I want your slavery and I don’t want you Illegal
Immigrants or stateless workers?
In the cycles of the crisis of the capitalist system, questions and rhetoric of social change appear, as well as, right-wing candidacies and infections also swell in the body of crisis societies, especially those that are accustomed to obtaining self-evident privileges that have been inherited from generation to generation. These infections are always looking for a scapegoat to justify the crisis, instead of engaging and clashing with its obvious material roots.
In the origins of complicity and obedience, the current discourses against immigration carry a number of contradictions, which feature a fair amount of obedience, populism, and lack of consistency. From one angle, immigrants, most of whom are full citizens, are portrayed as anticivilization. Therefore, in parallel, they are accused of laziness and dependence on governmental social support systems, and weak contribution to running the productive work machine that is productive for civilization.
While the movement of capital tends towards profitability, it sometimes needs the roles played by the ragtag proletariat. In many places it is structurally dependent on it and tends to extend its scope, even to perpetuate it, so that it is possible and for periods to turn a blind eye to the accumulation resulting from an illegal and organized labor force as long as that illegality is a guarantee of a quantitative and decisive reduction in workers’ wages. Domestic work for women was not excluded here in the times after women joined the proletarian labor market.
Work and citizenship as synonyms in our contemporary world with the exception of perhaps the Arab Gulf countries and Japan, organized legal work has become the gateway to citizenship in our contemporary world. Particularly in rich countries, a person obtains his “citizenship” after four or five years of regular, legal work accompanying the approval of his permanent residence status. In the past 15 years, immigration and settlement policies have been globally unified.
After Canada, Australia and New Zealand granted their nationalities to permanent residents after only two years, and after European countries granted their nationalities to permanent residents after a period of up to ten years, the time gap between the two models was bridged to become an average of four or five years in most countries of the rich world, with the exception of Japan. Which still adheres to archaic racial laws that threaten the very existence of the Japanese people.
Citizenship here would mean the right to obtain a package of services and material and moral rights, including health care, education, the right to housing, obtaining a social protection umbrella and travel documents. This is in exchange for paying taxes on a regular basis in favor of that armed political entity called “the state”. This applies to countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, as well as the European Union, Britain, and even Turkey.
The same standard applies to the United States, with the difference that the American state does not provide welfare and social safety nets. And speaking of Turkey, as a country that receives many immigrants, and given the current circumstances and the current electoral scene, from which we can summarize three main categories: Generation Z or the youth generation, immigrants who have Turkish citizenship, and finally the Kurds, the most important category for us are immigrants, those who number approximately 600,000 and who have obtained citizenship with the facilities of Erdogan by owning real estate inside the country, unlike the nationalist party that wants to expel the refugees. The sad thing is Kleijdar’s pledge to forcibly expel these people means that more than 3 million Syrians will have to either return to Syria as Turkish companies, build houses there for them with the support of the European Union or open the borders for refugees and immigrants and for the European Union to bear its responsibility.
Let’s say that this is a threat to the borders of the European Union and not bargaining with the lives of refugees in order to clean up their image a little. In fact, we cannot blame anyone for this, as the candidates are looking for the interest of their country. The blame is on human rights organizations that remain silent about matters like this, in which a person becomes nothing more than commodities that he bargains with for the sake of some interests.