leftvoice.org
The capitalists and their states use migration to divide workers and increase the rate of exploitation. But workers have no interest in limiting the movement of their class sisters from other countries. As the history of capitalism has shown, restrictions on migration don’t really stop anyone from moving – xenophobic laws simply deny immigrants their rights, and therefore lower wages even further.
Other urls found in this thread:
socialistaction.org
twitter.com
youtube.com
paulcockshott.wordpress.com
boingboing.net
slp.org
twitter.com
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1. Resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International. Translation by Ben Lewis.
2. Karl Liebknecht: Fort mit dem Damoklesschwert der Ausweisung! (Our translation.)
3. V.I. Lenin: Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration.
4. Clive Heemskerk: Corbyn’s Brexit opportunity. In: Socialist Today 201.
5. 1918 Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
6. Wladek Flakin: Debatte: Offene Grenzen oder „demokratische“ Abschiebungen?
7. British Perspectives 2013: a Socialist Party congress document.
8. Discussions with ⛏️rotsky on the Transitional Program.
9. Leon ⛏️rotsky: Letter to South African Revolutionaries.
10. V.I. Lenin: Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League. "Jingoism" was a popular term at the time for extreme national chauvinism.
Another good, and more recent article:
socialistaction.org
USSR&China and the rest had had closed borders. And there is a reason for that: The economy has to be managed in the interests of the workers, and such aspect as immigration has to be completely controlled, if we want a managed economy.
If you don't give a shit about worker conditions and simply want as big a labour supply as possible (and unlimitedly stretchable consumer market) - guess what - the more people there are the better.
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Yes they do. Migration into Europe slowed down dramatically when E Europe started putting up fences and unleashed goons literally hunting for migrants in Bulgaria. Inhumane, but it does slow migration. If you want to convince the workers in the west, you won't do so with ideologically inspired lies of this sort. Migrants have agency, and will take circumstances into account when deciding whether or not to risk migrating, and when deciding where to go.
Did you read the article?
kys reddit.
Open borders is not leftist, it is liberal humanitarian.
Open borders is a way for imperialist powers to sap out professionals from the third world.
Did you actually read either of the articles, you meme tier reactionary fuckwit?
"Liberal humanitarian"? Liberals don't want open borders - perhaps the liberal bourgeois want a kinder face to the process, but the perpetually threatened status of undocumented immigrants allows for a huge and continuous source of cheap labor that can't organize. It is this position the bourgeois want - a status which renders millions of workers in a position of fear where they cannot stand, organize/unionize, and fight for their rights, thus keeping costs down and keeping the individuals always replaceable. Read the fucking articles.
Also, note how the article opens with the fact that the Second International, and specifically Liebknecht and LENIN were for open borders precisely for the above reasons.
Imperialists benefit from hard borders, they are a vital factor in maintaining this cheap source of labor. And don't forget that these migrations/immigrants are often moving due to the various wars, interventions, and economic influences of US imperialism in their home country. Read for once in your life.
I think we should bear in mind that there is a difference between bourgeois liberal open borders and "import" open borders/open borders between socialist states. The former is almost always an explicit result of imperialist intervention in the third world, where the people leaving the nation seek liberation from the repressive puppet states and corporate exploitation. Said immigration then lowers wages and increases poverty induced crime in the place they migrate to, which the capitalist class uses as a scapegoat to keep the native population from achieving class consciousness.
We should not be fighting immigration but for the immigrants themselves. We should not support liberal open borders, but rather internationalism and autarky.
Those borders were closed to prevent a brain drain to the west.
I see a kernel of truth there, in what you're saying - but not all of it. Yes we should be fighting for the immigrants. However, if you read these articles, you can see more of what I'm talking about. Liberals are not for open borders, at least not in full. Under Obama record numbers of immigrants were deported and detained.
The hard borders are a deliberate element of capitalist design - it ensures the creation of a perpetually threatened segment of the working class, which itself is what enables it to be cheap labor/low wages. If the status of undocumented immigrants weren't to exist, these immigrants would be able to openly organize, unionize, fight for equal economic rights and thus fight against their fixed status as cheap labor.
This creation of an "other" category, and the network of detention centers and ICE surveillance/assault, directly benefits the bourgeoisie and not the working class. The elimination of borders is not feasible under a Capitalist state for sure, but should be a rallying point to fight against for socialists. To show that the evil and root is not the immigrants themselves, but the systems and contours of Capital and Imperialism which drive these things.
Also, with millions working here, paying taxes, embedded in communities, etc - is it not accurate to say that these "undocumented immigrants" are still in fact members of the working class? The working class is not something so fixed by ideal characteristics projected on them, but by the actual relations as they are - in flux and change.
1907 is not the same year as 2018, Imperialism is different now.
How 'bout instead of continually saging and "replying/refuting" with one line memes, how about you actually read these articles and defend your perspective in detail?
Open Borders are shitty under capitalism.
If you want them under socialism it's fine thou
I think I see what you mean. Liberals don't want open borders, but still want the cheep and physically/legally disarmed labor force illegals represent. Still, open borders as a term is a bit too loaded of a term in regards to piraxis, and in practically it is pretty shitty when it comes to disease control. It is probably better to attack liberals for being imperialist scum who forced families to uproot and flee to the US in the first place as a basis for giving said immigrants equal rights.
I also never said they weren't members of the working class m8, hence the call to internationalism.
lmao go try to illegally immigrate to China and you'll see exactly how "open" China is with its borders.
Good article, OP. I don't really care about burger politics and definitely not about the ⛏️CWI⛏️, but the cited texts from the Second International, Liebknecht and Lenin respectively are interesting.
Yes they do. Liberals are constantly screeching about “muh immigrants’ “muh refuges.” Also immigration reduces economic development in the third world, by draining labor, thus hindering the development of socialism in those countries. While over saturing the labor market in the first world making strikes much harder to work.
lol no
Try analyzing reality instead of buying into liberal word games like a retard. What liberals want isn't "open borders," they want the free flow of capital, and the free flow of labor. The borders are only "open" if you can afford to pay the exit and entry fee.
The US has "open borders" between its states. Theoretically, you can move across the country as easily as across the street. There aren't armed guards between California and Oregon lined up to probe your asshole on your way from Fresno to Portland. You don't have to pay a bunch of fees and shit or be naturalized as a citizen of Maine after moving there from Arizona. No one checks your ID when you drive across state lines to buy fireworks.
If the borders were open then you could leave these countries just as easily as that. All these hoops set up to prevent it, like visas, customs, and so on, wouldn't be there. They're put in place specifically for the reasons of controlling capital and labor, because of the alchemy involved in the global Capitalist economy, where you can draw an imaginary line between two workers and pay one a quarter of the other for the same work. Borders are and always have been a tool of the ownership classes to deprive the working classes of liberty and livelihood, and that's exactly what's happening today.
The reason all these "immigrants" are being brought into the west is because of pea brains like you that think they're somehow separate from the "domestic" working class. Because they're "foreign" or "illegal" or whatever buzzword is used to trick lackwits like you, porky is justified in paying them less, which serves to keep their profits up, fools like you complacent with your "fuck you, got mine" bullshit, and erode living standards across the board as more and more capital is drained from the economy and concentrated at the top. Because you're drunk on liberal bullshit you don't know what's going on and you parrot reactionary bullshit because blaming the browns is easier than actually having to wrap your little peanut around the functions of capitalism.
Dipshit, immigrants to the west are a major source of capital infusion into the third world. It's made even more significant by the fact that unlike WTO or World Bank scams, that money isn't coming with strings and interest attached.
Are you seriously fucking retarded? You might be able to make the "brain drain" case, but technology magnifies physical labor to such an extent as to make whatever "labor drain" you've made up in your defective brain irrelevant. Couple that with advances in information technology and not only are more people than ever granted access to information and the education that they need, but that fewer experts are able to accomplish even more, without even needing to be in the same country.
That's not how socialist development works you fucking moron. It's not contingent on how many laborers are in a given place, but the social conditions effecting it. And chances are, if they're in a place characterized as "third world," they know exactly how badly capitalism is fucking them.
This isn't the 1930s you blithering dimwit. Not only has technology has magnified human labor to the extent that there will never not be a saturated labor market, not the least because capitalism requires a saturated labor market to function, and it will actively work to create it, but capital is no longer tied to a national geographic location. The entire world is the labor market now, you fucking dumb asshole. You have nurses in Calcutta reviewing lab results taken in your local hospital, IT workers in Thailand providing tech support to customers in Saskatoon, design firms in Prague creating ad campaigns for companies in Buenos Aries. It doesn't matter if they're here or there, you massive fucking dipshit, because the international nature of capital has rendered nationality obsolete.'' It's what necessitates the international, borderless character of Socialism.
Have you seriously never picked up a fucking book before? Or read a newspaper? Looked out your fucking window? In the first half of the 20th century, the American labor movement was at the top of its game. It was organized, militant, and had some of the best compensated labor in the world. What happened? The capitalists moved all their industry to places that weren't organized. You stupid fucking class cuck, you aren't arguing to protect the workers with your crypto racist bullshit, you're arguing to protect the noose around its neck.
The only way forward is the elimination of borders and the spooks that porky has ingrained into brainlets like you to trick you into maintaining them for them. "Foreign" and "native" labor are false dichotomies, and your empty rhetoric is nothing but reactionary horse shit.
Open borders is code word for imperialist brain drain.
Just lurking this thread but thank you for voicing all my objections.
It honestly feels pointless to argue on immigration when the people doing it are coming from a race and culture angle and then justify everything else after-the-fact. It feels like its not done on good faith. But thank you for having the patience to actually point it all out.
Thanks man. These fucking Zig Forumscuck class traitors piss me the fuck off, and I feel like they have to be opposed in every thread they come to spew their bullshit in.
What the ruling class wants is exaclty what you are describes as what they don't want. Large multinational trade unions like the EU is the goal of the international bourgeoisie.It's in the Hillary emails released by wikileaks in 2016.
Then why not let them in in the first place? You've admitted yourself that immigration is class warfare. Borders are a tool of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
Ironic coming from the guy who's unirocnally shilling for neoliberalism as a means of achieving socialism.
No one makes this argument. This is a blatant strawman. "brown people" are victims just as much native workers.
[Citation needed]
Reagan, '65 immigration act, NAFTA
"the only way foward is to shill for neoliberalism, until socialism can be realized"
This is what the 21th century left is now. Socialism that thinks liberal internationalism somehow leads to revolution.
As much as we don't want states to exist, they do and we have to use them to our advantage. Fuck off back to reddit, liberal.
I miss when Leninhats were actually knowledgeable and made worthwhile posts.
A Letter from Eugene Debs on Immigration
My Dear Brewer:
Have just read the majority report of the Committee on Immigration. It is utterly unsocialistic, reactionary and in truth outrageous, and I hope you will oppose with all your power. The plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletariat gathering under the auspices of an international movement that is calling on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation. . . .
Away with the “tactics” which require the exclusion of the oppressed and suffering slaves who seek these shores with the hope of bettering their wretched condition and are driven back under the cruel lash of expediency by those who call themselves Socialists in the name of a movement whose proud boast it is that it stands uncompromisingly for the oppressed and down-trodden of all the earth. These poor slaves have just as good a right to enter here as even the authors of this report who now seek to exclude them. The only difference is that the latter had the advantage of a little education and had not been so cruelly ground and oppressed, but in point of principle there is no difference, the motive of all being precisely the same, and if the convention which meets in the name of Socialism should discriminate at all it should be in favor of the miserable races who have borne the heaviest burdens and are most nearly crushed to the earth.
Upon this vital proposition I would take my stand against the world and no specious argument of subtle and sophistical defenders of the civic federation unionism, who do not hesitate to sacrifice principle for numbers and jeopardise ultimate success for immediate gain, could move me to turn my back upon the oppressed, brutalized and despairing victims of the old world, who are lured to these shores by some faint glimmer of hope that here their crushing burdens may be lightened, and some star of promise rise in their darkened skies.
The alleged advantages that would come to the Socialist movement because of such heartless exclusion would all be swept away a thousand times by the sacrifice of a cardinal principle of the international socialist movement, for well might the good faith of such a movement be questioned by intelligent workers if it placed itself upon record as barring its doors against the very races most in need of relief, and extinguishing their hope, and leaving them in dark despair at the very time their ears were first attuned to the international call and their hearts were beginning to throb responsive to the solidarity of the oppressed of all lands and all climes beneath the skies.
In this attitude there is nothing of maudlin sentimentality, but simply a rigid adherence to the fundamental principles of the International proletarian movement. If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare.
Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be none the weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the Socialist movement while they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.
Let us stand squarely on our revolutionary, working class principles and make our fight openly and uncompromisingly against all our enemies, adopting no cowardly tactics and holding out no false hopes, and our movement will then inspire the faith, arouse the spirit, and develop the fibre that will prevail against the world.
Yours without compromise,
Eugene V. Debs.
First published: International Socialist Review , Vol. XI, No. 1. July 1910.
I am curious as to the content of this report
"In our struggle for true internationalism & against “jingo-socialism” we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America, who are in favor of restrictions of the immigration of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907, & against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one can not be internationalist & be at the same time in favor of such restrictions. And we assert that Socialists in America, especially English Socialists, belonging to the ruling, and oppressing nation, who are not against any restrictions of immigration, against the possession of colonies (Hawaii) and for the entire freedom of colonies, that such Socialists are in reality jingoes."
-V. I. Lenin
Saved.
Free flow of capital and labor is open borders. People can move in and out of countries at will.
And that isn’t a good thing. I’m a Burger from Michigan. Michigan is a part of Burgerland which used to be very prosperous but after decades of deindustrializing is poor compared to the rest of the country. and many people where I live are leaving to go to cities like LA and NYC, destroying economic development in Michigan even further. The US should have an internal passport system, at least until living standards across all states are equalized. (which they aren’t)
And this is what neoliberal Porkies are currently pushing for. See Schengen area.
Because of differences in the amount of productive forces in different countries and scarcity of labor.
No what’s happing today is open border agreements like the Schengen Area that divert labor away from underdeveloped regions into a few areas where the labor market is over saturated making strikes impossible.
Porky payes them less because
A) Them being here cause the labor market to be over saturated causing strike to be harder then before they were here.
B) They come from poorer countries and are willing to take lower wages.
The reducing the labor power of these regions. Also thepeople who are able to leave tend to be better foo. If those people stayed many of them would be part of the national Bourgieous causing industrialization. Before the 80s Mexico’s economy grew very rapidly. However after the 80s Mexico’s economic growth started stagnating. This is around the time mass Mexican migration to Burgerland started happing.
Automation is a meme. As automation increases so does demand.
Yes it is. The less free labor in a country the longer it takes to industrialize. And socialist ideas can only grow under industrial conditions.
Bullshit. As automation increases so does demand. the less worker’s there are the more valuable each worker is. So the easier it is fro Workers to go on strike and win. When there are more workers this is harder. This is called an over saturated labor market.
And efforts by capital to create over saturated labor markets must be undermined. including Immigration.
Not with Trump's trade war.
Capitalism is global, which is why capitalists support open borders. If the global flow of capital and labor was completely halted Capitalism would collapse in a few weeks.
Which is why free flow of capital needs to be opposed.
we all now your a fucking neolib so your opinion is worthless.
leftists and the post national global Jewish bourgeoisie agree! borders are bad! news at 11
Capitalism in 2018 isn’t Capitalism in 1918. Capitalist then weren’t pushing for open borders, unlike today. Capitalism in 1918 wasn’t global, unlike today. Labor market’s weren’t over saturated in 1918, unlike today. The third world had no brain and labor drain in 1918, unlike today.
Good quality, As supporter of open borders, thank you.
The defenders of open borders in this thread are being utterly disingenuous. We are currently living in a world dominated by globalizing capital, and all of us (a stray Indian poster excepted) are living in the developed world, where class consciousness is currently nonexistent; it is dead. Yet whenever objections are raised against the vague notion of open borders, they will immediately pivot to talking about a world where suddenly there does exist class consciousness, and all the negative effects hat might befall the first wold workers are offset by solidarity and collective action between the native workers and the newcomers, and yada yada. The bourgeois don't want real open borders, you see. If only we had open borders socialism style, you would see something!
You've skipped a step.
Talking about open borders in a society where the working class is at its most disempowered it has been is asinine. At best, open borders as you would have it are something that is enforced by an already empowered worldwide proletariat - this would be swell. But I would prefer we think about ways to achieve that first, in stead of organizing a struggle session to see who can take the most virtuous position about a subject which is today not yet before us. To the extent that we do have to tackle open borders, and that we discuss it, it is entirely in the context of actually existing capitalism. If you advocate open borders as such, absent or before a socialist transformation of society, that is the only kind of open borders you are discussing - the liberal conception of open borders.
And as far as that goes, migrants as such are not the solution to the problem of low class consciousness, they do not come with it inbuilt that is not there with the natives. You cannot import the revolutionary subject. Introducing them into a population without class consciousness will not suddenly instill it in the totality of the working class. At best you can make a purely speculative accelerationist argument, but that's all that is - speculative. For all you know you'll just get an ethnonationalist reaction. None of us have a crystal ball with which to tell, don't believe people who pretend otherwise.
Having open borders at some point is preferable, but is completely unpragmatic as things exist today.
They also protested and kicked out that bitch director of the DHS from eating at a restaurant too. Finally the Democrat Cops of America does some good praxis.
That's not how you enact change btw.
user, directly stopping the activity of an organisation that targets you is great praxis: and lawmakers clearly do not want to stop it so until you get properly into the legislative mechanism; Direct action gets the goods.
By your own definition then they aren't "open borders" you drooling retard.
Youd didnt even argue retard. You just said "Nuuu thats bad we need class conciousness first". Kill yourself.
This brainlet
did the same thing. All these reactionary cunts true socialists seem to have are the stern refusal to confront reality and "rebuttals" that don't answer or rebut anything. "The foreigners are bad because they're bad! We have to secure a future for white children the "native proletariat" by defending the borders of capitalists in order to keep working our jobs for those capitalists!
"I'm a real socialist, honest!"
Oh good, the board's pet reactionary is here.
You're the one making up and attacking shit no one fucking said. You've made up a fucking fiction instead of dealing with any of the actual arguments in this thread. The elimination of borders isn't just necessary because of some magical solidarity that will arise out of nowhere. Borders exist only as a bourgeois tool to arrest the flow of people and create arbitrary zones for exploitation. It's a false separation you fucking idiot. The worker in Calcutta and the worker in New York are both ensnared in the same system of global capital.
It's not an issue of "virtue" you stupid cunt. Borders aren't to be eliminated because of ridiculous feelings of sympathy for these people. What kind of fucking palliative would that be? "Oh, sorry about the soul crushing economic and social conditions in your country. Here, enjoy the soul crushing alienation of wage labor and poverty here. You'll still be poor and wasting your life to enrich the obscenely wealthy, but at least you'll have xbox."
Truly, the answer to class consciousness is to for the workers to endlessly fight with each other in order to maintain the system that keeps them fighting each other. Brilliant! Marx would be proud. "Le Internationale?" nah, how about "Le Fuck you, Foreigner, I got Mine." Class solidarity will undoubtedly follow.
No one said it was you fucking faggot.
No one said that either, you tremendous bitch!
All you've done is vomit up a bunch of vacuous nonsense said by no one and based on nothing.
Your post is nothing but that, you absolute retard.
You reactionary shitcocks are as bad as the Zig Forumscucks that intentionally misconstrue revolutionary internationalism as bourgeois "globalism." It's galling that you would behave so dishonestly yourself and then accuse others of being "disingenuous." The opposition to borders themselves is fundamentally different from "open borders." It's tantamount to saying that advocating for unions is advocating for the yellow management-friendly "unions" that exist in the US. "Oh, you want socialism? But didn't you know Vladimir Stalin killed a billion people???" Kill yourself.
This is the only thing you got right in your whole post. The revolutionary subject is already here. Immigration, emigration, whatever, doesn't fucking matter in the least fucking bit because wherever you go, Capitalism is already there. You can draw whatever arbitrary lines you want, even invent new borders like that retard above you, but that won't effect capital in any meaningful way.
Onanist, you have always been a shit poster but this here is a new low for you. You should take your dumb ass back to Zig Forums where you and the rest of the class traitors belong, at least until actual socialists can take you out to your closest border wall, line you up against it and shoot you.
I like how those retards get BTFO out, good job lads
Revisionist garbage. Marxism rejects concept of rights.
A lot of sound and fury, though I’ll grant you it does signify something. Still, you are largely refusing to confront the world as it confronts us, in favour of broad statements of principle flavored with the occasional redditesque swearword. We live in a world where borders exist and are enforced at the point of a gun, and where everyone's rights are determined as a function of their nationality. Arbitrary or not, the lines are there, for now, and we have to honestly asses how exactly their mutation and removal will impact people’s lives. Because only then can you start figuring out how to offset any possible negative impacts to whatever constituency you address, how to craft institutions that will ease the transition, etc.
Let’s try and distill a central point from the angry missives: borders are maintained so that the bourgeoisie can maintain an underclass of workers who do not have the same rights as do nationals – the undocumented. Get rid of borders, and this tool of dividing and undercutting disappears. It goes without saying that this is an a-historical point. It only makes sense to the extent that national workers have any rights to begin with, which is a fairly new development, while borders existed before this became a concern (and I’m not just talking about social rights here; where I live, we didn’t even get universal suffrage until late nineteenth, early twentieth century).
If there are no minimum wages, social insurances which an employer has to pay into, health and safety regulations to be upheld etc., there isn’t much point to employing non-nationals over nationals – you both pay them subsistence wage and that’s that. There is nothing to undercut. At the most, the bourgeoisie would want to bring more workers to any region with a relative labour scarcity, so the wages don’t rise because of it. But note that this would also organically happen absent borders, as the workers themselves would be drawn to areas where prospective pay would be higher, especially today, when information flows are rapid and ubiquitous.
This is the keystone of the whole discussion. Nationality is only a concern in so far as (social) rights attach to it. If tomorrow the welfare state and the whole coterie of social rights legislation disappears, nationality stops being an issue, to be sure. Borders have been rendered meaningless, as nothing of substance would come with nationality anymore. I can see us getting there yet. That is not what you propose of course, you explicitly call for agitation that equalizes the rights of the undocumented upwards. This is an unqualified good: it is in nationality-holding workers interest that there is not an underclass that erodes the bargaining power of workers generally, and the advantages for the non-nationality holding workers are self-evident. But that’s not actually an open/no borders position, rather an equal treatment within borders position. Talk of abolishing borders to the uninitiated conjures a specter of the global race to the bottom sketched above, not an uplifting of an underclass.
But just to make sure we do not talk past one another, you do also militate for the total free movement of people, right? Not just agitating for equal rights upon entry, but totally free entry. And not at some point in the future, but right now.
that should not have been spoilered OH WELL
I'm fucking howling.
hmhmhmhhmm
Leftypol was incorrect i guess….
Yes they are. Free flow of capital and labor is what is considered to be open boarders.
If you read my posts you’d understand that open boarders are harmful foremost workers’ in the third world with the exception of those who immigrate. Which is less than 5%. You argument is based on individual immigrants instead of the bigger picture of what effect them leaving there native countries has on those countries.
Dude I’m mixed race.
Capitalists are the ones trying to destroy travel/immigration restrictions and open boarders.
Not really. It’s legal to pay native worker’s minimum wage, but often times there payed higher than that because native workers’ are used to higher wages. Immigration is less than about avoiding labor laws and more about undercutting unions. And forcing worker’s to compute for wages. Instead of business competing for workers. This situation is only possible because immigration increase the labor supply in first world countries.
Tbf the solution here is to unionise immigrants: IWW stylé.
Mate there are plenty of porkies in my country that do not want open borders, heck our porked conservative party that is in power atm is renowned for trying to deport LEGAL CITIZENS under the guise the gov lost their documentation.
Most Porkies where I’m from support Immigration and lessening travel restrictions. Granted I live in a big Metropolitan area.
slp.org
If conservative porkies where so against border control, then why do the Koch brothers oppose trumps tariffs, and deportations.
Was meant for
Repeating your made up bullshit isn't going to make it true. People can't move from country to country "at will." First, you have to have money to be able to afford the travel itself, and however many documents this or that country requires. Second, it's all contingent on the state letting you leave. The only people that can move "at will" are those few wealthy enough to afford it, which the bourgeois are only too happy to accommodate as the petite bourgeois leave for the west and bring their liquid capital with them.
No, that's the argument you made up in your dysfunctional brain.
It's exactly the same bullshit nativism you awful fucker.
And they have help from traitors like you.
Eat a dick made of cyanide.
That’s open boarders under capitalism. You have to afford to travel inside of a country as well. Otherwise Appalachia would be depopulated by now.
This is what Porkies that support open boarders wish to abolish. They want a Schengen Area of the World. And in the Schengan Area there are no travel restrictions.
That isn’t true. With no travel restriction it would be very easy for people to move about. Many people immigrate to countries legally without open boarders. America as over a million legal vetted immigrants arrive a year. Most of these people aren’t rich. That number would increase five times if there were open boarders.
No you were accusing me of being a white ethno-nationalist which I’m not.
What are you talking about. Your the one advocating for open boarders, not me.
t. doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about.
Traveling illegally into Europe from Afghanistan currently goes for about 6000$, from Syria, about 3000$, from Sri Lanka, about 9000$, going by testimonies I have heard from refugees. These are not insurmountable prices for a family pitching together to send a second son over, especially if they take a loan in expectation of remittances. What is keeping people from trying to migrate is by and large not cost, but the risk of life, pushback, and deportation (which would make the trip futile).
i wish it was actually working out this way at the moment
You guys could crash the banks within 10 years by banning immigration. It's clear that advanced capitalist economies must seek new markets in various ways (war, outsourcing, etc.) to avoid stagnation and collapse, thus the paranoia over demographic decline - but apparently no leftist has yet made the connection yet that a similar effect can be achieved by bringing the market to you. It is problematic, to say the least, to build up suitable infrastructure in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America, where most migrants to rich countries come from - and the people there are poor and can't afford European/American goods. To get around this, bring them in and put them on benefits. Simple. Without population growth, when the boomers die off, banks go under.
We ought to stop fighting for open borders and start fighting for a coordinated effort to launch the 3rd world into prosperity. The migrants who travel to Europe are the migrants who can afford to. Those who don't are in much deeper shit.
I'd like to see a unified European army, not to fight any enemy, but with the express purpose of installing infrastructure and teaching people valuable skills in economically disadvantaged regions. This army should receive significant funding, and we could potentially even have a draft. We can start with Africa.
Besides helping the poor, it would give the alienated western youth a sense of meaningful purpose, thus not only vitalizing Africa but also Europe itself. Further, it would very significantly increase the political sphere of influence of the European continent, which I find preferable to powers with less democratic ideals.
The problem is that late capitalist life is so heavily. Most Europeans regularly see migrants on the streets, or even at their school or workplace, but they rarely have any meaningful contact with them. Thus they are free to excessively focus on the problematic cultural elements of the other demographic without ever experiencing them in their banal, everyday context.
It would be great if we could get every retarded right-winger to have a polite one-on-one conversation with a refugee or something. See if their sense of racial loyalty holds up. I promise you that they'll feel just as much empathy towards a brown person as anyone else.
The problem is you're spooked into thinking national laws are absolute. There are already millions of immigrants here because Porky wants the cheap labor. Porky won't give up the cheap labor and has no reason to do so. Even if the government made an honest effort to stop immigrants from coming in rather than turning a blind eye to companies using illegal labor, they would find it difficult because borders are, you know, not real and don't have mystical powers. You'd either have to change the fundamental laws of the market that make illegal labor desirable to capitalists, or you'd have to reduce the standard of living of Americans to that of the illegal immigrants to remove the incentive. It's amazing that "common sense" conservatives can't grasp this simple reality and insist on the power of muh nation, when they keep praising the mystical wisdom of le market.
The purpose of immigration "crackdowns" are to drive down the standard of living for the illegals and prevent them from organizing for better conditions, and to a lesser extent to galvanize white nationalist sentiment to counteract any possible encroachment from the left. Trump is doing little different from Obama or Bush Jr., and what new he is doing is just an escalation of policies already in effect; those policies are not something Trump intended or even knows a thing about, they were crafted far away from any democratic process and will happen regardless of which talking head is elected. The direction of policy in America has been cleaved almost entirely from any democratic oversight and has been assumed by permanent bureaucrats, think tanks, and wealthy monied interests who actually do have a say so in how this country is governed.
I don't really see the point of arguing for bourgeois states to open borders, or even regarding national borders as a real thing. The ruling class and professional class don't care about borders, because they more or less have free movement around the world. It is only the lower rungs of the working class and the underclass that are tied to their nations, and that tie is more by force than anything else. I can't really leave America - not that I'd have any real reason to, but if I did I would more or less be barred from international travel, even if I had the money to do so. So long as there are laws binding the underclass to their nations, open borders in a capitalist setting is basically a tactic to pit different segments of the working class against each other and to drive down the standard of living for the recipient nation's working class. That said there are some positive benefits to an open borders policy that allows legal immigration as opposed to a policy of border enforcement which is just as excuse to empower wannabe fascists while illegal labor is imported anyway. Certainly the detention centers and police-state apparati in the United States are reprehensible and ought to be torn down. Geopolitically for the US, Mexico is more or less a part of the US; US is simply too big and powerful and there is no really good reason for genuine tension. Of course the US wouldn't want to admit Mexico as an American territory because that would imply a level of obligation to the Mexicans that the ruling class doesn't want to bear, and they like the status quo where Mexico is a pool for cheap labor.
But the bourgeois has been pushing for open borders for the past 50 years.
Smart post.
Arguing about "closing the borders" or opening them ignores the fundamental laws of the market. From a dialectical materialist perspective, t's a phenomenon that's -directly- linked to capitalism and pretty much unstoppable in the way technological progress and social developments are unstoppable.
But shitposting about race and agitating along identities is easier, I guess.
Because leftists invite the stranger to someone else's land not their own. Their own land must be majority "leftist" or its "leftist" character will not survive.
As a socialist, isn't the pragmatic option closed borders, at least under capitalism?
Yes. But it's not trendy enough for some american "leftist"
