Where there is no flour, everything is chagrin. If during the era of unbridled economic growth, migrants have been carrying on their backs the most thankless production, plays in times of crisis Senar finger as scapegoats. But before that during "good times" What has been the dominant discourse on migrants? Well, basically that "to come, but with paper." Laudable purpose and shareable in the abstract, but contrasted sharply with the real mode of mobilization of foreign labor force that our society has generated. Paradoxically, while we hard to admit, the "coming, but without papers" came to become a piece of this system of exploitation of foreign labor in irregularity conditions. A "Kingdom of Heaven" imagery that, in many ways allowed and played the opposite of what he preached. Anyone reading this think I'm a loko radikal and I lost the pot. I can not develop this idea a lot here, but I'll give an example in the legal field. The inability to convert tourist visa into working visa, even with a valid job offer is apparently serving an orderly regulation of labor migration, preventing the perversion of the figure of the tourist visa. In practice, this impossibility is essential to ensure that immigrants work illegally for at least 3 years conditions of extreme exploitation. This, of course, benefits to employers who operate in the informal economy, but also the formal sector of the economy under the division of labor between firms and workers themselves English through, for example, the availability of domestic cheap in terms of pseudo-bondage.
This speech is usually completed or completed with a view of "integration" unduly focused on the perspective of "cultural difference" real or imagined rather than the reality of social relations. I say "imagined", because sometimes they devote significant efforts to imagine and dialectical I really do not solve problems arising in practice, in order to emphasize the difference "cultural" between "civilizations."
Of course there are cultural differences and of course they can cause problems of coexistence, but the fact is that this issue becomes the absolute center of the "integration" decoupling of social relations in which cultural differences reproduced, both in academic debate in the talks as "street." This bias "culturalist" serves the same function that we call the "categories of contempt": through emotions, provides relevant and meaningful to the mental category that distinguishes between "us" and "the Others", reinforcing the symbolic and cognitive boundaries that separate them from each other, a distinction that is remembered and is activated when the time comes. Thus, it perceives the other as different and normalized or even justify social relations of domination and exclusion. I have quoted here sometimes the words of Karl Ernst von Baer -written in the nineteenth century, when everyone was openly racist and colonialism was at its peak, " Just imagine the experience of all countries and times that when people have power over another and behaved unjustly with him, will not to imagine as bad and incompetent and repeated frequently and loudly this statement.
All these ideas are playing in public debate, but now the cycle seems to charge a greater urgency the problem of "crisis economy ". This opens the way a different discourse, which already existed, but in contrast to the" need "to mobilize foreign labor and, therefore, was a minority (own xenophobic groups, the lumpen proletariat and some low status workers could actually compete with the newcomers). Today, I think, this way of thinking is spreading to other areas of middle and lower class, including people who identify ideologically with the "left." This "new" speech comes to be more or less like this: " During these years, employers have been shoving bringing cheap labor from abroad, in collusion with them, public authorities and legislation have been extremely lenient with migration and as a result of the entry of cheap labor, English workers have worsened our purchasing power and our working conditions as we lost our jobs or , now that the crisis comes on top we have to feed migrants with potatoes and we have health, education and social services collapsed because of it. "
This speech is not necessarily" blame "directly to the migrants of what happened (although still there in the background as the cause of problems). The" blame "for all the evil capitalists have aided top hat, as "we" tried very well to the Ecuadorian who cared for her grandmother. But it is "objectified" to these migrants, who become radically "other" by the grace of the mental categories that reproduce social differences.'s ( im) migrants are an "object" of which I speak, moved by the evil "subjects" capitalist but not "partners" and much less are "we." We might even get to report, with small mouth, exploitation, without ceasing to be the reified object (mouth girl if we think it is more urgent issue of the English exploitation). Apart from this complicated question of the categories, which try to explain in next post, and what is truly important issue, this speech is riddled with inaccuracies.
is true that the mass mobilization of foreign labor has occurred in relation to a certain "needs" of capital accumulation (and domestic reproduction.) But not true that the legislation has been "too" permissive. On the contrary, the law (and, in very general terms, administrative practice) has been extremely restrictive . Certainly, in comparison with other European countries, the mobilization of foreign workers has been enormous, but this difference in the numbers of immigration is that there are very significant differences in the immigration law of one country or another but a whole series of structural factors characteristic of the English economy. Because we recorded the key idea in his head that "immigrants" come to Spain because the "poor" have no choice but leave their country. This is at best a half truth, which would be equivalent to saying that the mass migration from the countryside to the city during the Industrial Revolution were due to the field was very bad. There is an "output effect" and there is a "pull" and they also exhibit remarkable interdependence. In addition, the irregular labor market has called illegal immigration and the result fed back the cause. Restrictive regulation has not prevented the migration, but has provided fodder for the market irregular.
Second, the overall effect of this mobilization process has not affected English workers globally. But the fact is that not the case, as shown in this study Miguel Pajares (pp. 95-129) . During the massive influx of immigrants, the English economy has grown tremendously and largely because of the mobilization of labor, the net employment has increased for both English and foreign, the increase in employment for foreigners has created jobs superiors, who have occupied the English (and therefore, there has been an upward mobility of natives), wages have grown faster than the CPI (but the jobs have been generated particularly in low places purchasing power, which affects the distribution of economic pie between capital and labor), wages have grown more in areas of high immigration and where they have risen so has been in areas where the effect of migration is low, the sectors where there were more immigrants have been the most dynamic and vibrant and, therefore, which has grown more than trade union membership, etc. All this does not mean, eye, reading this massive process of mobilization of work has to be generally positive. First, because from a macroeconomic point of view has served to feed back a model based on the intensive use of labor force in low value added, to put it bluntly, in the mundanity. Second, but not least, because all this wealth has been produced through the exploitation of foreign labor and multiplied by their precarious legal position. But it is true that globally the arrival of immigrants has decreased the use of English or negatively affected their wages. This could have happened in theoretical terms (the saturation of the labor supply implies a lowering of wages) and may have occurred in individual cases.
However, even if it had happened that way, or in cases where this happens, this does not make the speech right that I am criticizing. Not without considering beforehand how we built this "we" English workers, who supposedly "suffer" the arrival of immigrants in their jobs or income levels, which supposedly "suffering" that "collapse" of health and education "due to the influx of immigrants" and that theoretically " suffer ", and already" suffered "when there was prosperity, cultural divergence that hypothetical hurts both in the collective imagination. But that is a matter for another chapter.
