"In the beginning immigration was a phenomenon linked to big business. It still continues to be that way. Those who clamor for always more immigration are big companies. This immigration is in accordance with the very spirit of capitalism, which aims at the erasure of borders (laissez faire, laissez passer).
While obeying the logic of social dumping, Balssa continues, a "low cost" labor market has thus been created with the "undocumented" and the "low-skilled," functioning as stopgap "jack of all trades." Thus, big business has reached its hand to the far-left, the former aiming at dismantling of the welfare state, considered to be too costly, the latter
killing off the nation-state considered to be too archaic." This is the reason why the French Communist Part (PCF) and the French Trade Union (CGT) (which have radically changed since then) had, until 1981, battled against the liberal principle of open borders, in the name of the defense of the working class interests."
It is a revealing fact that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their books Empire and Multitude endorse "world citizenship " when they call for the removal of borders, which must have as a first goal in developed countries the accelerated settlement of the masses of low-wage Third World workers. The fact that most migrants today owe their displacement to outsourcing, brought about by the endless logic of the global market, and that their displacement is precisely something capitalism strives for in order to fit everybody into the market, and finally, that each territorial attachment could be a part of human motivations — does not bother these two authors at all. On the contrary, they note with satisfaction that "capital itself requires increased mobility of labor as well as continuous migration across national borders." The world market should constitute, from their point of view, a natural framework for "world citizenship." The market "requires a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flux," destined to serve the interests of the "masses", because "mobility carries a price tag of capital, which means the enhanced desire for liberty."
The trouble with such an apology of human displacement, seen as a first condition of "liberating nomadism," is that it relies on a completely unreal outlook of the specific situation of migrants and displaced people. As Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn write, "Hardt and Negri delude themselves with the capacity of the immigration flows, thought to be a source for new opportunities for capital valuation, as well as the basis for opportunity enhancement for the masses. Yet, migrations signify nothing else but a process of universal competition, whereas migrating has no more emancipating value than staying at home. A "nomadic" person is no more inclined to criticism or to revolt than a sedentary person."
"As long as people keep abandoning their families, adds Robert Kurz, and look for work elsewhere, even at the risk of their own lives — only to be ultimately shredded by the treadmill of capitalism — they will be less the heralds of emancipation and more the self-congratulatory agents of the postmodern West. In fact, they only represent its miserable version."
Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
