‘To prevent migrant deaths, Labour must stop embracing nationalism and trying to outdo the Conservatives on immigration’ – Byline Times

In the early hours of September 15, eight more people drowned while attempting to cross the Channel. But instead of looking at opening safe and legal routes for asylum seekers, Keir Starmer is in Rome for bilateral talks with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, hoping to learn from the reduction in migrant arrivals in her country.

Starmer said the UK will contribute about €4.75 million to Meloni’s plan to move the processing of asylum applications to third countries such as Albania.

Meanwhile, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to carry out the highest number of deportations since Theresa May became prime minister, with plans to deport more than 14,500 illegal migrants over the next six months.

Cooper also plans to expand immigration detention capacity by reopening the controversial Haslar and Campsfield detention centres. Ironically, current Women and Equalities Minister Anneliese Dodds celebrated the closure of Campsfield in 2018, noting it was “a bitter victory” as the “hostile environment looks set to become even more hostile”.

This follows Cooper’s July announcement (written before The Sun) that 1,000 officials would be deployed to speed up deportations of undocumented migrants. In the same piece, she announced a wave of immigration raids on businesses, including nail salons and car washes, that are believed to exploit illegal migrant labor and fuel human trafficking rings.

The administration’s plan is a violent attack on migrants, many of whom are refugees. As we have seen with forced returns to Afghanistan, Syria, Russia and many other countries, sending back people who have fled for their lives is often a death sentence.

Even the most “humane” immigration controls require significant state violence against migrants and marginalized communities.

As comforting as it is to believe that immigration controls can be implemented with a light touch, they involve officers kicking down doors, tearing families apart, shoving people into vans and stripping them of their basic rights until they are forcibly sent to another country.

That is why it rings hollow when the government presents its policy as saving vulnerable migrants by stopping smuggling gangs.

As Amélie Moyart of the French charity Utopia 56 notes, increased policing on the northern French coast has not reduced the demand for boats to cross the Channel: it has simply led to fewer boats and more people on each boat, with the average number of people loaded by smugglers rising from around 40 to “at least 60”. This increases the risk of fatal accidents at sea.

More broadly, numerous researchers, including Neil Howard and Garrett Nagaishi, have strongly criticized the “raid and rescue” approach to combating human trafficking.

From Brazil to Vietnam to the US, this research shows that raid and rescue missions fail to address the real sources of exploitation, misleadingly promote a clear victim/criminal dichotomy, and often leave forced rescuers in prolonged states of detention against their will – something they often experience as a form of ‘secondary trafficking’.

The Starmer government’s approach to law and order, therefore, far from protecting vulnerable migrants from exploitation, places migrants in the firing line.

An undocumented migrant working for starvation wages will not feel “saved” or “protected” when police or immigration officials enter their workplace, discover their immigration status, and drag them (often literally) into the Kafkaesque nightmare of the detention and deportation system.

Moreover, the mere possibility of deportation puts migrants at even greater risk of exploitation, as they fear state violence.

The government’s latest U-turn is far from an isolated incident. It fits into a much longer pattern of Labour trying to outdo the Conservatives on immigration. This pattern includes the Wilson government’s passage of the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968 to prevent Kenyan Asians from entering the UK on British passports, and the Blair government’s massive expansion of immigration detention.

It is an approach aimed at attracting right-wing voters by portraying the party as more responsive to the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary working people” and better able to enforce immigration controls.

This is not simply a misguided electoral strategy – something reflected in Labour’s lower overall vote in this year’s general election (some 560,000 votes fewer than in the 2019 election, which was a catastrophic defeat) and in radical independent candidates winning countless seats from Labour. This repeated capitulation to reactionary politics is symptomatic of the extent to which a deeply exclusionary nationalism permeates our society.

From a progressive perspective, pursuing nationalism (even under a polite facade of “patriotism”) is misguided because it fundamentally does not work.

Not only is nationalism by nature an exclusionary and homogenizing process, but – as social scientists Marc Helbling, Tim Reeskens and Matthew Wright demonstrate in their extensive comparative study – the mobilization of ‘nice’ nationalist symbols or discourses consistently provides a platform for simultaneous exclusionary, ethnicized and violent manifestations of nationalism.

It is no coincidence that the far right’s street-level racist and xenophobic violence is increasing at the same time as the state’s own anti-migrant violence: something we saw this summer when rioters chanted “Stop the boats!” as they attacked asylum seekers’ housing.

More broadly, the accentuation of nationalist rhetoric activates latent far-right tendencies among voters, empowering parties such as Reform UK. This effect is amplified as more political parties adopt exclusionary views.

Courting nationalism is also cowardly because it betrays the Labour leadership’s paralysing fear of the Conservative press. Unless the escalation of anti-migrant bureaucracy is driven by genuine bigotry (which can hardly be ruled out), the most plausible explanation for the government’s approach is that it is trying to curry favour with a media that is waging war on migrants.

This is in line with their other policies, such as eliminating healthcare for transgender people and freezing pensions instead of raising taxes on the wealthy.

That approach is doomed to failure.

The Conservative press did not support Labour in 2015 under Ed Miliband when the party brought out the infamous ‘Controls on Immigration’ mugs, and The Telegraph responded to Cooper’s latest deportation announcements by saying the administration is weak on immigration.

She and other right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail will simply use Labour to further the persecution of migrants and the entrenchment of structural racism, and still support the Conservatives at the next election.

A sheep dressed as a wolf is still dinner. Our path forward as progressives should be to rediscover and reassert our history of working class internationalism.

Labour Party members should organise within constituencies and union branches to pass motions in support of migrants and implement them by mobilising for solidarity actions on our streets and in our workplaces.

The Labour Campaign for Free Movement is organising a demonstration outside the Labour conference in Liverpool at 1pm on 22 September. This is an opportunity to hold the party leadership to account and build a counter-attack.