Context

The Mexican border was closed for hours on November 25, 2018 at the San Ysidro Port of Entry to the U.S., after a group of migrants, including children and women, in Tijuana reportedly stormed the area.Global political action is required to reinforce the legitimate identity of a worker.

Rise of Xenophobic tendencies

• Since the 1990s, not just international but even interregional workers have slowly been pushed into the rubric of ‘criminals’.

• U.S. President Donald Trump is a prime example of this: his victory was largely founded on his ability to depict international workers, particularly those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, as ‘criminals’.

• This tendency is present, though in less obvious versions, in almost all developed and developing countries, including the social welfare democracies of Europe.

• It is also present within nations, as we in India witnessed in the recent ‘Gujarati’ backlash against workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

•  Politicians can garner extra votes by implicitly or explicitly equating international/interregional ‘workers’ with ‘criminals’, and states can openly devise blatantly differential treatment for them — as the children ripped away from their parents and the workers tear-gassed at the U.S. border can testify. This marks a significant development in recent years.

Reasons for labelling refugees as criminals

Most immigrants crossing a border are law-abiding and industrious workers, not ‘criminals’ — this remains the case today, as it was in the past.

1.Nature of capitalism – It longer needs workers as much as it did in the past.

2.Financial speculation –

• Financial speculation has increasingly dwarfed international trade from the 1990s onwards.

• More than that, much of financial speculation is based on factors other than the productivity of a sector.  A world dominated by financial speculation does not need workers in two ways:

• Financial speculation does not depend on the production of workers.

3. Post-humanism –

• It is used to suggest a world after human beings, a world run by artificial intelligence.

• Inevitably, for those in power — either in terms of a monopoly on wealth or a monopoly on knowledge — a world of financial speculation leads to a ‘post-human’ world run by artificial intelligence.

• Once workers become redundant and numbers are sufficient, then, inevitably, one can think complacently of replacing human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

Conclusion

• Universal Solution – Solution has to be ‘universal’ and global. Global political action is needed to ensure international working rights, linked to human status and not the caprice of state or capital.

• Otherwise, as the right to work can currently be ensured only by national governments, it will always be used to define other — ‘foreign’ — workers as actual or potential criminals.

• The threat of monopoly of corporations– Soon it might well become the monopoly of corporations. It is basically being used to criminalise those workers who are not allowed — by nation-states or neoliberal capitalism or both — the legitimate identity of a worker.

• And as this is a shrinking identity — there are fewer and fewer active workers under the impact of rampant financial speculation — it simply adds to the official metamorphosis of more workers into ‘criminals’.