the politics of immigration in hard times don flynn
TRANSCRIPT
The Politics of Immigration in Hard Times
Don Flynn
Outline of argument
• The character that immigration took in the noughties has its origins in the reconstruction of the UK economy which took place in the 1980s
• The key features of this were the de-regulation of labour markets and the use of social welfare systems to defuse protest and manage the transition to the new economy.
• It took a decade and a half for the implications of these changes to feed into immigration but the lineagew is there to be traced.
Thatcher’s reforms create the need for a new type of working class
• Post-war capitalism was built on a model which assumed a strong partnership between the state and capital.
• Capital prepared to commit to long-term investment in activities that supported the employment of a skilled working class, but required the state provide it with this class, appropriately educated and socialised to meet the needs of Fordist production.
• Features of this model – jobs for life, regulation and a role for unions, the male family wage.
Problems with this model
• Required regulation to provide stable conditions that would encourage long-term investment.
• Also, high rates of taxation to support state services
• A state bureaucracy to oversee economic planning
• Consequently a marginal role for the commercial middle classes who also carried what they thought were unacceptably high levels of taxation
Implications for immigration policy
• Immigration associated with ‘bottlenecks’ in manufacturing and the public sector.
• Periods of downturn and reduced demand for labour could be rapidly translated into more restrictive immigration policies.
• This was particularly the case after 1973 when the rationalisation of industry forced by the OPEC oil crisis brought back large-scale unemployment.
• This reduced labour demand encouraged the view that the immigration legislation of this period was working.
Thatcher’s settlement
• Deregulation of labour markets• Increased mobility of capital (floating
exchange rates, the City ‘Big Bang’, etc)
• Sharp decline in industrial sectors that has provided a base for trade union power.
• The ‘liberation’ of the middle classes through lower taxation and increased opportunties to leverage value from asset inflation.
• Squeeze on the public sector
Outcomes
• Much smaller industrial base• Decline in skilled jobs offering life-long
employment prospects• Expansion of jobs in service sector• Higher proportion of lower paid jobs• Cushioning the danger of social tension
through the large-scale use of social welfare allowing large numbers of middle-aged males to be weased out the labour market
• An economic recovery driven by more intensive market competition.
Implications for immigration
• No immediate expansion of demand for immigrations emerging from these market driven reforms.
• But external effects – Thatcherism allied with US power to become the neo-liberalism that filled the vacuum in the post-Cold War period – began to produce a more volatile situation internationally bringing larger numbers of workers into migration systems.
• This intially seen as increased refugee flows, but latterly became economic migration.
1990s onwards – the new economy and migration demand
• By mid-1990s capitalism was emerging as a competitive system in which firms gained advantage by managing supply chains – off-shoring but also just-in-time production domestically.
• Ultra-flexible labour force had been summonsed but in conditions of broadly full-employment as a result of a long boom and labour supply restricted by social welfare provisions that provided for subsistence.
• Demand for labour therefore flowed over into a new phase of immigration.
Implications for politics
• New Labour reconfigured the objective of immigration management away from ‘reduction to an irreducible minimum’ to policies which supported growth.
• Required a reform of work permit system geared towards skilled migration, but also measures aimed at easing bottlenecks at low skilled ends.
• This project configured in managerialist terms – low level of confidence that ordinary citizens would welcome immigration.
Ambiguous messages – growth of mistrust
• Negative perceptions of refugees• Surveillance of economic migrants – ID
cards, etc• Undermining of rights of EU migrants –
residence test, etc• Claim for policy rooted in a strong
evidence base fundamentally challenged by experience of 2004 accession
• Considerable loss of lustre as capable managers but the full force of a backlash still some years away.
2008 and collapse of New Labour competence
• Space now exists for the backlash to more fully develop
• Claims of competition between natives and migrants becomes more plausible.
• Evidence for this is claimed in the form of wage pressure, youth unemployment, and pressure on public services.
• Centre right furnished with arguments which allow it to chip away working class support for Labour
Coalition produces ‘new’ immigration messages
• ‘Broken borders’• Uncontrolled EU migration• Loss of capacity to select ‘good
migrants’ and deport the bad• Pressures from population growth.• Need to reduce net migration.
Wider policy agendas
• Immigration an obstacle to completing the drive to reform social welfare provision and make it a more effective instrument for disciplining the working class through conditionality, etc
• But stronger restrictions also threaten to break up old alliances with business community and also the drive to put higher education on a business footing.
• Demographic issues – how does the Tory party avoid alienating the rising ethnic minority middle classes?
Medium and longer-term prospects
• Demand for labour migration unlikely to diminish – now too strongly written into the business plans of important stakeholders
• Mainstream parties also unable to develop a credible narrative which supports their claim that migration can be managed through stronger policing and more selectivity
• Outcome is likely to be the consolidation of immigration as a part of the platform of stronger right wing current in mainstream politics
• But still no practical answers to how migration can be better managed/
