As the article’s title conveys (‘Border controls: reactionary by nature’), today’s uncompromising opponents of frontiers ignore half of the Stuttgart congress’s assessment of immigration controls: “fruitless and reactionary by nature”. They have given up arguing immigration controls are fruitless.
This is for good reason, because the Stuttgart congress was wrong; immigration controls are effective, most everyone today agrees, in reducing the labour supply and mitigating the adverse effects of immigration on wages. For those who deny that immigration controls raise wages, an interesting treatment is in Peter Turchin’s ‘Return of the
oppressed: from the Roman empire to our own gilded age, inequality moves in cycles. The future looks like a rough ride’.
The US, in short, was in a revolutionary situation, and many among the political and business elites realised it. They began to push through a remarkable series of reforms. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed legislation that effectively shut down immigration into the US. Although much of the motivation behind these laws was to exclude ‘dangerous aliens’ such as Italian anarchists and eastern European socialists, the broader effect was to reduce the labour surplus. Worker wages grew rapidly.
But whether restriction of immigration is “reactionary” isn’t, for a materialist, an independent question from whether it is “fruitful”. If the Stuttgart congress erred on the supposed fruitlessness (for defending against the harmful effects of mass influxes) of immigration restriction, the “reactionary” character of controls must be reconsidered. The resolution prohibits on principle only “preventing particular nations or races from immigrating” (my emphasis), which it singles out as “also [that is, in addition to being unfruitful] reprehensible from the point of view of proletarian solidarity”.
Stephen R Diamond
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http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/1004/border-controls-reactionary-by-nature