FRFI 156 August / September 2000
On 18 June 58 Chinese people were found dead in a lorry at Dover. Their deaths are directly attributable to British immigration laws, and in particular to the Labour government’s 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act, which renders almost all methods of openly arriving in Britain to claim asylum illegal and forces immigrants into the hands of unscrupulous racketeers.
These gangsters operate internationally, selling passages to Europe and north America to impoverished migrants from Africa and Asia, seducing them with promises of a better life or an escape from oppression. They extort vast sums of money both before and after the hazardous journeys they arrange. They deserve no sympathy or support. But they are not the only guilty parties and without laws banning entry into Britain, there would be no demand for their services. Movement of people across borders only becomes trafficking, piracy or smuggling once that movement is made illegal and can therefore only be done in a clandestine way. The Labour government is as guilty of murder as the ‘organised traffickers’ and ‘snakeheads’ it denounces. It is steeped in the blood of innocent people, whose only crime was to try to enter this country.
The 54 men and four women died a horrific death from asphyxiation. The lorry, which was officially carrying tomatoes, arrived at Dover from Belgium on the hottest day this year. According to the coroner’s office ‘A small air vent…allowed air to enter, but this vent could be shut off externally…It is thought that the vent was open until shortly before the arrival at Zeebrugge docks. At this point the vehicle was stopped and the vent closed off, denying an air flow to the people within.’
The ferry crossing lasted four and a half hours. After 90 minutes the people in the lorry began banging on the walls and trying to force the vent and the doors open. No-one heard them and one by one they died as the oxygen in the confined space ran out and all that remained was carbon dioxide.
By chance two of the original total of 60 men and women in the lorry did survive. Their physical and mental suffering is barely imaginable. They were taken away to a police ‘safe house’ and are being held under armed guard until they recover sufficiently to be interrogated about the details of their journey. Once they have provided this evidence to the police, and possibly repeated it to a court, they will presumably be deported. The danger of the journey which brings an immigrant to Britain has never been a guarantee of leave to remain, as the man who survived the journey from India frozen to the underbelly of an aeroplane discovered.
The dead have not yet been formally identified, although Kent police claim to have up to 42 provisional identifications. London lawyers, working with the Chinese community, say they are aware of at least eight people living in Britain who believe their relatives may be among the dead but are too frightened to come forward because the police and Immigration Service have said that if they do so their own immigration status will be scrutinised.
Carriers’ liability
The 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act massively extended ‘carriers’ liability’, a concept first introduced in 1987, when transport operators began to be held responsible for passengers who turned out to be illegal immigrants. The 1999 Act created a new civil penalty for road-hauliers, shipping firms, rail services or airlines which bring in illegal immigrants, even when they are unaware they are doing so.
In April Jack Straw jubilantly told parliament about the money the government was going to make from impounding a lorry containing 50 (live) immigrants. At a fine of £2,000 per ‘clandestine’, the government was set to boost its tough image in the face of Tory propaganda and net £100,000 at the same time. It remains to be seen if Dutch lorry-driver Perry Wacker, who has been charged with manslaughter, will also be fined £120,000.
Media backs government line
The lack of outrage over these deaths is almost as horrifying as the deaths themselves. When the news broke on the morning of Monday 19 June, TV and radio dutifully reported ‘the facts’, as then known. As the day wore on, they added predictable government comment on the evils of trafficking and a little – sombre to suit the gravity of the moment – inter-party bickering about how Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe would have ensured that such a lorry never got onto the ferry in the first place. The government produced a Chinese ‘community leader’ and member of a Home Office race advisory committee to repeat the party line. By the time of Channel 4’s 7pm news broadcast, one might have expected some debate about the immigration laws, if only out of a journalistic sense of variety. So what was ‘liberal’ presenter Jon Snow’s take on the subject? He asked the Home Office minister whether the government would be launching a propaganda offensive in China to inform would-be immigrants of how unwelcome they are here. And he suggested that a useful tool in putting this message across would be as yet unavailable footage of the bodies inside the lorry – ‘so far we have only seen the tomatoes’.
Cross-party consensus
Jack Straw’s line – ‘blame the evil traffickers entirely; don’t blame us at all – let’s now bring in more and tougher laws’ – was echoed by MPs of all parties, who questioned whether £2,000 was a sufficient deterrent. Only Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democrats dared murmur almost apologetically that the lack of lawful ways to enter the country was a factor in the deaths, while he was as vitriolic as Ann Widdecombe in his desire to pursue the traffickers ‘to the ends of the earth’.
So what about those left-wing MPs who have been so vocal at recent marches and meetings in opposition to the Asylum Act? Tony Benn was conspicuously absent or silent during the parliamentary debate following the deaths and Jeremy Corbyn could only muster asking whether it wasn’t ‘time that the world learned that people who are seeking to escape from political, social or economic tragedies and repression adopt desperate measures to get out?’
Immigration and right-wing economics
Outside the small ranks of left and anti-racist organisations the only dissenting voices raised against the view that the lessons of Dover were that controls should be tightened still further and European co-operation increased, came from an emerging libertarian current whose most vocal proponent is Nigel Harris, author of The new untouchables: immigration and the new world worker. Supporters of this view argue that immigration controls are bad for the economy and call on the government to rethink its policies in the light of the ageing population, the ‘skills gap’ and the availability of a cheap well-educated, computer-literate workforce in south and southeast Asia. In the May 2000 issue of Red Pepper, Harris argues that far from creating unemployment among British workers – the traditional far-right line – increased immigration will increase employment possibilities:
‘In general, immigrants don’t do the jobs the natives want (except if they’re students on their uppers), so they don’t displace native workers: there’s no competition between the two. They don’t steal native jobs nor drive down wages.
‘In fact, the situation is the opposite: if a hospital cannot recruit enough workers to do the unskilled jobs – porters, cleaners, laundry and canteen workers, security guards – it is impossible for the nurses, doctors, managers to work. So if you cut the number of immigrant workers, you increase native unemployment…
‘But is it right to allow in immigrants to do the lousy jobs the natives refuse? Are we not protecting, even encouraging, the worst kinds of exploitation? On the surface this seems a much stronger argument. Yet it also turns out to be wrong. To stop exploitation, we are stopping willing workers getting work and increasing the unemployment of the natives.’
(Red Pepper)
The day after the Dover massacre Guardian journalist Alan Travis called for an ‘immigration policy based on…economic needs rather than… foreign policy objectives or asylum sympathies’. He dismissed the argument against depriving poor countries of skilled workers so they can service the rich nations as of ‘marginal’ importance, citing the global value of remittances sent to poor nations by workers in rich ones as $65 billion a year, $20 billion more than official global overseas aid expenditure.
While Travis calls for selective lifting of controls and Harris for their abolition, Harris also sings the praises of a remittance economy, claiming that the end of fetters on migration would allow such an economy to boom and would create ‘a serious possibility of a real attack on world poverty’ and, he is hopeful, ‘the decline of the nation state’. This is pie in the sky. Socialists support the free movement of labour, but to argue that the ‘freedom’ of the populations of poor nations to work in rich ones and send home money earned there will transform the parasitic relationship between oppressor and oppressed states is nonsense.
While remittances, like aid, may alleviate short-term poverty for some people in the oppressed nations, a global economy based upon them simply shores up imperialist domination still further. Skilled workers from Asia will be used as a reserve army of labour in just the same way their grandparents’ generation were used to do unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in the 1950s. If they outlive their usefulness, they will be told to go. Such a policy is no less racist or class-driven than its predecessors and the murderous and vicious nature of today’s immigration and asylum laws should not lead socialists to embrace it as an alternative. Neither Travis nor Harris questions the right of imperialist economies to dominate the world in a way which compels the workers of poor countries to need to seek work abroad. Despite Harris’ anti-poverty rhetoric, neither envisages the need for redistribution of wealth other than via remittances, and revolutionary struggle to redefine relations between imperialist and non-imperialist nations is definitely not on their agenda.
A fitting memorial
In stark contrast to the Australian government’s response to the deaths of 15 people in a hostel fire the same week as the Chinese men and women perished, no state-funded public memorial will be erected to commemorate the wasted lives of the 58 immigrants. The only memorial events were organised by a coalition of anti-racist and religious organisations who held a a vigil outside Downing Street followed by a remembrance meeting on 12 July.
A fitting tribute to the dead would be the building of a strong, united movement against the racism of the British government. A movement which combines the provision of material support for immigrants and refugees with the understanding that in an imperialist nation like Britain immigration laws are by their nature racist and oppressive and that opposition to them must be opposition not simply to the individual laws but to their basis, which is the imperialist relationship between oppressor and oppressed nations.
