Globalization and Islamophobia, Part 2: Class Issues

As we saw in Part 1, most trade liberalization projects don’t match mobility of capital with mobility of labor. Border regimes and other factors keep most people at home. However, more and more are risking everything to cross borders illegally, thus following an inevitable economic logic that is only going to intensify.

Migration from low-wage countries impacts different socioeconomic groups in the host countries in different ways. The plain fact is that those who talk against Muslim and other migrants tend to be of a different social class than those who are more accepting.

Not all illegal immigration, in fact, is bad for all of the business people and certainly not all of it is bad for all of the other privileged strata in the rich countries. Illegal immigrants will for little money take care of your children and your garden, or build an addition to your mansion. But illegal migrants are bad news for the working class. There is scholarly evidence that they lower the cost of wage labor. They work for less than the legal minimum in the country. They work without job security or benefits.

This immediate impact may eventually be erased by the overall economic benefits of immigration. But it is rightly perceived by low-paid people as introducing wage competition that is against their interests.

Ruth Wodak has provided one of the most poignant summaries of the obvious. Anti-migrant talk does not just make a simple contrast between “us” (the domestic population) and “them” (the newcomers). Rather, there is a three-way division: “us,” “them,” and “the elite.” “Us,” in other words, is not all the people who are not “them.” “Us” excludes our “elite.”

In the U.S. the “elite” can variously be labeled as “Washington” or “New York;” in Europe, it’s “Brussels.” It is the government and the politicians. On both sides of the Atlantic, it is also “the media.” And of course, it’s the academics and other intellectuals. There is an implied and occasionally explicit reference to “the Jews.” The elite, so this rhetoric goes, is cosmopolitan. It does not put America, France, or Hungary first. It is soft on foreigners because it benefits financially from its international, globalized economic and political connections.

In contrast, the anti-migrant “us” are the patriots. They stand for national as well as “western,” “Christian,” or “Judeo-Christian” values and they think they are defending them against the domineering encroachments of Islamic terrorists and, what is more or less the same thing, immigrant Muslims. They want to defend their “rooted” values, also, against the transnational elites and their soft stand on the foreign menace of Islam.

In spite of their proclamations of being the typical sons and daughters of the nation, the “us,” intolerant of the migrant “them,” have a specific demographic and class profile. In Europe as in America, they tend to be less educated; in America they tend also to be white. They work at jobs that enjoy few if any permanent protection from newcomers that is provided by professional associations or unions. In the 2016 Republican primary, less educated white men were particularly likely to vote for Donald Trump, but unionized workers tended instead to support the Democrats. The BBC reports that elections in Austria on May 22, 2016, saw a whooping 86% of manual workers vote for the far-right presidential candidate, compared to only 40% of white collar workers. Only 14% of manual workers voted for the eventual victor, whose roots are in the Green Party, compared with 60% of white collar workers!

This class analysis is, to be sure, oversimplified. To use Marxian terms, there are deep divisions within the bourgeoisie and within the working class. Yet the truth that we need to face head on is that there is a class dimension to anti-migrant rhetoric, as there is to the rhetoric of tolerance.

This is a difficult and embarrassing position for those of us who wish to fight Islamophobic rhetoric. We need self-inspection and circumspection. A blank contemptuous dismissal of prejudice will not suffice. Without condoning it, we must try to understand.

Understanding requires recognizing the class interests not only of the bigots but also of our own.

In Part 3, we will look at more of the class issues involved, and the specifics of the rhetoric against Muslims and Islam.

Globalization and Islamophobia: Part 1

Some people would like to keep most migrants out of the West, especially if the migrants are Muslim. The rest of us are indignant about these builders of walls and fences, as indignant as they are about the migrants. We despise them as ignorant, deride them as Islamophobic, decry them as immoral. They fear that the migrants will destroy our western liberties and cultural traditions. We, on the other hand, fear it is they, not the iterant Muslims, who will destroy those values.

Definitely, we are right and they are wrong. But right should not mean righteous, and certainly not self-righteous. We don’t need to agree with our neighbors whose views on migration and on Islam we abhor. We do owe it to them and to ourselves to try to understand how they’ve come to hold their opinions, rather than just mocking them as intellectual and emotional simpletons. Paranoia has other causes than stupidity.

In this and future blogs, I would like to discuss some of the root causes of Islamophobia as a form of anti-migrant rhetoric, in the context of globalization. Let’s begin today by connecting globalization to the massive migration of refugees and economic immigrants to Europe. I focus on Europe because it is here that the great number of Muslim migrants gives an opportunity to bigots, to rally in defense of  “western” or “Christian” or “European” values (however uneducated they may be about any of those), against the foreign “invaders.”

Islamophobia, which is a hatred with very old roots, is reinvigorated by the European events even in the United States and elsewhere. The extent to which Islamophobia and anti-Mexican rhetoric fertilize the same rhetoric in the U.S. is great, demonstrating that Islamophobia today has at least as much to do with migration as with religion, and probably more. So before we look at the specifics of Islamophobia, it behooves us to look at the generalities of migration in the age of globalization.

Globalization means that employers can move jobs from places where wages are high to places where they are low. They can make products more cheaply that way. Businesswise, the move to a low-wage area makes even more sense in the absence of import duties, which might otherwise make bringing the products back home expensive. This is why free-trade agreements, featuring both low or no duties and freedom of capital flows, are so dear to big business.

The free flow of investment capital out of high-wage countries is accompanied by the free flow of jobs in the same direction. Cheap goods come back in the other direction, along with the profits.

But while jobs are allowed to flow freely from the high to the low-wage countries, job-seekers are not allowed to freely move in the other direction. Freedom of movement for capital is not matched by freedom of movement for labor. (The important exception is the European Union, which we will deal with later.)

What we are looking at is partial globalization. Capitalists enjoy a globalized investment market. But workers don’t enjoy a globalized labor market. Some are kept living in countries that, from a global perspective, look like giant ghettos.

Ghettos breed disorder, corruption, and violence – all the more reason for people to try to leave them if they can. When war is added to the equation, the pressure to leave may be irresistible. But we have seen illegal would-be migrants drowning even when they were not coming from a war-torn region like Syria or Somalia, but from the extremely low-wage countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Globalization has been designed to benefit the rich above all. Globalized investments are in the interest of big business, but free movement of labor is not. Low-wage ghetto-states are essential to high profits. Yet by weakening border controls in general, globalization has still made it easier for globalized capital to be matched by a globalized job market, pushing migrants towards the richer nations – even if they have to cross borders illegally.

There is a logic to this development. It is an open question if its consequences can be mitigated in some fashion, but it cannot be eliminated.

How does this connect to Islamophobia? That I will discuss next time.