At 07:59 22/02/00 -0800, you wrote:
> from today's L.A. TIMES (2/22/00), op-ed:
>
> Surprise! Immigration Hasn't Ruined Us
>
> Economy: Quite the opposite, the flow across our borders
> provides wide benefits, as the AFL-CIO now recognizes.
The law of value should explain why.
Within a notionally sealed economy the total exchange value is related to
the total labour power available for producing commodities.
When the volume of labour power increases with the arrival of new workers
there are new opportunities for the capitalist cycle to go on expanding a
little longer as the total social exchange value increases.
Furthermore because the expectations of the newcomers relate to the costs
of reproducing their labour power in another society with less wealth in
the form of use values, they are prepared to work for less than the average
wage in the receiving country. The difference is available to the
capitalists of the receiving country as relative surplus value, which
allows them to go on producing further into the capitalist business cycle.
Major centres of capitalist economic activity have been fuelled by inward
migration - initially from the land to the cities, but in the case of
individual countries from the West Indies to Britain, from Africa to
France, from Turkey to Germany, from Mexico to the USA. The migration from
mainland China to Hong Kong has also been an incredibly powerful motor of
capitalist accumulation.
So dependent on inward immigration has Europe become that it will have to
import tens of millions of non-European workers in future years to come to
service the cost of its aging population without a major recession. When
Haider's generation becomes senile they will have to be nursed in their
dotage by Slavs and Turks, whose ability to communicate in colloquial
German is limited.
Wise monopoly capitalists do not oppose inward migration. Nor do they
oppose some laws to mitigate racism. At the same time they benefit from the
continued existence of some racism to divide the labour force.
Reactionary nationalist capitalists oppose all inward migration. Examples
are (by implication) people like Haider, and the dominant little England
wing of the British Conservative Party.
Immigration pays - at the cost of greatly exacerbating the contradiction
between town and country, now expressed on a global scale between the rich
and the poor countries.
Chris Burford
London
