The RCG opposes all Britain’s immigration controls as racist tools that entrench inequality and fragment resistance.
Over the summer, racist hatred has once again been whipped up against asylum seekers by the media, politicians and far‑right influencers, provoking street protests outside hotels where the Home Office has housed people awaiting asylum decisions. These protests have been fed by familiar, dangerous lies — that migrants are criminals or terrorists, threats to women and children, stealing jobs, or living on state handouts while ‘ordinary British people’ lose out. Those lies are the same racist myths used for generations to divide and weaken the working class.
The forces organising and legitimising hotel protests have also seized public space with jingoistic displays of the blood-soaked Union and St George flags — symbols of British imperialism — while presenting themselves as a grassroots defence of ‘the people’. In reality, the right‑wing organisers of this campaign represent better‑off layers of the working class, the middle class, landlords and small capitalists. Their outrage is a reactionary defence of the petty entitlements promised to them by British imperialism. We cannot let these auxiliaries of the ruling class organise unopposed.
We unconditionally support the right of migrants and other workers from ethnic and national minorities to fight back against all racist attacks by any means available to them.
The most dangerous agent and driving force of racist oppression remains the British state itself. The Home Office, and the system of detention and deportation it enforces, have been continually strengthened by both Labour and Conservative governments.
Mass migration is a structural fact of capitalism and imperialism. UN figures at the end of 2024 show roughly 300 million people are migrants worldwide, a record number; over 110 million are displaced (including refugees) and around 8.5 million seek asylum. In 2025, about 30,000 people made the dangerous Channel crossing — a record for Britain, yet a tiny fraction of global displacement. As long as imperialism exists and falls deeper into crisis, more and more workers will be forced to migrate.
No amount of British state brutality will deter people from fleeing war, environmental collapse, imperialist theft, unrepayable debt and exploitation. These conditions are the product of imperialism: British banks, monopolies and the military have plundered resources, destabilised economies and waged wars that force people to leave their homes.
Immigration controls are not designed to stop migration but to manage it for capitalism. These controls create and police a hierarchy among workers. By denying rights, work and security to migrants, the state isolates them from their fellow workers and prevents collective organisation. Tens of thousands are held in immigration detention without charge; many more live undocumented and precarious lives, unable to challenge exploitation by legal means. The existence of this super-exploited layer of workers enables employers to discipline all workers, to depress wages and conditions, and assign unprofitable but vital jobs in the capitalist economy — care, cleaning, healthcare — to the lowest paid and least protected.
It is in the service of this segregated system, which sustains the existence of the bloodthirsty British ruling class, that racist hatred is being whipped up. The solution is not more racist controls. The solution is the unity of all workers. We must fight the racist immigration regime that divides the working class and strengthens imperialism.
We therefore demand full and equal rights for all workers in Britain regardless of immigration status:
- to stay in Britain – no more detention or deportations
- to work
- to claim benefits
- to housing, healthcare and education
All migrants have the right: here to stay, here to fight!
