The Immigrant War: A Global Movement against Discrimination and Exploitation

167 Pages·2013·2.05 MB·English

by  Vittorio Longhi

the
immigrant
war
A global movement against
discrimination and exploitation
Vittorio Longhi
The immigranT war

The immigranT war
A global movement against
discrimination and exploitation
Vittorio Longhi
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
The Policy Press
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ISBN 978 1 44730 588 0 hardcover
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Front cover: photograph kindly supplied by Matilde Gattoni
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Contents
Preface: The war vii
1 in the Persian gulf 1
Return from hell 1
Who built the country? 6
A time bomb 11
The trade union bridge 16
The tower of Armani and of Athiraman 19
Like everybody else, like nobody else 22
2 in the United States 27
Hermanos en el camino 27
The work borderline 31
A nation of immigrants 35
The Great American Boycott 39
Intolerable for a democracy 42
Waiting for reform 46
3 in France 53
Beyond the jungle 53
From the colonies to the banlieues 57
The sans papiers and the workers 61
The reserve army in the kitchen 65
24h sans nous 70
4 in italy 75
The Mediterranean wall 75
Between amnesty and security 80
What would happen? 85
From factories to the crane 88
The farm labourers’ strike 92
5 The mobility of labour 97
Need for governance 97
Globalisation without development 102
Where do resources go? 104
The international political vacuum 107
Where is Europe? 111
the immigrant war
The potential of the diaspora 116
Work and citizenship 121
Notes 123
Index 147

vi
Preface
The war
‘The de facto apartheid that I witnessed in this rundown district was
only one episode in a relentless war against illegal immigration that is
beginning to recall some of the darker periods of European history.’
The place Matthew Carr1 is referring to in this article for the New
York Times is Attiki Square in Athens, where families of migrants and
refugees, particularly Afghans, gather, who are regularly attacked by
Greek neo-Nazi groups and then made to move on by the police.
When I read the article I was struck by the title ‘The war against
immigrants’ and the way Carr linked the stories of manhunts in
various parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. ‘I have seen French
police in Calais confiscate blankets from homeless migrants in what
one official described to me as a “cleaning operation”. I have seen
starving Somali migrants in Greece rummaging through rubbish
bins; Afghan asylum seekers in France hunted down by police
in abandoned railway sidings; penniless Malians living in ruined
buildings in southern Spain; and African migrants hiding from police
raids in the forests of Morocco.’
These are stories of migration, which recur and resemble each
other, just like the actions by police on the border all inevitably
recall military operations, planned and coordinated as though in a
real conflict, faced with a ‘real enemy’. It should be clear by now
that economic migration is a physiological mobility phenomenon,
linked in particular to the demand for labour in advanced economies
and the globalisation process and the revolution in communication
and transport. And managing this phenomenon requires multilateral
agreements and coordination by international institutions, with
clear and shared rules. Instead, migration has been left to single
governments’ policies that are influenced by domestic propaganda
1 Carr, M. (2010) ‘The war against immigrants’, New York Times, La Repubblica,
8 November.

vii
the immigrant war
reasons, portraying this phenomenon as a temporary event to be
contained, or in the worst cases, as a threat to local identity and the
security of their own citizens. For this reason governments all tend
to militarise their borders, greatly restricting entry and limiting as
much as possible the duration of permits to stay.
This approach and these policies have created a new, obvious
contradiction between the need for foreign workers in advanced
economies and the possibility of entering, living and working legally
with dignity. Excessive restrictions do not stop movements, but make
them more insecure, contribute to creating illegality and expose
thousands of people to trafficking, exploitation and the risk of death.
This is happening in every flow of migrants today and it is happening
every day: from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, from South
East Asia to the Persian Gulf or Australia and from Central America
to the United States.
The conflict evoked by the New York Times article does not stop at
borders, however; it reaches to the heart of social life, penetrating and
permeating economic relations and the political and cultural sphere
of the countries of destination. Even when someone does succeed in
crossing a border, even when they obtain a permit and find a steady
job, they are still faced with this ‘implacable war’ against migrants.
Historically the worst jobs with the hardest working conditions
and the least pay are reserved for immigrants. They also have to
face xenophobic propaganda that is so functional to what Michel
Foucault would call ‘biopower’,2 or the ‘subjugation of bodies and
the control of populations’.
The immigrant war examines four migration routes from which
appear, on the one hand, continuous, indiscriminate abuse suffered
by foreigners: violence against Asians in the richest countries of the
Persian Gulf, attacks against Central Americans without documents
in the US, the ghettoisation of people from the Middle East in France
and the exploitation of Africans in Italy. In these same contexts, on
the other hand, all the migrants’ potential for conflict and to make
2 See Foucault, M. (1997) Il faut défendre la société [Society must be defended], Paris:
Hautes Etudes Seuil-Gallimard.

viii
preface
demands comes to the surface, as they change from being passive
victims to become new, conscious social agents, capable of fighting
for their own rights and contributing to the revival of a wider protest.
Noam Chomsky wrote that for some time we have been witnessing
an ‘international assault on labor’,3 referring to the processes of de-
unionisation, flexibilisation and deregulation of the right to work.
In the eternal conflict between capital and labour, the arguments of
capital and the market have prevailed also in those countries that
founded their constitutions on rights and social protection, necessary
elements for development, cohesion and democracy. According to US
linguist Chomsky, there is a new ‘precarious proletariat’ today, which
includes those traditionally on the margins of the labour market,
such as migrants, and those who until now lived under conditions
of greater stability, protection and opportunity; the current assault on
labour is not even sparing young people in industrialised countries,
the locals. In our knowledge economy, we now have a whole
generation living in frustration and uncertainty, because of casual
work and general insecurity, and because of spreading unemployment
in the absence of former protection.
Migrants and casual young workers are not two separate aspects
of the labour market, two contrasting elements, even opposed in
some cases, as one might think. Instead they are united by the same
structural conditions of insecurity and vulnerability. I argue that the
same unity should be found to fight back against the system, aiming
for a political reassembling of the various forms of resistance4 and
for the creation of a ‘collective will’ that the Marxist thinker Antonio
Gramsci5 used to cry out for.
The protests that took place in 2011, from the Arab Spring, to the
movements of the Spanish indignados in Europe, and to the Occupy
Wall Street demonstrations in the US, show how dissatisfied this
3 Chomsky, N. (2011) ‘The international assault on labor’, Truthout, 4 May
(www.truth-out.org/internationl-assault-labor/1304431702).
4 Mezzadra, S. and Negri A. (2011) ‘Lotte di classe e ricomposizione politica
nella crisi’ [‘The struggles of class and the recomposition of society in the crisis’],
UniNomade, 12 January.
5 Gramsci, A. (1975) Quaderni dal carcere [Prison notebooks], vol 3, Turin: Einaudi,
pp 1055-6.

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