Transcript Presentation - The Institute of Employment Rights

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 deregulation 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 largescale 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 middleaged 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 neoliberalism 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 – offshoring 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/
Thanks
Don Flynn
Migrants’ Rights Network
www.migrantsrights.org.uk
[email protected]
#donflynnmrn