BLAME THE BOSSES NOT THE FOREIGNERS
Why Ireland Should Welcome Immigrants
Contents
Introduction: Are Foreigners
Favoured?
1. Jobs, Housing and Health
2. Where Racism Comes From
3. How Racism is Promoted
4. Travellers, Roma, Jews, Muslims
5. Do We Need Immigration
Controls?
6. The Fight Against Racism
Introduction: Are Foreigners
Favoured?
‘The
trouble with Ireland these days is that the foreigners are getting everything.’
This is a sentiment that can be heard in many a pub and many a workplace in
Ireland today. However, in the same pub or workplace there are likely to be
people who dislike this sort of comment, who instinctively feel it is wrong to
be blaming or ‘giving out’ about immigrants and think it smacks of bigotry.
One of the
aims of this pamphlet is to show that their instincts are right and that those
who blame the foreigners or believe they are somehow favoured over the native
Irish population are seriously misled. Another is to argue that this whole way
of looking at society is mistaken and that the real division in Irish society,
and pretty much everywhere else, is not between people born here and people
born elsewhere, but between the Irish (and foreign) rich or bosses and the
Irish (and foreign) workers and poor.
So let’s
begin by accepting that there certainly are a group of ‘foreigners’ who are
favoured and ‘given everything’. These are the multinational corporations,
their executives and senior managers.
Companies like Facebook, Starbucks and Pfizer are able to get away with
paying almost no tax – Facebook paid only 0.6% corporation tax in 2012 and
Starbucks paid only €35,000 over five years – and their executives are given
virtual bribes in the form of tax breaks and having their school fees paid.
Similarly every foreign bondholder, like the ridiculously wealthy Bill Gates,
was protected when the banks crashed in 2008.
But is this
who our pub pundits and canteen complainants have in mind? Not at all. Generally speaking it is the ordinary Polish,
Romanian, Nigerian or Asian immigrants they are having a go about – the people
they say they have seen drawing benefits in the post office, filling up the
A&E departments in the hospitals or getting the jobs driving taxis. And
here it is necessary to say very firmly that the idea that ordinary immigrants
are somehow privileged or favoured over the so-called native Irish is
completely false.
The large
majority of ‘foreigners’ who come to Ireland do so for one of two reasons.
Either, a minority, they have fled circumstances that were life threatening or
intolerable (like war, famine, persecution, torture) or, the majority, because
they hope to get work and build a better life for themselves and their
families. The former are what are usually referred to as asylum seekers or
refugees and the latter are what are called ‘economic migrants’.
A moment’s thought
should remind us that these are precisely the same reasons that Irish people
have been emigrating en masse to Britain, America, Australia and elsewhere ever
since the Famine. A moment’s thought will also tell us that as people who come
from countries that are substantially poorer than Ireland (Poland, Romania,
Bulgaria, Turkey, every African country) they arrive here, just like the
immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island in New York or in Camden Town or Kilburn,
as among the poorest, least advantaged members of society. And that is what
they remain.
The idea
that the Irish government which devotes its energies to bailing out bankers, and
pampering the corporations, while cutting the wages of PAYE workers and cutting
the benefits to lone parents, the unemployed, and people with disabilities is
somehow dishing out special privileges to people because they are ‘foreign’
makes no sense at all and is simply not true.
The claims
about immigrant privilege and favouritism are usually anecdotal – people say
they ‘heard’ about this case, or read about such-and-such an example or ‘saw
loads of foreigners in the dole office’ – which makes them hard to check or
answer, but the overall evidence is very clear.
In 2006 a
major study was done of the data in the census called Multiple Disadvantage in Ireland – an equality analysis of the Census
2006. It showed that all the main immigrant communities were more likely
than Irish nationals to be suffering poverty and deprivation. For example, it
showed that White Irish aged 25 to 44 had a 17% chance of being in the lower
manual social class, ie at the most deprived end of society. The rate for
Africans was 33%, for Chinese 26%, and for non-Irish whites (eg Polish) 29%.
Similarly it recorded that in terms of lack of access to a car – a good measure
of poverty – only 8% of White Irish lacked such access, whereas the rate for
Africans was 23%, for Chinese 42%, and for non-Irish whites 29% (www.equality.ie/research and www.esri.ie).
More recent
data confirms this pattern. In 2010 median household income for Irish nationals
stood at €42,252, nearly €5,000 a year more than the €37,642 median for
non-Irish, and whereas 21.8% of Irish nationals were held to be suffering
deprivation (a shocking statistic in itself) the rate rose to 31.0% for
non-Irish (Frances McGinnity et al, Annual
Monitoring Report on Integration 2012, ESRI.pp.41-43).
In other
words the basic picture, exceptions aside, is that the majority of foreigners
and immigrants, far from being privileged, are in fact among the most
disadvantaged.
Equally this
pamphlet will show that it is quite untrue that the numerous serious problems
in Irish society – the lack of jobs, the housing crisis, the deterioration in
the health service and so on – are caused by immigration or immigrants, and
that to blame them for these problems is simply to let those really responsible
off the hook.
At the moment
it is clear that hostility to foreigners and the racist attitudes that go hand
in hand with this are on the rise in Ireland. This is shown by the sharp
increase in racist incidents reported in 2013, almost double the figure for
2012 (Independent.ie, 7 December, 2013), by the surveys of public
attitudes to immigrants (Annual Monitoring Report on
Integration 2012,
as above) and by a study of migrants’ own experiences by Dr Patricia
Kennedy of the School of Applied Social Science in UCD, which found that 60% of
foreigners had experienced discrimination.
Shop in Tallaght after a Racist Attack in 2014
The increase is from a low base. Ireland
has a strong tradition of anti-racism and, compared to many European countries
including Britain,
was relatively welcoming to immigrants, but it is an increase. The reason for
it is clear. It is that the establishment and their media have been able to
deflect some of the anger at the pain inflicted on people by the recession and
the government’s austerity policies onto ‘the foreigners’.
This pamphlet aims to provide the facts and arguments to
help combat this growth of racism and redirect that anger back to where it
belongs.
1. Jobs, Housing and Health
Jobs
‘They are
taking our jobs!’ Is there any truth in this familiar cry? No, there is not. In
2001 unemployment in Ireland stood at only 3.6%. In October 2012
it was 14.8% and as I write it remains over 12%. Did immigration cause this
dramatic increase? No, it did not. Immigration was relatively high between 2000
and 2007 but unemployment remained low – in 2005 it was 4.2%, the lowest rate
in the EU at the time. Unemployment only started to rise significantly in 2007
when the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger began to falter and it took off like
a rocket in 2008 when the banks collapsed.
Is
it possible that the accumulated immigration of the late 1990s and early 2000s
eventually caused the mass unemployment we are seeing now? No, because, as the
graph above shows, unemployment was very high – even higher than it is now – in
the 1980s when immigration was very low.
What
the graph above shows clearly is that it is the state of the economy that
causes unemployment, not immigration. Rather levels of immigration and
emigration are a consequence of the
state of the economy. When the economy booms there is a demand for more labour
and this attracts immigration (and emigration declines). When the economy goes
into recession unemployment rises and immigration decreases (while emigration
increases).
This
is not just true for Ireland
but is the case internationally. Historically the worst period for unemployment
was in the 1930s when there were many millions of unemployed right across America
and Europe. This had nothing whatsoever to do with immigration
but was caused by the Great Depression which began with the Wall Street crash
in 1929. The high unemployment in Ireland in the early 1980s was matched by
mass unemployment in Britain (under Thatcher) and in the US because there was
an international recession. The deep economic crisis that broke out in 2008 was
also international – it began with the banking crisis in the US – and it has
produced high unemployment internationally. The precise figures vary but the
basic pattern is the same.
In
the US the unemployment rate in October 2007 stood at 4.7%; by October 2010 it
had risen to 10%. In Britain unemployment was 5% in early 2008; by 2009 it was
over 8%. In southern Europe, which, like Ireland, was particularly hard hit by
the crisis, unemployment grew astronomically reaching over 26% in Greece and
Spain in 2013.
Here
it is important to understand that, despite the scaremongering that goes on in
the media, an increase in the population, whether through rising birth rates or
immigration, does not create unemployment. Every new person in a country, child
or adult, means an increase in the demand for goods – food, clothes, housing,
phones, transport, etc – and therefore stimulates the economy, ie leads to the
creation of new jobs. At the same time each new person is, actually or
potentially, able to fill those jobs and produce more wealth.
If
it were not so, unemployment would have been rising relentlessly over the last
thousand years or so in which the population of the world has grown steadily
and especially the last two hundred years in which it has grown rapidly. And
everyone would have been getting poorer and poorer.
Consider
the United States.
In 1700 the US
had a population of about 1 million, mostly Native Americans. It had a GDP
(Gross Domestic Product) of approximately $500 million, which equals $500 per
head. By 1870 its population had
increased to 40 million, largely through immigration, and its GDP had risen to
approximately $100 billion or $2,500 per head.
Today its population is 314 million and its GDP
is $16,000 billion or just over $50,000 per head. By contrast Ireland had a
falling population for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, from over 8 million
to under 4 million, but remained poor with historically high levels of
unemployment (until the Celtic Tiger in the 1990s).
The real cause of unemployment in Ireland
and elsewhere is that we live in a capitalist economy where production is for
profit. When profits are high the capitalists expand production and employment
rises. Indeed they fall over themselves to attract labour, from abroad if
necessary. When profits fall they cut back production and lay people off and
they stop investing so that demand for labour falls and unemployment
rises. None of this is in any way caused
by ‘foreigners’ or immigrants. It is entirely the responsibility of the
bankers, speculators, giant corporations and politicians who run capitalism.
Unfortunately
this is not the end of the matter. Unfortunately it is possible to argue that,
regardless of who caused the crisis and the lack of jobs, the ‘foreigners’ should not be allowed to have jobs. Only
native born Irish people should be allowed to work here. This is the logic of
the idea of ‘Irish jobs for Irish workers’ or ‘We should look after our own
first’. ‘We should look after our own
first’ sounds reasonable but putting it into practice would mean massive and
vicious discrimination.
It
would mean refusing to employ people or sacking them on the grounds of their
nationality or ethnic background and, more or less inevitably, that would turn
into discriminating against them on the basis of their skin colour, ie outright
racism. It would not, in the main, be the 28,000 Americans in Ireland, 17,000
Scots, 6,000 Australians or 212,000 English and Welsh who would be thrown out
of work; overwhelmingly it would be the 20,000 Nigerians, the 20,000 Romanians
or the 3,000 Bangladeshis.
Indeed, to some extent this is what is already happening even though such
discrimination is illegal. In 2012 the Annual Monitoring Report on Integration
showed the number of immigrants in employment between 2008 and 2011 fell by
40%, compared to a fall of 10% for Irish nationals over the same period. The
unemployment rate in 2011 was 18% among immigrants compared to just under 14%
for Irish nationals (
http://www.rte.ie/news/economy/2012/0605/323566-immigrants-hit-hardest-by-recession/).
At present this discrimination occurs ‘quietly’, on the sly (which is easy
enough for employers to do; they just say ‘The job has gone’ when a black
person or Eastern European applies). If it were made legal and state policy it
would obviously multiply many fold and worse would follow. Immigrants are
already attacked for being on welfare or the dole (so they are damned if they
work and damned if they don’t). If all immigrants were stopped from working it
would be said that they contributed nothing to society and their welfare should
be stopped. This would mean either starving them or forcibly deporting them.
And once a group in society is stigmatised and isolated in this way it leads to
all sorts of barbarities.
Of course, most people who say ‘We should look after our own’ haven’t
thought this through. They are just ‘giving out’ and don’t realize what it
would lead to. But some people do, which is why fascists and Nazis across
Europe (like the British BNP and the Greek
Golden Dawn) always attack immigrants. When the idea of ‘British Jobs for
British Workers’ was raised in England
the BNP seized on it and said ‘When we say
British jobs for British workers
we mean
it.’
To summarise: it is completely untrue that immigration causes or has caused
unemployment. The real cause is the economic crisis of a system based on
production for profit. Blaming foreigners and immigrants is scapegoating of the
first order, it leads to vicious racism and crucially it lets those really
responsible – the bankers, capitalists and politicians – off the hook.
Housing and health
Housing and health are two areas of Irish society in serious crisis. In
neither case did immigration or immigrants have anything to do with causing the
problems but in both cases there are people who want to blame them for the
situation or to ‘solve’ it at their expense.
The housing crisis has two main aspects to it: homelessness and mortgage
distress.
On homelessness
Focus Ireland
reports:
But Focus Ireland believes this is an underestimation and ‘estimates that
there are up to 5,000 people at any one time who are homeless in Ireland.’ It
also points out that many more people are at risk of becoming homeless:
People who are homeless can find it very
difficult to find a place to live. There is a large waiting list for local
authority housing in Ireland.
Over 98,000 households were in need of social housing in 2011, and 2,348 (or 2.4%) of these households were in need of
housing due to homelessness. There are also thousands more families and single
people who are at risk of becoming homeless. These people are often at risk of
losing their current accommodation due to a range of reasons, including
struggling to pay their rent or falling into mortgage arrears.
In September 2013 Fr Peter McVerry, the founder of a trust for the homeless,
told the
Irish Times, ‘After 30 years
of working to eliminate homelessness, I believe the problem is now worse than
ever, perhaps even out of control.’
But this has nothing to do with there being a housing shortage
or with foreigners taking people’s houses. On the contrary there is, as a
result of building in the property boom, a huge surplus of houses in Ireland.
In November 2013 official figures showed there were 1,200 ghost estates in the
country (
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1200-ghost-estates-blight-country-29792522.htm).
Estimates for the number of empty houses vary but in 2012 the Deutsche Bank
suggested that there are 289,451 empty houses in Ireland, which represents a
vacancy rate of 15%, and in 2011 the Census lists the number of empty homes to
be around 230,000 (excluding the 60,000 holiday homes). So if people are
homeless and the numbers of homeless are rising this not because there are not
enough houses but because they cannot afford to access them, and this has
nothing to do with immigrants and everything to do with austerity, rising
poverty and government inaction.
Mortgage distress is very widespread. The latest data from the
Central Bank for the third quarter of 2013, published in November, shows that
owners of 141,520 principal dwelling houses (PDH) had fallen behind in their
home loan payments. The number of accounts in arrears for more than 90 days at
the end of September had risen to 99,189. The increase of 1,315 was driven
entirely by accounts that are behind by over 720 days (see
http://www.thejournal.ie/mortgage-arrears-central-bank-1208062-Dec2013/).
For the people concerned, looking into the abyss of losing
their homes, and for other people fearing that it may be them next, this is a
nightmarish situation. For some it may be tempting to lash out and blame
someone, anyone, maybe ‘the foreigners’, or to hope that someone else – maybe
someone with a different colour skin or from a different country – should be
made homeless instead. But, in truth, the mortgage crisis, like homelessness,
has nothing at all to do with immigrants and everything to do with the mad
property bubble that developed during the Celtic Tiger. Kieran Allen and Brian
O’Boyle describe what happened:
Between January 1996 and December
2005 553,267 housing units were built in Ireland. And then, despite the fact
that a quarter of a million units were unoccupied, another 244,590 units were
added between January 2006 and December 2009. At the height of the bubble Ireland
was building twice as many units per head of the population as anywhere else in
Europe… New house prices rose in Dublin
by 429 per cent while the price of second hand houses rose by 551 per cent
between 1991 and 2007.
(K. Allen & B. O’Boyle, Austerity Ireland, Pluto Press, 2013,
p.74)
This extraordinary bubble did not happen of itself. It was
deliberately driven by an alliance of landowners, bankers, property
developers and landlords – all looking
to build, buy, lend and let for a profit and all backed by the government and
various corrupt politicians. When the bubble burst as bubbles always do
hundreds of thousands of home owners, who had bought at the height of the
Tiger, were left in negative equity and with unpayable debts and mortgages.
Mortgage distress is also closely linked to that other main
feature of Ireland
after the boom, unemployment. Davy Stockbrokers did a survey and found that
there was a close correlation between mortgage arrears and long term
unemployment (as above, p.70).
The crisis in the health service is well summed up by a report on RTE that
has appeared as I write these words:
The number of patients on trolleys in hospitals
waiting for admission to a bed continues to increase. Today there are 467
patients on trolleys in emergency departments or in wards waiting for
admission to a bed, figures from the Irish Nurses and
Midwives Organisation show. It represents an increase of six on
yesterday's total figure.
The INMO
says that of the 467 patients affected today, 374 are on trolleys in emergency
departments and 93 are on trolleys in wards.
The worst affected hospitals today are Beaumont
Hospital in Dublin with 49 patients waiting on trolleys, University Hospital
Galway with 37 patients waiting, the Midland Regional Tullamore with 33
patients and Connolly Hospital Dublin with 32 patients (
http://www.rte.ie/news/2014/0108/496576-patients-trolleys/).
The HSE has tried to excuse this
situation by saying that ‘part of the increase is due to the seasonal flux that
traditionally takes place after Christmas and the New Year period.’ But this
doesn’t work because, as the same report points out, ‘This day last year (ie
just after Christmas and New Year 2013 – JM) there were 345 patients on
trolleys in emergency departments, compared with 374 today.’ So the situation
is getting worse. When 495 patients were on trolleys in March 2006 the then
Health Minister Mary Harney (not known for her softness) described the
situation as ‘a national emergency’. So presumably it’s a national emergency
today.
What underlies this situation is the systematic cuts that have been made to
the health service and, in particular, to staffing levels over recent years, as
the graph below shows:
Health Service Staffing to July 2013
But maybe things are going to get better soon. Not according to the Minister
of Health, James Reilly.
Niall Hunter, Editor
www.irishhealth.com, reports:
Health Minister James Reilly has admitted that
2014 will be a 'massively challenging year' for the health service, with €666
million in cuts and savings targeted, particularly at medical card holders.
The savings target is higher than was predicted
in recent days – Minister Reilly admitted that 2014 would be the most
challenging year yet for the health service.
He said the out-turn for 2013 for the health
service had been €14.21 billion, and the budget would be €13.66 billion
for 2014….
Minister Reilly said 35,000 over
70s would lose their full medical cards through a lowering of income
thresholds, generating savings of €25 million; however, they would still
be entitled to a GP visit card.
Commenting on the hike in prescription charges
to €2.50, Minister Reilly referred to the problem of over prescribing in
the elderly, and stressed that sometimes patients did not necessarily need a
pill for every illness.
The charming Minister Reilly, who lives in a 13 bedroom mansion in Moneygall
on which he claims tax breaks, tries to excuse this situation by blaming the
elderly for wanting too many pills (or is it doctors for prescribing them?);
blaming foreigners is just as absurd. Clearly the responsibility lies with
Minister Reilly and with the Fine Gael/Labour government who are making the
cuts, and with the Fianna Fail/Green government who made cuts before them.
Any scapegoating, whether it’s
immigrants, refugees, Travellers, single parents, old people or people with red
hair just helps James Reilly and his partners in crime get away with it.
However, it is especially obnoxious where immigrants are concerned because it
is clear that many ‘foreigners’ work in the health service as doctors, nurses
and support staff, thus making a major contribution to keeping it going.
Nurses in Ireland
As we have seen, there is no evidence to support the idea that foreigners or
immigrants are specially privileged, quite the contrary, and the notions that
the crises in jobs, housing and health are the fault of immigrants make no
sense. These are myths. But why are these myths so widely believed? Part of the
answer to this is that they tap into prejudices that are deep rooted and
widespread in our society and in our world – Ireland
is by no means unusual in this; these are the prejudices of racism. We shall
now look at the nature of racism and where it comes from.
2. Where
Racism Comes From
The term racism is used to refer to prejudice and discrimination against
people on the grounds of their real or presumed ethnic origin. The main form of
racism in the modern world has been, and remains today, ‘White’ European and
North American racism against ‘people of colour’ such as Africans, Asians, Native
Americans (‘Indians’), Arabs, Iranians, Polynesians, etc and their descendants.
Sometimes, now is one of those times,
this racism has also extended to certain Europeans such as Poles, Bulgarians
and Romanians and there have been times, especially in Britain, when there was
strong racism against the Irish.
In addition to this there have been some specific forms of racism which have
been, and are, very important – these include anti-Jewish racism (usually
called anti-Semitism), anti- Gipsy or Roma racism, anti-Traveller racism (in
Ireland) and in recent years anti-Muslim racism or Islamophobia.
To understand the general phenomenon of racism we need to begin with the
main form which is of Europeans towards non-Europeans.
This has very deep roots in our society and goes back many centuries.
However, it is not simply ‘natural’ or part of human nature. Racism was not,
for example, a feature of the ancient Egyptian or Greek world (when northern
Europeans were ‘backward’) or the Roman Empire: there was slavery but it was
not on the basis of ‘race’ or skin colour and most slaves were ‘white’ while
there was at least one African
emperor
(Septimius Severus, reign AD 193-211).
Nor is racism a biological thing. Race is not a scientific concept.
Biologically and scientifically there is only one race, the human race, or,
more accurately one human species every living member of which derives from
common ancestors in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Of course there all sorts
of physical differences between humans in different parts of the world
(differences of height, weight, anatomy, hair type and colour, etc, as well as
a wide variety of shades of skin colour) but the idea that these divide us into
distinct races (the ‘white race’, the ‘black race’, the ‘yellow/ Chinese’ race,
etc) is false. Both racism and the idea of races were a product of history –
the history of Western Europe coming to dominate the
rest of the world.
This begins at the end of the 15th century – Columbus’s arrival in the New World
in 1492 is a convenient landmark date. We are told that Columbus
‘discovered’ America.
This is not true: America was ‘discovered’, both North and South, by people
(later called Indians) coming from Asia via Alaska many thousands of years
earlier. Columbus wasn’t even the
first European to get there – the Vikings reached America
about 1000. What Columbus did was begin the
conquest of America, which was followed up rapidly by the Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, English and French.
At around the same time (with Vasco de Gama in 1498) the Portuguese reached
India by sea and this began a process of European colonization of much of Asia.
This whole process lasted for several centuries and culminated at the start of
the 20th century with Western European countries having divided up between them
virtually all the rest of the world, at which point they fought the First World
War to decide which among them should get the lion’s share.
The rise to world domination of Western Europe was
bound up with the development there of a new economic system, capitalism.
Capitalism was a competitive system based on production for profit and in
search of profits (through slaves, cheap labour, raw materials, markets and
territory) the capitalists scoured the whole globe. It was this process as a
whole that drove the development of racism.
Slavery and empire
A crucial role in the early development of capitalism, in opposition to the
feudal system of kings, lords, knights and peasants that preceded it, was
played by the transatlantic slave trade that shipped Africans in their millions
to work as slaves on the plantations of the Americas.
It was through this trade and the huge profits it produced that many of the
early capitalists and merchants acquired the capital to invest in agriculture
and industry to get capitalism going. But they had a problem: how could this
mass enslavement be justified?
This was a particularly acute problem because these early middle class
capitalists, or ‘bourgeoisie’ as they have become known, were involved at the
time in a struggle for their own rights against the old ruling class of
monarchs and lords (the feudal aristocracy). In this struggle they adopted the
language of human rights and equality to get the majority of ordinary people on
their side. So the American Declaration of Independence said that ‘All men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, and
the French Revolution proclaimed as its slogan ‘Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity’.
So how was this to be reconciled with slavery and the slave trade? By
developing the racist idea that black people were not fully human or were by
nature inferior and incapable of freedom or governing themselves.
In the 19th century as capitalism, including US capitalism, industrialised
so it came to depend on ‘free’ wage labour rather than slavery and this led to
the abolition of the slave trade and slavery (as in the American Civil War) but
at the same time colonialism developed more and more. Britain,
especially, established its empire in India
and large parts of Africa but many other European powers
were involved too, like the French in Indo-China and North Africa
and the Belgians in the Congo.
To justify this racism shifted to emphasise the childlike qualities of
native peoples; they had to be ruled by Europeans for their own good and led
slowly, very slowly, towards independence when they grew up. Rudyard Kipling
expressed this attitude powerfully in his notorious poem ‘The White Man’s
Burden’ (1898).
Take up the White Man's
burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
These racist ideas spread throughout the official culture of Western society
in the 19th and early 20th century. They were adopted by politicians, learned
philosophers and popular writers alike. They were widespread in children’s
literature such as Enid Blyton and
Mary
Poppins (the racism was cut out of the Disney film). There was a so-called
‘scientific’ racism which ranked races according to their supposed innate
intelligence and level of development, with white Europeans at the top, black
Africans at the bottom and Indians and Chinese in between.
What is vital to grasp here, vital for understanding all forms of racism, is
the relationship between racism and oppression. The more one nation or set of
rulers oppressed and exploited another, the more racist they became towards
them. This is why there was such strong racism against the Irish in Britain.
The British landlords and politicians didn’t hate the Irish ‘naturally’ nor did
they exploit Ireland
because they hated it. They exploited Ireland and the Irish people for
profit – the same reason they enslaved
blacks and conquered India – and that made them hate and fear the Irish.
Anti-immigrant racism
In the 20th century, especially after the Second World War, the imperialist
powers were gradually forced to grant independence to their colonies. India
became independent from Britain
in 1947. Many African countries followed suit in the 1960s. There was also a
massive challenge to the old racism from the Civil Rights Movement in America
which had a big international impact.
At the same time Western capitalism experienced a major economic boom, like
the Celtic Tiger but on a much wider scale (though it didn’t really happen in Ireland).
The result was a huge demand for labour which was met by importing workers from
the former colonies. By and large these immigrants came to what had been their
colonial masters: Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians to Britain; Algerians
and other North Africans to France; etc.
This brought about a shift in the nature of racism. Many of the old
prejudices remained below the surface but the focus changed from stressing the
biological or inborn inferiority of non-white people to emphasizing their
‘cultural’ difference and the supposed ‘threat’ they represented by being ‘over
here’. People who had been happy to go to India
or Africa and lord it among millions of black people now
became indignant at the presence of black people in Europe.
All the things, almost word for word,
that are now being said about foreigners and immigrants in Ireland – ‘They
are taking our jobs’, ‘They’re all on welfare’, ‘They’re getting special
favours from the government’ – were said about Asians and West Indians and
others in Britain in the 1960s and 70s. Often the Irish were included too,
especially when they were tarred with the ‘terrorist’ brush during the
Troubles.
Enoch Powell
The racist charge was led by the leading Tory MP Enoch Powell with his
infamous speeches in 1968 predicting that unless immigration was halted and
reversed the streets of Britain would become ‘rivers of blood’. When Powell was
kicked out of the Tory party he came to Northern Ireland and became a Unionist
MP for South Down!
This anti-immigrant racism serves the ruling class of society very well. It
provides a very convenient scapegoat on which to blame all the problems of
society, thus diverting and deflecting working class anger away from themselves,
and at the same time it is part of a strategy of divide and rule setting one
section of the working class against another.
We shall return to the question of immigration later in a discussion of
whether Ireland
needs immigration controls. First it is necessary in an Irish context to say
something about the relationship between nationalism and racism.
Nationalism and racism
Internationally, and especially in Europe, it is
clear that there is a link between strong or intense nationalism and racism. In
France the main racist organization is called the Front National, in Britain it
is called the British National Party, and there’s also the National Front, the
UK Independence Party and the English Defence League. It is not an accident
that the German Nazi Party were ardent German nationalists. In Ireland,
however, the nationalist tradition has been very different.
This is because Ireland
was an oppressed country and Irish nationalism or patriotism developed in
opposition to British rule and British imperialism. This gave Irish nationalism
a democratic and progressive dynamic that was absent in the nationalisms of
oppressor imperialist countries like Britain, France, Germany and others which
were, and remain, thoroughly reactionary. Consequently Irish nationalists and
republicans were generally anti-racist and tended to identify with anti-racist
and national liberation movements in other countries like the Civil Rights
Movement in America and Nelson Mandela and the Anti-Apartheid struggle in South
Africa.
This relatively progressive character of Irish nationalism may be one of the
reasons why no significant fascist or organised far-right racist party has yet
emerged in Ireland, unlike many other European countries.
However, there was always a weakness at the heart of Irish nationalism (and
all nationalism) in that it looked on the Irish people as all sharing the same
interests regardless of whether they were rich or poor, workers or bosses,
exploited or exploiting, and could then go on to counterpose those national
interests to the interests of all foreigners, not just the British ruling class
who oppressed Ireland for so long.
Now that the Irish Republic
is no longer an oppressed colony and, indeed, has joined the club of richer
European nations, there exists a danger that Irish nationalism can be directed
against immigrants from poorer countries in Africa, Asia
or Eastern Europe. If that happens it will inevitably start
to become racist. All those who cherish the legacy of Wolfe Tone, Jim Larkin,
Padraig Pearse and James Connolly or, for that matter, Bobby Sands should
strongly resist this tendency.
One further point needs to be made about where racism comes from. It is
often assumed that racism originates at the lower end of society, being
basically a working class phenomenon. Of course it is true that many ordinary
working class people are influenced by racism and accept certain racist ideas
but this not where racism originates, or where it is most deeply embedded.
As our historical survey of its development shows, whether we are talking
about slavery, empire, anti-immigration or nationalism the real source of
racism is at the top of society. It is primarily driven by our rulers and
exploiters and serves their interests. In contrast the main opposition to
racism in all countries has come from the working class and the left. We shall
now look at how this process of pushing racism from the top operates.
3. How
Racism is Promoted
In the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries overt racism was part of the
official ideology of Western society. Even someone as ‘progressive’ as Abraham
Lincoln was, in fact, openly racist saying:
I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing
about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races
– that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of
negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white
people… I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position
assigned to the white race.
The 1911 edition of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica (then considered the most authoritative reference book in the
world) stated ‘Mentally the negro is inferior to the white...the arrest or even
deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very
largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place
in the negro's life and thoughts,’ and referred favourably to the Ku Klux Klan.
And it must be remembered that explicitly racist Jim Crow Laws (which imposed racial
segregation) remained in force in the American southern states until the 1960s.
But that is not how things stand now... Now almost all governments,
establishment politicians and mainstream media outlets claim to be anti-racist.
So-called ‘world leaders’, not just Barack Obama but Bill Clinton, George Bush,
David Cameron and many others, fell over themselves to attend Nelson Mandela’s
funeral (even though some of
them would
once have called him a ‘terrorist’). From time to time some public figure is
caught out making a racist comment, usually when they thought the microphone
was switched off or they wouldn’t be reported. When that happens they have to
apologise (‘for any offence caused’) and often have to resign.
This state of affairs is undoubtedly a step forward and it has been hard
won, by a multitude of different anti-racist campaigns, but it does NOT mean
that businesses, politicians and the establishment media don’t promote racism.
On the contrary they do it all the time but they simply avoid using openly
racist language.
Back in 1993 the Nazi BNP ran a
successful local election campaign in the Isle of Dogs in the East End of
London based on attacking the local Bangladeshi community. The slogan they used
was ‘Isle of Dogs Homes for Isle of Dogs People!’ No use of the N word, no
mention of Pakis, or even blacks or coloureds but EVERYONE knew what they
meant. Unfortunately this method is not confined to the extreme right but is
used by all sorts of mainstream politicians, pundits and media.
Employers and landlords are able to practise large scale racial
discrimination without saying or doing anything openly racist at all. All that
is necessary is that there should be an unspoken bias in recruitment, promotion
and letting policy and the overall effect on ethnic minorities will be massive.
But it will always be very difficult to prove discrimination in any individual
case. However, the overall statistical evidence, including the evidence I have
already quoted on the disproportionate growth of unemployment among non-Irish
nationals in the recession, shows that in Ireland
today this discrimination is widespread.
And what is done by employers and landlords can also be done by all sorts of
people who have official power or authority over ordinary people in the
numerous state institutions: judges, gardai, council administrators, civil
servants, hospital managers and so on. This is not to suggest that all such
people are racist – no doubt many are not – but it is to understand that the
potential for racism is there and can easily be realized.
State racism
The Irish people have a strong tradition of anti-racism and of
identification with oppressed people in other countries, such as the
Palestinians and black South Africans, but Irish governments and the Irish
state have a long record of hostility to immigrants. Even when the Irish
population was down to less than three million and falling the state set its
face against dealing with the problem through immigration, mainly through a
desire, backed by the Church, to ensure that the country remained
overwhelmingly Catholic.
In 1935 they passed the Aliens Act which required immigrants to report every
week to the Aliens Office. At that time there was particular discrimination
against Jews who were only allowed into Ireland
if they had converted to Catholicism.
The racism of the Irish State
is clearly seen in its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. The world is
full of oppressive regimes, many supported by the West, that persecute and
torture people because they are political opponents or because they are lesbian
or gay or because they are the wrong colour or nationality. Many people are
forced to flee from such regimes as a matter of survival. The world is also
full of devastating wars, many of them waged by or with the support of the
West, which force people from their homes and drive them into horrendous
refugee camps.
A very small proportion of such refugees manage to get to Ireland,
sometimes by design because they hope to find a safe haven here and sometimes
by chance because they are dropped here by people traffickers when they were
trying to get somewhere else, such as Canada.
But from the moment they arrive it is made clear they are not welcome: they are
treated with suspicion and subject to difficult and degrading conditions.
There is a long history of this. In 1956 there was a revolution in Hungary
which was brutally repressed by Russia
with many thousands of deaths. About 500 refugees reached Ireland
and were promptly detained in military camps until most of them eventually fled
from here. In 1992 27 Kurds (Kurds have been denied their national rights in Turkey,
Syria, Iran and Iraq and subject to many massacres) tried to claim asylum but
were forcibly put back onto planes by gardai at Shannon.
Dealing with the situation today the Irish Refugee Council provides the
following information:
While their application is
being processed, asylum seekers are housed by the government’s Reception and
Integration Agency (RIA) in direct provision
accommodation centres around the country. This means that they
live in hostel-like accommodation, where families are often housed in one room,
and singles usually share a room with others of the same sex. Shower and
toilet facilities are often shared...
Do asylum seekers get
social welfare or children’s allowance? Asylum seekers receive a
weekly allowance of €19.10 per adult and €9.60 per child. This must cover
any additional school expenses, clothing, footwear, toiletries, phone credit,
internet access, etc.
Can asylum seekers work? Asylum
seekers are not permitted to work in Ireland; therefore they are forced to
depend on the state.
Clearly, therefore, the issue of asylum seekers taking people’s jobs or
sponging on welfare does not even arise except as a racist myth. Moreover
asylum seekers are very likely to have their applications for refugee status
turned down and to be deported. Between 2005 and 2012, 2,259 people were
deported from Ireland,
including 973 Nigerians. Approximately 95% of asylum seekers get their
applications for refugee status rejected, the highest rate of rejection of any
EU member.
How is this inhumane treatment justified? There are two main claims made: that
Ireland is being ‘flooded’ or ‘overrun’ by asylum seekers and that most asylum
seekers are ‘bogus’ – they are really economic migrants. Neither of these
claims stands up.
First there has been a systematic decline in the number of those applying
for asylum arriving in Ireland,
from a peak of 11,600 in 2002 to only 940 in 2012. Even if we take the highest
figure this is less than 0.25% of the Irish population and no threat
whatsoever. The current figure of less than a thousand is statistically almost
invisible. Even if all the 11,600 of 2002
were
‘bogus’, which is quite untrue, it would still not have presented any difficulty
if they had been accepted and allowed to work.
But by always treating asylum seekers, along with immigrants as a whole, as
a threat and a problem the state
sends a
strong message to its citizens that there is something wrong with these people
and this feeds racism and divide and rule.
The institutional racism of the Irish state is further reinforced by the
institutional racism of the European Union which acts as a ‘rich man’s club’
with strict and brutally enforced border controls to keep out people from
poorer countries. This regularly results in tragedies in the Mediterranean
such as that off the Italian island
of Lampedusa on 3 October 2013. In one of the worst disasters of
its kind, more than 360 Eritreans died when the boat carrying them from Libya
caught fire and sank off the coast of Lampedusa. To make
matters worse the traumatized survivors were then detained in a hugely
overstretched reception centre for more than 100 days with many of them forced
to sleep outdoors for want of space.
In another incident in January this year the Greek coastguard were accused
by survivors of deliberately drowning 12 refugees whose boat capsized while it
was being towed. Apart from the appalling inhumanity of this behaviour, it sends
to the whole of European society, including Irish society, the racist message
that poor non-Europeans are a threat who must be kept out at all costs.
It would be possible to give many other examples of state and institutional
racism in Ireland
but it is also necessary to highlight the role played by the media.
Media racism
Contrary to its own claims the media is not an independent set of
institutions. Overwhelmingly it is owned and controlled either by big business
(especially Denis O’Brien and Tony O’Reilly) or by the state (principally RTE).
If, as we have shown, both business and the state have a shared racist agenda
then the media will too and in fact it plays a crucial part in spreading racist
ideas.
One way this operates is through the employment and promotion of
‘controversial’ columnists such as Ian O’Doherty and Kevin Myers. Both of these
worked for
The Independent, co-owned
by O’Brien and O’Reilly, and both had as part of their brief the regular
stirring up of racism – it would be extremely naïve to imagine that this
happens without the backing of the owners.
Ian O’Doherty
O’Doherty is a right wing bigot with a range of prejudices. He has written
that ‘
If every junkie in this country were to die
tomorrow I would cheer,’ and that gays are ‘sexual deviants’. Among his
specialities has been attacking Muslims, arguing that Islam is ‘the biggest
threat to the West since the end of the Cold War’. For this he was rewarded by
RTE with an invitation to make a documentary called Now Its Personal in which he spent a week with a Muslim family in
Dublin. The documentary began with footage of 9/11 and of an extremist Muslim
threatening to take over the world. In other words it was calculated to
reinforce the association of Muslims with terrorism [see the section of this
pamphlet on Muslims and Islamophobia].
Kevin Myers writes things like, ‘A hugely disproportionate amount of rural
crime is by a handful of Travellers...they have generated an atmosphere of
terror in rural areas unlike anything Ireland has experienced since the 1920s’ (The Irish Times,
19/1/96) and that ‘no one can deny this unassailable truth: our unemployment
figures have been made immeasurably worse by the large numbers of immigrants
who poured unchecked into the Celtic Tiger economy’ (
Independent.ie, 10/8/ 2011).
And in July 2008 he wrote an article entitled ‘Africa is Giving Nothing to
Anyone – Apart from Aids’ in which he asked, ‘How much morality is there in
saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today…resulting in another half-dozen
such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them?’ and
attacked an anti-malaria programme sponsored by Bill Gates, saying:
If his programme is successful, tens of millions
of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood,
he boasts. Oh good: then what? I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that's an
idea.
Of course O’Doherty and Myers are not typical but
that they are given major platforms in the media is not accidental. Also
alongside this overt racism there is a lower level but consistent tendency in
the media as a whole to reinforce stereotypes with stories such as ‘A GANG of
Romanian criminals is behind a sinister prostitution racket that has turned a
well-known part of Limerick city into a red-light district, a Sunday Independent investigation reveals’ and to repeatedly present stories about
immigration in terms of immigrants ‘flooding’ into the country. The use of the
‘flooding’ metaphor has become so regular that it passes without comment but it
has its effect.
The narrative of victimhood
To
see how racism is promoted and spread in our society today it necessary to
understand that the narrative of racism has changed. In the past, say 100 years
ago, the narrative of racism was a narrative of white and western superiority.
It presented non-whites and non-Europeans as innately inferior and thus
justified denying them self-government or equal rights.
Today
the dominant racist narrative presents whites and Europeans, in our case ‘the
Irish’, as victims of immigrants, non-whites or whoever. In this view of the
world ‘they’ have always taken over the country or are about to take over the
country. ‘They’ are getting the jobs and the welfare and ‘they’ are protected
by the police. And anyone who speaks out against this threat (like O’Doherty
and Myers) is ‘bravely standing up to political correctness’ and ‘the liberal
establishment’.
As
I noted at the beginning of this pamphlet this narrative can be widely heard in
Ireland today,
but it is not in any way unique to this country. On the contrary it is the tone
adopted by those, especially those politicians, who want to play to racist
feelings across Europe and
round the world. Thus when Margaret Thatcher wanted to play the race card in
the run up to her election in 1978 she said in a TV interview:
By the end of the century there will be four million
people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here.
Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather
afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different
culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for
law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it
might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those
coming in.
How
a minority of four million were going to ‘swamp’ a majority of over fifty
million was not explained but the message was clear. Even outright fascists
like the BNP and the
English Defence League, who undoubtedly do believe in ‘white superiority’,
couch their propaganda in terms of demanding ‘Rights for Whites’ and resisting
the Islamic takeover.
Like
much effective propaganda presenting the Irish people as victims combines an
element of truth with a big lie. The element of truth is that the Irish people
have been and are being victimised. They have been and are being made to pay
the price of the economics of the system that was not of their making. The big lie,
as I have shown throughout this pamphlet, is that they are being victimised by
foreigners or immigrants, rather than the bankers, speculators, big capitalists
and politicians who actually run the system, who benefit so massively from it
and who actually inflict wage cuts, job losses and welfare cuts on the people.
4. Travellers,
Roma, Jews, Muslims
Racism exists everywhere in the world today because capitalism is a world
system and capitalism everywhere needs scapegoats. Who the scapegoats are can
vary enormously from time to time and place to place: Armenians in Turkey in
1915-16; Albanians in Greece in the 1990s; Coptic Christians in Egypt; in
Australia the Aborigines and so on.
When it comes to Ireland there are, in addition to ‘foreigners’ and
non-Whites in general, four groups who are subject to racism and require
specific discussion: Travellers, Roma, Jews and Muslims.
Racism towards all these groups shows certain common features, especially
the tendency to attribute certain negative characteristics to the group and
then generalise it to all members of the group ie to stereotype people, as in
the British stereotype of the Irish as stupid and irrational. At the same time
each of these racisms has its own specific features. Racism towards Travellers
is not identical to anti-Jewish racism – no one claims that Travellers ‘rule the
world’ or ‘control all the banks’.
Travellers
Travellers are Ireland’s
own indigenous ethnic minority. They are a very small minority, only about
25,000 or approximately 0.5% of the population, but DNA
evidence shows that they have been a distinct ethnic group for about 1,000
years. Despite this they are not officially recognised as an ethnic minority by
the Irish state, even though they have this recognition in Britain.
In Irish society today Travellers are a highly marginalised and extremely
disadvantaged group. An analysis of the 2006 Census showed that among Irish
Travellers aged 25 to 44 unemployment stood at 74% compared to 6% for other
white Irish in the same age group and 50% of Travellers were in the lower
manual class category compared to 17% of other white Irish. Moreover 25% of
Travellers aged 25 to 44 had no access to a car compared to only 8% of other
white Irish. Levels of educational achievement are also very low with only 15%
having completed second level schooling.
Most revealing and most telling of all are the figures for life expectancy
which show a much higher rate of mortality with only 9% of Travellers over 50
compared to 28% of other white Irish. (All statistics from Dorothy Watson et
al,
Multiple Disadvantage in Ireland: An
Equality Analysis of Census 2006, ESRI.)
The fact of massive disadvantage is clear. The question arises as to what
causes this situation. Some would say that the Travelling community bring it on
themselves through their ‘lifestyle’ and behaviour. This claim rests on the
stereotype of Irish Travellers as anti-social, violent and criminal.
There are a number of points that need to be made in answer to this
argument:
1. Like all stereotypes this involves generalizing the behaviour of a small
minority to all members of a community.
2. There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that any particular
ethnic group (Travellers, Roma, African Americans, Australian Aborigines or
whoever) have an inborn criminal tendency. There is a lot of evidence to
suggest that those who suffer poverty, disadvantage and discrimination are more
likely to become involved in petty crime than those who do not, whatever their
ethnicity.
3. Once a group is stigmatised they are more likely to be picked on by and
come into conflict with the police, and thus to be seen as criminal. This well
established syndrome (known in sociology as ‘the crime amplification spiral’)
operates against many racial minorities including and especially Black
Americans. Anyone claiming US Blacks are innately criminal would be seen as
racist and rightly so. The same applies when the claim is directed at Irish
Travellers.
Brid Smith is a Dublin City Councillor for the People Before Profit Alliance
who works closely with the Traveller community, especially in the Ballyfermot
area. She offers the following powerful testimony on how Travellers face
institutional discrimination:
In my experience having worked
closely on Travellers Rights in Dublin City Council for the last five years,
there does exist an unofficial racism in the system. It is very hard to pin
down or prove but the facts speak for themselves.
Traveller families are discriminated against on a number of grounds. There are
upwards of 40 families around the city who still do not have safe and legal
access to the most basic facilities of water, sanitation and electricity. This
is an outrageous fact in 21st century Ireland
and it is not caused by austerity. In fact during the Celtic Tiger the
situation was no different.
Traveller families are discriminated against on the housing list because of an
indigenous clause that means they have to be living for a certain period of
time in an area to apply for housing in that area. This clause is not applied
to settled people. Traveller communities are often discriminated against and
denied investment in housing and basic infrastructure on the grounds that there
has been ‘criminal or anti-social elements’ in their communities. This would
never be used as a reason not to regenerate areas like Moyross or
Teresa's Gardens, despite the existence there of similar problems.
In fact in 2013 local authorities all over Ireland refused to draw down in the
region of 16 million euro dedicated by the Department of the Environment for
the provision of Traveller accommodation. There was a pattern of similar
responses of local authorities to the issue of ‘criminality and anti-social
behaviour’ whereby this was used as the reason or explanation for failure to
draw down the funding.
So entire communities are consistently penalised and stereotyped because of the
behaviour of a tiny minority. This is clearly discriminatory. But it also runs
deep in the system, and if austerity hurts the most vulnerable, then the
Travelling community have been hit the hardest. The education and accommodation
budgets for Travellers have been reduced by a staggering 86% in the last four
years. They may as well have told the Travellers to go away and stop existing.
But fortunately the Travellers themselves are resilient and dynamic people, who
hold their heads high, respect their culture and look for a decent future for
their children. They are up against a racist system, albeit disguised by the
establishment of committees and reports and plans that tick boxes but rarely
deliver.
It is important to note here that, as with other forms of
racism, this discrimination comes from above, from the state and its
institutions and not just from popular ‘ignorance’ or prejudice.
But what is the historical root of this discrimination and
prejudice? As with racism towards people of colour and immigrants we have to
look to the needs of the system as a whole.
Travellers, as their name implies, were originally, and to
some extent are still, a nomadic people, moving around the countryside. But
industrial capitalism as it developed needed to push people into a settled life
style suitable for wage labour in its factories and workplaces. Both employers
and state officials (who were closely linked) instinctively viewed Travellers
with hostility. They saw them as people who should be made to conform like
everyone else. Modern capitalism is highly bureaucratic – there is a form, and
often three – for everything. For Travellers this is extremely alienating and
officials and bureaucrats respond in kind by seeing Travellers as a ‘nuisance’
and a ‘problem’ or worse.
Irish Travellers are by no means the only people on the
receiving end of this kind of institutionalised bureaucratic discrimination.
Many immigrants, asylum seekers and, indeed ordinary working class people are
also treated this way, as are many indigenous people round the world (e.g. Australian
Aborigines) But in Ireland Travellers are particular victims.
Roma
There are very few Roma or Gypsies in Ireland – probably about 3000 – but in
Europe there are probably two million or so. All the statistics are unclear, as
is much about Roma people, but one thing is very clear: that in Europe as a
whole and especially in Eastern Europe the Roma are the single most marginalised,
disadvantaged and oppressed ethnic group.
Because so much about the Roma is surrounded by myth, prejudice and
ignorance it is necessary to start by establishing a few basic facts. First in
Ireland today there is a confusion between Roma and Romanians. Most of the Roma
in Ireland come
from Romania
but they are not the same. Most of the 20,000 or so Romanians in Ireland
are not Roma, and Roma have a long experience of being persecuted in Romania.
Also some of the Roma in Ireland
are from the Czech Republic,
Slovakia, Poland,
Hungary and Bulgaria.
Roma, also known as Romanies or Gypsies (and other names) were a nomadic
people who came originally from northern India.
They left India about 1,000 years ago and travelled westwards through Persia
and Asia Minor reaching Western Europe by about the 15th century.
The roots of modern anti-Gypsyism are
probably similar to the roots of the oppression of Irish Travellers, i.e. the
hostility of capitalism to people who resist wage labour and social conformity.
The oppression of Roma has taken many forms including a long period of
enslavement in Romania
(ending in the 1840s) but it reached its height with the Nazis in the Second
World War. Just as the Nazis attempted to exterminate all the Jews of Europe so
they tried to annihilate all the Roma. In the event they murdered approximately
half of European Jewry, about 6 million, and a roughly similar proportion of
Roma, about 500,000. This is important to remember because it means that almost
every Roma in Ireland
or Europe today will have lost members of their family
in this catastrophe.
Roma in the Holocaust
After the Second World War the Roma in Communist Eastern Europe were not
well treated or integrated but outright persecution of them was kept in check.
This has not been the case since the collapse of Communism and Eastern
Europe has seen the rise of right wing racist and fascist forces,
such as the Nazi Jobbik Party in Hungary,
who regard Roma as their main target. Violent racist attacks on Roma are
widespread in much of Europe. Consequently it must also
be born in mind that Roma in Ireland
are likely to have fled from such vicious persecution.
There are two main stereotypes of Roma: a romantic myth of passionate
Gypsies with their violins by the campfire and one that is very similar to the
stereotype of Irish Travellers. Recent media coverage has ensured that it is
the second stereotype that has predominated.
An additional element in anti-Roma sentiment is their association with
begging. Here it is worth stressing that people – Roma or Irish – beg out of
poverty and desperation, not choice. Sitting on a bridge on the Liffey in the
cold is not an easy or nice way to spend the day. Denouncing beggars means
denouncing the most unfortunate and downtrodden members of society, while
regarding all Roma as beggars is crude stereotyping.
Just how damaging such stereotyping can be was shown by an incident in
Tallaght in October 2013. One of the many long-standing myths about
Roma/Gypsies is that they steal children. In Athens
the Greek police, known for their racism, removed a blond child called Maria
from her Roma parents on suspicion that she had been abducted. This story was
immediately seized on by the media and became international news – precisely
because it bought into and fed the ‘Gypsies steal children’ myth. Within days
the garda in Tallaght had seized a blond four year old Roma child from her home
because she was supposed not to look like her parents. They did this despite
the parents’ vehement protests and production of a birth certificate. In the
event DNA testing, only carried out AFTER
the removal, proved that child was the natural daughter of the parents.
The effect of the episode was not only to traumatise the parents and child
concerned but also to make the whole Roma community feel under suspicion and at
risk.
Jews
Anti-Semitism has a very long and grievous history in Europe,
stretching back to the Middle Ages and culminating in the worst crime in human
history, the Nazi Holocaust.
In Ireland
today, as opposed to the first half of the 20th century, anti-Semitism is less significant.
Irish Jews are not at present a disadvantaged or majorly oppressed group like
Travellers, and they are not subject to systematic attack by the media like Muslims.
It is unlikely they will be a principal target of racist agitation at present,
but this doesn’t mean we can just ignore the issue of anti-Semitism.
The image of the Jew as a greedy money lender and banker is a classic
example of racist stereotyping. Its historical roots lie in the role of Jews as
a trading people in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages and in the fact
that a small number of Jews became lenders at a time when money lending, or
usury as it was called, was regarded as sinful by the Church and barred to
Christians.
This stereotype, with centuries behind it, was manipulated by Hitler and the
Nazis to serve their purposes. The Nazis’ fundamental attitude was hatred of
the working class, trade unions and the left but to gain popular support they
needed to sound radical. Blaming the economic crisis and mass unemployment on
Jewish bankers and
Jewish speculators enabled them to appear anti-capitalist and
express popular anger, without actually challenging capitalism or the bulk of
the capitalists. In return many of the big German capitalists funded Hitler and
helped him come to power so as to smash the left.
Why this still matters is because traces of these notions are still around.
They surface in various conspiracy theories, in the totally false idea that the
Rothschild family control world banking or the myth that Jews run all the
media. If working people fall for these ideas their entirely justifiable anger
at the system and the people who run it will once again be diverted onto the
wrong target.
When right wing Jewish politicians pursue right wing or anti working class
policies they should be attacked for their policies, not their Jewishness, and
socialists who are strongly anti-capitalist have a particular responsibility in
this matter.
Muslims.
The majority of Muslims already faced racism by virtue of being people of
colour from Africa, the Middle East
and Asia, but this has been added to by the rise of
Islamophobia.
Islamophobia, or fear and
suspicion of Muslims, has recently become one of the main forms of racism in
the world and so inevitably has an impact in Ireland.
Islamophobia was deliberately fostered by the US state and US media, which
together form the most influential political and cultural force in the world
today. It was developed as a response to the rise in the Middle East
and elsewhere of Islamist political forces. The first major manifestation of
this was the Revolution against the pro-Western Shah of Iran in 1979. It was
then intensified as part of George Bush’s ‘war on terror’ after 9/11.
The racist stereotype of Muslims is that they are backward religious
fanatics with reactionary attitudes to women and gays and an inclination to
terrorism. Just as earlier racism was designed to justify slavery and empire so
this image, carefully cultivated by the Western media, serves as a cover for US
wars of intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
At the root of this is the US
determination to maintain control of the world’s oil supplies. Oil is the
world’s most important source of power – the system runs on oil. But a huge
amount of the world’s oil reserves are in predominantly Muslim countries. This
means the American government constantly needs to intervene in these countries
in order to control their governments directly or indirectly.
Islamophobia is their way of justifying this. The idea that Muslims are
mostly religious fanatics who ‘hate the West’ because of its freedom and are
about to try to conquer it or attack it through terrorism enables the US to
wage imperialist wars while pretending to be defending itself.
If the world’s oil supplies were concentrated in Buddhist countries we would
probably have seen the development of Buddhophobia and Buddhists would be
depicted as ‘anti-Western’, ‘backward’,
‘theocratic’ and with an inclination to set fire to themselves.
But if the origin of Islamophobia lay in the needs of the US ruling class it
has now spread throughout the culture of the Western world in a way that
ordinary Muslims in Western countries, including Ireland, live under a cloud of
suspicion and hostility. In view of this it is necessary to state a few basic
facts.
1. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in all countries are not
‘fundamentalists’, Islamic militants, terrorists or fanatics but just ordinary
people living their lives in peace.
2. The terrorist threat is greatly exaggerated. Between 2010 and today there
was only one serious ‘Muslim’ terrorist attack in America – the Boston Marathon
bombing in April 2013 which claimed three lives and received saturation media
coverage. That is far less than the numbers killed by lightning (average 51 per
year in the US),
by police (587 in 2012 and 304 in 2013) and in school shootings (38 in 2012, 12
in 2013). In Ireland
there has never been a Muslim terrorist attack.
3. No Muslim country has actually made war on Europe
since the defeat of the Ottomans at Vienna
in 1683 and no Muslim country has the capacity to launch such an attack. There
is no Muslim threat to the West.
4,
There is no special connection
between Muslims and terrorism
‘Terrorism’ has been practised at various times by people of all religions
and none, ranging from the Russian Narodniks in the 19th century to the Italian
Red Brigades in the 1970s, far-right Americans, and of course Republicans and
Loyalists in Ireland. The link is not religion but political oppression and
nationalism.
5. Predominantly Muslim countries stretch from Morocco
to the Philippines
and exhibit a wide range of governments, social behaviour and religious
customs, with a number of different versions of Islam. Crude generalizations
about all Muslims are no more likely to be true than such generalizations about
Christians.
6. Yes, many Muslims (but by no means all) have conservative views on women
and gays. But then so do many Christians – indeed such views were dominant in
both Ireland
and America
until very recently, and to some extent still are.
7. Many Muslim women wear the hijab (or headscarf) but only a small minority
wears the burka or total covering, just as only a small minority of Irish women
became or are nuns.
For all these reasons it is quite wrong to demonise Muslims who live in Ireland
or anywhere else. They should be treated with respect and welcomed just like
people of all other religions or ethnic groups that live here.
What these four examples of racism all show is that the system we live
under, capitalism, is continually on the lookout for scapegoats it can blame
and prejudices it can use so as to deflect popular anger. It is a trademark of
the far-right and of fascist forces that they try to exploit these issues. At
the end of the day they don’t particularly care who the target is so long as
there is some vulnerable group they can use to stir up hatred.
The history of fascism in Britain
illustrates this. In the 1930s British fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, focused
their attacks on Jews. In the 1960s and 70s the National Front concentrated on
black West Indians. In the 1980s with the British National Party the main focus
became Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and now, for both the BNP
and the EDL (English Defence League), it is Muslims.
Everyone who wants to live in a democratic and halfway decent society should
reject this whole racist mind set.
Working class people, in particular, have a vital interest in defending
the multicultural unity of their communities and of their movement.
5. Do
We Need Immigration Controls?
Some of the main arguments in favour of immigration controls – immigrants
are taking our jobs, all on welfare, taking our houses, sponging on the health
service etc – have already been discussed and rejected. However, the idea that
we must limit immigration is widely accepted, including by many people who
would definitely consider themselves not to be racist, so it is worth looking
at the issue again in its own right.
The case for immigration control is based on the assumption that immigrants
are, in one way or another, a ‘problem’ for the host country. There are two
ways in which they can be seen as a problem: in terms of their
numbers or in terms of
who they are. Unfortunately the reality
is that arguments about numbers are often used to conceal concerns about who
the immigrants are, concerns which are really racist. In other words it is not ‘floods’
of ‘white’ British or Americans people are worried about but an ‘influx’ of
Africans, Asians and Romanians. But first let’s look at the numbers argument on
its own merits.
It is simply not true that a large or increasing population is economically
damaging for a country or a strain on its resources. This is for the simple
reason that a country’s resources are not fixed but are produced by its people.
The larger the population the more people there are to produce goods and
services. This basic truth is borne out by the whole history of the world whose
total population has been growing for thousands of years and which has also, in
terms of overall wealth, been getting richer (though inequality has also
grown).
The same thing is true at the level of individual countries. Singapore and
Hong Kong are two of the most densely populated places on earth, with 7,605 and
6,620 per sq. km respectively. They are also two of the richest places in Asia
and have both grown enormously wealthier as their populations have been rising.
Taiwan (645 per
sq. km) and South Korea (505 per sq. km) are other examples of countries that
have combined high population density with rapid economic growth.
Ireland by
contrast has a very low population density. With only 65 per sq. km it ranks 147th
in a list of countries by population density. The UK,
with a standard of living roughly similar to Ireland’s,
has a population density of 262 per sq. km, four times greater than Ireland. Ireland’s
population reached its peak at just over 8 million in the 1820s, fell
drastically as a result of the famine and then emigration to a low of 2.8
million in 1961. At no point was this low population an economic or social
advantage.
In fact one can give examples of rich countries with very low populations
(Australia, Canada) or rich countries with high populations (the Netherlands,
Japan) or poor countries with high populations (Bangladesh, India) or poor
countries with low populations (Bolivia, Chad) or China with the largest
population in the world at 1.4 billion which was very poor but has been growing
explosively for several decades.
The point is that there is no link between population size as such and
economic prosperity and there is no reason at all to believe that a growth in
the population of Ireland
through immigration would cause economic problems.
Unfortunately we are generally conditioned to believe that more people equals
more difficulties because it suits our rulers and their media to give the
impression that the reason for social problems is the existence of too many
people. For example world hunger is not due, as some people suggest, to there
being too many mouths to feed. World food production has actually grown faster
than world population. If hundreds of millions of people are suffering
malnutrition, as they are, it is not because there is not enough food but
because they are too poor to buy it.
In
other words it is caused by inequality and the production and distribution of
food, along with everything else, for profit.
So if the numbers argument is false this brings us back to the idea that
there is something the matter with who the immigrants are. Many people who
advocate immigration controls don’t answer this question – they simply assume
or imply that there is something wrong with being a ‘foreigner’. Well, we are
entitled to ask what exactly this is. Is it the colour of their skin? If so
then this is racism pure and simple. Or perhaps ‘they’ are supposed to be
‘lazy’ and ‘all on welfare’? Again there is a strong racist element here and it
is also factually completely false. Over 80% of immigrants of working age are
in jobs. Is it that ‘they’ are less intelligent or less well educated? Another
racist assumption and another factually disprovable claim. 46.4% of non-Irish
nationals have third level qualifications compared to only 32.8% of Irish, and
among Asians the figure rises to 72.6% (Frances McGinnity et al,
Annual Report on Integration 2012, ESRI,
p.34).
Or maybe it is that many immigrants are poor? Here snobbery merges with
racism. But yes, immigrants do tend to be poor; that is why they migrate from
poorer countries to richer ones in the hope of getting work and making a better
life for themselves – just as the Irish did when they set off for New York or
London.
There is one slightly more ‘respectable’ sounding argument for immigration
controls which is sometimes put forward by people who definitely think of
themselves as not racist: namely that they are needed to prevent the rise of
racism and maintain good relations. It says we are not racist but lots of
‘ordinary’ people are so it is necessary to limit the numbers of immigrants to
stop things getting out of hand. This was the argument put by British Labour
Party politicians back in the 1970s when they faced the rise of the Nazi National
Front to persuade the Labour Party to accept immigration controls.
This policy is wrong in principle and doesn’t work in practice. It concedes
the fundamental idea that immigrants are a problem and so encourages racism and
emboldens the racists. If 200,000 foreigners are preferable to 400,000 then 0
foreigners are better than 200,000. This then leads to calls for repatriation
and deportations. Just what the fascists and neo-Nazis want.
Nor is it the case that more immigrants equals more racism. The opposite is
the case. The more people of different nationalities and ethnicities mix the
more racism tends to be undermined. Again there is factual support for this:
Data from
the recent European Social Survey shows…a clear rise in positive attitudes [to
immigrants] to 2006 [when immigration was increasing – JM] and a clear fall in
2010. In terms of openness to
immigration openness was higher in the early years of the decade and fell in
2008 and again in 2010.
(Annual
Monitoring Report on Integration 2012, as above, p.79.)
Fundamentally the argument is not about numbers; as we have argued
throughout this pamphlet, it is about who gets the blame for the suffering that
working people experience. Is it the elites who inflict the pain or is it
various vulnerable scapegoats? Accepting the argument for immigration controls concedes
this basic principle and leads to worse not better race relations.
Finally if there are no good arguments for immigration controls there are certainly
good arguments for positively welcoming immigrants. Immigrants are a positive
benefit to the economy. As the education figures above show they bring many
useful skills and much knowledge. They are also more likely than Irish
nationals to be of working age, with a far lower proportion of elderly people.
Consequently they contribute more to the economy than they take out, and very
possibly more per head than the average Irish national.
But it is not just about economics. Migrants from round the world greatly
enrich the cultural life of this country. This is the case in terms of science,
of music and the arts, of food and of dress. A multicultural society broadens
all our horizons. Anyone who doubts this should look at New York, often
described as ‘the cultural capital of the 20th century’ with its
extraordinarily rich mix of Native Americans, WASPS, Irish, Jews, Blacks,
Spanish, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Chinese, Russians, Germans, Poles and more or
less everybody else under the sun.
It is also worth remembering that immigration is not something just
happening now in Ireland.
The whole history of humanity is a history of migration in that humans all
originated in Africa several millions of years ago and
then spread all over the globe. The same is true of homo sapiens, the latest
branch of the human family, which also first developed in Africa about 130,000
years ago and then migrated throughout the world.
And just in modern times there have emerged many nations such as Australia,
New Zealand,
the United States
and
all the countries of the Americas,
which would not exist in anything like their present form without massive
immigration over the last few hundred years.
6. The
Fight against Racism
Racism is not
just a mistaken idea
or even
just a morally wrong one. For
working people it is a deadly enemy. It threatens to divert, derail and divide
the resistance working class people put up to austerity, cuts, the bosses and
the government.
The example of Northern Ireland
serves as a warning here. In the Six Counties sectarianism, which is akin to
racism in some respects, has long divided the working class and thus weakened
the workers’ movement. The consequence has been that working class living standards
and housing there have always been the worst in the UK.
In the United States
racism towards blacks has had the same effect in the Deep South.
Mississippi, the state most
associated with ingrained racism, is the poorest in the Union,
followed by West Virginia, Arkansas,
Kentucky and Alabama.
Getting working people to accept racist ideas and turn their anger on
‘foreigners’ (or Travellers, or Roma, etc) makes them putty in the hands of
unprincipled right wing politicians and right wing newspapers. It turns them, in
the words of Bob Dylan, into ‘Only a Pawn in their Game’.
Racism is also a breeding ground for fascism and Nazism and they are busy
trying to exploit it right across Europe. But fascism destroys all democracy
and all workers’ rights and organizations. Hitler used anti-Semitism to get
popular support at a time of deep economic crisis in Germany
but the first people he put in concentration camps were German trade unionists
and socialists.
This is why it is vital we oppose racism on all fronts. When racist attacks
or incidents occur, eg assaults on individuals, or attacks on homes or shops,
we should do our best to mobilise support and solidarity with the victims. As
this pamphlet has argued, we have to oppose state and institutional racism,
opposing immigration controls and the racist treatment of asylum seekers. Racial
discrimination should be exposed wherever it occurs and we need to challenge
the myths about immigration circulated by politicians and the media. We also
have to combat racist stereotyping of Travellers, Roma and Muslims. And we should
give active support to anti-racist campaigning by organizations such as the
Anti-Racist Network or the Migrant Rights Council.
Trade unions have an important role to play here. Most trade unions have
anti-racist policies in place. They should be encouraged to act on them and
engage in active anti-racist campaigning. In Britain the South West TUC
has published a very useful factsheet, ‘Truth, Lies and Migrants’ (
http://bit.ly/1fmBBv3), countering the deluge
of lies about migrants from Bulgaria and Romania that have filled the British press.
A similar initiative in Ireland
would be very helpful.
So far Ireland
has been fortunate in that, unlike Greece,
France, Britain,
Hungary and
elsewhere, no serious fascist movement or party has yet emerged here. But this
could change and if it does we have to stand ready to counter it actively with
specific campaigning on the basis of a broad united front. Fascism should not
be allowed to get a foothold in Ireland.
We also have to take up and challenge the everyday anti-foreigner and racist
comments that all of us hear at work, in the pub, on the streets, etc. In doing
this we have to bear in mind that given the systematic way racist ideas have
been and are promoted by politicians and the media it is inevitable that some
working class people who are otherwise quite progressive will pick up some of
these ideas, often without wishing to be deliberately racist.
It is important, therefore, that in challenging these ideas we respond with
serious and patient argument to show people they are attacking the wrong
targets, rather than just abusing or denouncing them. Nevertheless it is
crucial that we do challenge them rather than just turning a deaf ear;
otherwise they gain ground and people can imagine that ‘everybody’ agrees with
them.
But vital as it is anti-racist campaigning and argument is not enough by
itself; it needs to be combined with struggle against the bosses, austerity and
the government across the board. As we have said, racist ideas play on working
people’s (legitimate) feeling of being done down and victimised but then direct
that anger onto easy scapegoats. The more people are able to resist and defeat
the forces that are really exploiting and oppressing them the less they will
blame the vulnerable and disadvantaged. Equally the more working class
resistance is held back or sold out the more ground racist ideas may get among
working people.
History offers many examples of this. It was only
after the German working class movement had failed in its almost
successful challenge to capitalism in 1919-23 and had become split and demoralised,
that Hitler and the Nazis were able to gain mass support. This is why racist
and fascist movements often grow when Labour and Social Democratic parties are
elected to government but fail to deliver on the improvements they promised.
Conversely when workers do resist and mass struggle develops their horizons
broaden, their sense of solidarity increases and they become much less prone to
the lure of scapegoating. Russia
provides a good example of this. Under the Tsar anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish
attacks (known as pogroms) were officially encouraged and widespread. When the
Russian people in 1917 rose in revolution they elected many Jews, including
Leon Trotsky, among their new leaders. When the people were again ground
underfoot by Stalin and his henchmen anti-Semitism returned with a vengeance.
Now, after the terrible tragedy of Stalinism – tyranny masquerading as
socialism – racism of all sorts is widespread in Eastern Europe.
The Socialist Alternative
For all these reasons socialists and socialism have an important part to
play in the struggle against racism. On the one hand the socialist project –
the replacement of capitalism by a society based on production for human need
rather than profit – totally depends on united working class action so
socialists have to be principled opponents of all racism. On the other hand the
socialist outlook is the one best suited to forging the links between
anti-racist campaigning and the general fight against austerity.
Socialism is also essential, not just for the immediate struggle against
racism but also for creating a society which actually gets rid of racism.
Racism grew out of the development of capitalism and every capitalist
society exhibits symptoms of racism to a greater or lesser degree. A society
which treats people as objects, as commodities to be bought and sold for
profit, and which divides people into rich and poor, exploiter and exploited,
will also need scapegoats and will try to set nation against nation, people
against people.
In contrast a genuinely democratic society without class divisions, with
collective ownership of the main industries and founded on the principle of
solidarity, will be able tear up the very roots of racism and unite the human
race.
Join the
Socialist Workers Party
The
Socialist Workers Party is committed to both the fight against racism in the
here and now and the building of a socialist alternative. If you agree with us on these things please
join us.
Text JOIN to 086 307 4060
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