside of their country of birth. The number of migrants has more than doubled since 1970. Nine percent (16 million) of all migrants are refugees. This means that 91 percent of migrants leave their countries for reasons other than immediate danger to themselves or their families. The predominant reason for this type of migration is to attempt to improve a person’s and/or their family’s economic situation, living conditions and life chances. In other words, the majority of migrants are economic migrants.
In response to the massive movement of people across borders, state governments around the world are devising new ways of controlling migrants. Given this phenomena it is little wonder that organizing around issues of immigration has become the focus of a new layer of activists, not only in Canada but in other areas of the world.
While renewed immigration activism has brought the issue of refugees to the fore, it has been less successful in explaining economic migration, which accounts for the bulk of today’s movement. An analysis of global capitalism and state power is central to understanding economic migration and increasingly restrictive immigration policies. Due in part to the weakness of Marxism among today’s activists, there is a silence around issues underlying movement for economic purposes and the state’s coercive response to it. It is easier and fairly straightforward to argue that refugees deserve protection from the wars, persecution, and internal strife that have caused them to flee their countries. Some refugee rights activists rely on moral arguments to support their cause: “Canada is a great country, unlike those other countries that do not respect human rights, and therefore we have a moral responsibility to shelter those who are fleeing persecution.”
But it is important to recognize the role that countries such as Canada play in creating the conditions which cause people to migrate in the first place, and how the Canadian state in turn uses this process to establish a cheap and vulnerable working class out of Third World migrant labour. To properly understand this, and assess its implications for activist work, we must address global capitalism and its relationship to imperialism, racism and nationalism.
So-called First World countries, including Canada, actively pursue policies in the Global South which push people to move. These imperialist policies involve military intervention and the imposition of economic imperatives that cause extreme impoverishment or outright destitution for local populations.
A good example of this is the role international financial organizations, such as the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and rich creditor nations (who have the greatest influence in the WB and IMF) play in imposing structural adjustment programs on Third World countries in exchange for badly needed loans. Structural adjustment programs frequently include massive cuts to state welfare programs, the selling off of public assets and the reduction of tariff barriers to more competitive capital from the Global North. They have been widely criticized for leading directly to increased poverty, unemployment and ecological destruction. In many cases, lands have been so devastated by nearby industries and massive development projects funded by governments and multinationals of the North that people who live there have little choice but to move, while in some instances people are physically forced off their land or out of their communities.
At the same time, the use of economic subsidies by Canada, the US and European Union (EU) in industries that are central to the livelihood of many people in the Third World, such as agriculture, also has a very detrimental impact on the Global South. The subsidies enable producers in the North to flood world markets and drive down prices to the point where producers of the South simply cannot compete.
In the context of the Global North’s aggressive pursuit of structural adjustment and use of agricultural subsidies, in which hundreds of millions of people have been left unemployed or displaced, migration becomes a means of survival, as people leave their communities and head for the rapidly growing urban centres of their countries or across borders to Canada, the US and the EU in search of work to support themselves and their families. Indeed, you can trace the destruction caused by the economic policies of the imperialist countries in, for instance, the Caribbean basin or the Philippines, and the corresponding increase in out-migration from these same countries over the same period.
The devastation caused by neoliberal economic interventions has not gone unchallenged. There have been protests led by affected communities all over the world. However, movements against restructuring or displacement are often met with violent reprisal, whether from military forces or from paramilitaries hired by corporations which stand to loose from the opposition. For example, when the Ogoni protested Shell’s oil drilling on their land in Nigeria, the police were used to violently quell the resistance. In 1990, 80 Ogoni demonstrators were killed and 459 homes destroyed. In Mexico, the army has been used to fight the Zapatista uprising against displacement from their lands. Many more examples of this dynamic could be given. The bottom line is that military violence is used to implement the interests of global capital and defend policies that have disastrous consequences people in the Third World.
Canada, it must be stressed, actively engages in these imperialist practices. A major creditor nation, Canada has been a consistent supporter of structural adjustment policies, and has funded massive development projects, including dam building in China that has displaced hundreds of millions of people. There are also many examples of Canadian corporations – with the support of the Canadian state – ravaging the resources of the Global South and exploiting local labour to do this. These companies, especially in the mining sector, have been implicated in serious human rights violations. In Columbia, for instance, Canadian mining companies have been linked to paramilitary death squads that target union and indigenous activists. In addition, the Canadian military has actively participated in or supported military interventions around the world. Canada supported the bloody Indonesian occupation of East Timor (and was one of Indonesia’s major arms suppliers), has been occupying Afghanistan for three years, and recently supported the military coup against the democratically elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.
It is not only conditions in source countries that lead to the movement of people. Economies of the Global North rely on cheap immigrant labour. This has actually been a regular feature of capitalist history. During England’s Industrial Revolution, labour shortages were filled by pushing peasants off their farmland, which led to migration to cities where capitalist production was rapidly growing. Here they worked for meager wages in the growing industries. During early periods in which raw goods were being exported from the Americas, Africans were brought in as slave labourers to extract these goods. In Canada, Chinese migrants were brought in to fill the labour shortages in the early stages of the country’s industrial development. There have been programs recruiting live-in domestic workers in this country for over 100 years and to recruit farm workers for the last 40.
The shift to neoliberalism has exacerbated these trends. In the face of increasing global competition, capital has sought to increase profitability and drive down labour costs. While the Canadian state has pursued strategies to drive down the costs of Canadian-born workers and increase their vulnerability – by attacking labour laws and union rights, cutting social benefits and using contract and part-time labour – it has also relied heavily on immigrant labour.
The vast majority of jobs characterized by low pay, difficult and dangerous working conditions, instability, irregular hours, lack of benefits, social stigma and a lack of advancement opportunities are done by immigrant labour, if not by Canadian-born racial minorities, women, or youth. Immigrants do the kinds of jobs that others will not do, and this is precisely why they are so important to First World countries. Indeed, this is the conscious aim of immigration policy in Canada. Playing on the desperation of Third World migrants (for which Canada is partly responsible), and mobilizing deeply rooted racist attitudes towards persons of colour, it severely circumscribes their rights.
For example, access to full-citizenship status is denied to most immigrants entering the country to work. The requirements for obtaining status are so restrictive that they exclude huge categories of immigrants. In1973, 57% of all migrants to Canada classified as “workers” entered with permanent resident status. Twenty years later, that number had dropped to 30%. In order to obtain permanent residence in Canada before arrival, an applicant must accumulate sufficient “points”. Only those who are fluent in English or French, have a university education, an arranged job in Canada, and at least four years of skilled work have a chance of obtaining enough “points” to get citizenship.
It is virtually impossible for economic migrants that show up in Canada without pre-arranged landed immigrant status to get status. At constant risk of deportation, non-status workers have no access to the social benefits and protections that are offered to “citizens,” which in turn makes them super-exploitable. Non-status migrants are barred from services such as subsidized housing, health insurance, social assistance, student loans, and in some provinces legal aid, despite the fact that these people are much more likely to be living in poverty than other segments of the population. In the case of the temporary worker program, which includes domestic and agricultural labourers, immigrants are not covered by labour law and are not allowed to change employers – extremely coercive conditions of employment that leave people susceptible to all kinds of abuse. Those immigrants who cannot obtain the permits required to work legally in Canada comprise the steadily growing underground economy. All of these factors contribute to the forcing of Third World immigrants into jobs for which they are often overqualified, and where they face the worst conditions the Canadian labour market has to offer.
The industries immigrants typically end up in are those where the labour needs to be done locally in order to keep the economy functioning, but which would not be profitable at pay levels needed to attract large numbers of full-time Canadian-born workers. These industries include all types of service provision, construction work, cleaning, transport, domestic work and sex work. Jobs in these industries are characterized as “unskilled”, and the pay is low relative to the working conditions. One of the reasons employers work very hard in these industries to keep wages low is they are considered “low productivity”. “Low productivity” refers to the fact that capital investment (tools, machinery, technologies etc.) in many of these industries does not tremendously increase labour productivity (certainly not compared to capital-intensive industries like auto manufacturing). For example, you can give cleaners stronger cleaning solutions which may somewhat decrease the time it takes to clean a bathroom, but beyond that the time to do this job, and thus the costs beyond wages, cannot be cut down significantly. Profitability, in other words, is very wage sensitive; the best way to increase profits is to cut down on labour costs.
Thus, one of the most effective ways for employers to keep down costs in these industries is by drawing from an army of highly vulnerable and badly paid migrant workers. The labour is cheap, but it is nevertheless pivotal to the economy. For an office building to function in Canada, for example, it will need cleaners, security guards and catering services. And more highly-paid workers there will need dry cleaners, taxi drivers, cooks, servers and dishwashers working at their lunch restaurants and coffee shops, hairdressers, caregivers for their children, cleaners for their homes and people to build their houses.
So the capitalist economy cannot function without a class of people in the imperialist centre who are excluded from the benefits that come with living in the imperialist centre. The global domination of certain nations is reproduced within the dominating nations themselves. Individual and institutional racism helps extend the inferior status of certain nations onto its people, even after they have geographically moved into the First World.
The trends described here, framed by the deep-seated racist character of Canadian society, will continue, as Canada and other First World countries, with aging populations and low fertility rates, become increasingly dependant on cheap labour from the Global South. The Canadian government’s annual Report on the Demographic Situation in Canada reports that, in order to sustain economic growth, the country will have to rely on increased levels of migration. As it reports this, however, immigration policy, as we have noted, remains very restrictive towards people from the Third World. This doesn’t mean that Canada doesn’t want those labourers, however, just that it wants them on its terms.
The shaping of the working class in Canada via restrictive immigration policies places certain demands on activists in our struggles for social justice. Cheap immigrant labour plays an increasingly important role for Canadian capital and the state. Thus solidarity with immigrants must be central to our political work. It also follows from this that serious anti-racist analysis must influence our understanding of capitalism and the struggles against it. Racism has been an integral part of capitalist history, and the deeply rooted white supremacist nature of Canadian society is a basis upon which Third World migrants can be systematically excluded from citizenship rights and forced into the worst kinds of work. So we can’t properly take up the struggle for social justice in Canada if we don’t make the struggle against racism and racist immigration policy central to what we do.
This also means challenging Canadian nationalism, which is not only a right-wing phenomenon, but has resonance on the left as well. The nationalist call for Canadian independence or “sovereignty”, not uncommon among some union leaders, NGOs and writers, is premised on the mistaken idea that Canada is a subordinate nation dependant on the US (some employ the term “dependency” – typically used to describe Third World countries’ relations to the US and Europe – with the qualifier “rich” in front of it). It is based on the dangerous notion that a Canada completely sovereign from the US would naturally be a fairer and more just place (not being influenced unduly by the Americans anymore). This obscures Canada’s own imperialist role in the world as a major capitalist economy, its colonialist history and the racist nature of the Canadian state, while not challenging artificial borders which are the product of capitalist history and facilitate the state’s racist manipulation of the labour supply. Although activists demand reforms from the state, such as better services for people, including immigrants, and a radical change to immigration laws, we can’t lose site of the role played by the state in general, and in Canada in particular, in terms of imperialism and coercive immigration policy.
Our organizing, then, must challenge wherever possible Canadian nationalism and the sanctity of Canadian borders. It must be based instead on relations of solidarity with immigrants struggling for better working conditions, access to social services and equal rights in Canada. We must organize not to highlight the importance of our borders, but to challenge them and the restrictions placed on the free movement of people.
This organizing must involve the demand for status and access to services that citizens receive, as people invovled in the Status and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell campaigns are doing in Toronto. But the struggle for immigrant rights must also be taken up much more vigourously by unions. Indeed, as some of the most exploited workers in our society, whose labour Canadian business is increasingly dependant on, immigrants will be central to the renewal of the currently sluggish union movement. Sadly, however, most union leaders appear unwilling to take up this important challenge, and will likely only do so in the face of serious pressure from immigrants themselves, with the support of other activists, including the union rank-and-file.
These are not easy tasks, but they are necessary in the struggle for a more socially just world.
Katherine Grzejszczak is a member of the Toronto branch of the NSG who migrated to Canada from Poland with her family in the early 90s. Todd Gordon is an editor of New Socialist.