I know the majority of immigrants to the UK are not asylum seekers or refugees (its about 16% of all immigrants from what I could tell). That still doesn't answer my question - why are you against economic migrants?
I told you. Because they're being used as a weapon against workers. There is a class war going on. If you don't know how to fight it the oligarchs win. And any beautiful intentions get stomped into the mud.
The concept of a global north/south isn't a perfect framework for analysing these things (there is no such thing as a perfect framework). Attacking this framework does not disprove the reality that the UK and similar nations will not let someone who will likely be deemed a burden to the state (e.g a disabled person) become a citizen.
It's funny that it must be me to say here that "global south" is no more than political propaganda taken up as useful by Russia and the other states now busy dismantling the US
informal empire. If it means
anything, it is those states that are neither the US not its old vassals in some kind of formal alliance. This distiction, and with it the talk of "global south", is very likely to be simply dumped in a few years, as the strategy to end US imperialism is to break the vassals out of the empire, and the internal rot there is nearing the point where that happens. Analytically the term and the group it defines it meaningless to a discussion of migrations. Among the vassals there are countries that are or have recently been countries of emigration, and other countries where there is both great immigration and emigration, not just countries taking immigrants.
The "national interest" of a country is always what its ruling class wants it to be. They control political power, they define "national interests". The US vassals are an extension of the US political system: oligarchic rule disguised as "democracy". What oligarchs want are plebs divided against themselves but able to provide cheap, useful servants to the upper class. They therefore never want disabled or "troublesome" immigrants, rather the obedient and hard-working kind. They always say this is the "state interest" and enact that policy. The distinction between "good refugees" and "bad refugees" is a consequence. If you don't like that then you need to overthrow the oligarchy in your country first. And to do that you can't let the oligachs win
anything in the class war inside the country...
This is ahistorical. The concept of a Westphalian state was formalised in Europe in 1648. Before then nations in Europe organised themselves differently and the nations outside of Europe organised themselves differently as well. This is not to say that nations or communities didn't exist, but they were organised differently. I am not a historian so I can't go into further detail but the concept of these sorts of borders are a relatively modern, European invention.
This is a big gripe I have with histories of nationalism. Nations predate the treaty of Westphalia by millenia. The idea of nation versus the idea of empire is as old as the notion of citizenship and self-rule, and was born out of city-states. The drama played out in old Grece and Italy and was documented by historians of that age, in the first written western histories that are well preserved. The same drama happened in many other places. It's a matter of how power is exercised. My country had a nationalist rebelling against Hapsburg rule in 1640, before Westphalia. Had had another in 1383. When it tried to conquer the neighbouring country, same thing happened there, rebellions and failure.
Nationalist rebellions. Empires do sometimes get build, and endure centuries, but empires are not the historical norm any more than small nations are. Imperial rule is not the historical norm any more that represenative rule or even democratic rule has been. These systems are all ancient, and are all in unstable equilibria.
The modern nation state, with its bureaucracy and its passports, is recent but was a reaction to new technology that made travel easier. New technology to update the matters of political power to handle the effects of new technology. What the modern state and more technology made possible, arguably but I think it's still early to judge, is increase the size of the polities where self-sule by the whole people can happen. But even if there is the technology, how a polity is ruled is still open to many forms. Oligarchy is still powerful where the formalities of voting and representation have existed for a long time.
Take the UK. It has had a formally powerful parliament for half a millenia, with elections. It skipped almost entirely the whole episode of absolute rule in early modern Europe. And yet Parliament in the UK was the represenative of the commercial oligarchy, sharing power with the hereditary rentier oligarchy in the House of Lords. What democracy was there?
The franchise was extended, but the voting still gets done around
controlled alternatives now. Thos who doubt that may answer: when last has an election really shifted "national interests" against the ruling oligarchy's will? In the UK I think it was Churchill's defeat right after WW2. And even so the British Empire only got buried because the amerians had undermined it and the rank-anf-file of the british armed forces outright mutinied against the oligarchic layer above. Arguably brexit let the people break a tie between two factions of the ruling oligarchy, recently. Still it shows how
controlled it is, in terms of what is up for a choice in a vote. In whatever matters the ruling class is mostly united on, there is no democratic process for the plebs to change anything. The "option" is simply not made available to them as a matter of elections. Political parties are staffed with the oligarch's families and servants.
My opinion of all this is that genuine self-rule by the people, the whole people, against the alternative of oligarchic rule, must be the political aim of leftists wherever oligarchs now rule. The agenda can have many other things but none of those will ever get done without ending the power of the oligarchies first. And that does lead us to Lenin's view's...
I feel like you are making the same mistake that Socrates made when he said that humans were featherless bipeds. Not all entities that wish to abolish borders are Empires. Are Irish Republicans Imperialists because they wish to see the border between the North and the South abolished? Empires are evil because of Imperialism, not because they abolished borders.
To quote Lenin's The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination:
You might disagree with the idea of the abolition of borders but denying that it is part of the Leftist canon or saying that Socialists calling for the abolition of the nation-state are "uneducated" is just blatantly incorrect.
Irish republicans fought for a nation. A nation with borders, a nation that was a land for a specific people. Thet fought to
create a border with the remants of the British Empire, to exit it
and keep it apart. And the British Empire, after losing on the ground, still fought to prevent just that by continuing to offer subject status (as the british oh-so-accurately described what they passed as citizenship back then) to the irish as a tool to attempt to undermine irish independence.
Lenin's insight was exactly what I am trying to explain to you:
first the socialists had to take power
within existing nations. He stresses that point in his two most influential pampleths, what is to be done and the infantile disease of leftism. Any international brotherhood could only be accomplised later between socialist states which had ended their own histories of class wars. Then, and only then, will states be able to align peacefully with a goal of improving live for the population where cooperation naturally becomes the best way to act the disbandment of much that is wasteful in the machinery of the state can happen.
WW1 proved, in his own time, that his insight was correct. In the imperialist states of the time even the socialist parties turned "national-chauvinist". International brotherhoos simply wasn't possible in an environment of competing nations driven (having the "national interests" defined by) oligarchic cliques. His view was that
first "the liberation of the oppressed nations" and
second the taking of power by socialists were to precede the end of international rivalries.
What are you implying here? Surely you are not saying that Leftists should campaign for decreased levels of immigration to take away that tool from oligarch's toolbox, that would be a very silly thing to believe.
Leftists sould campain, always, with the aim of weakening oligarchic rule. Oppose them at every turn, destroy their tools, undermine what allows oligarchs as a class to exist and to keep a grip on political power.
Mass immigration is, has always been, one of their most powerfull tools. It enables a number of estrategies to reinforce their power, which in the absense of such immigration would not be available to this class at all: dividing the people againts "newcomers", making it easier to hire scabs against strikes, making it easier to recruit different kins of praetorian guards to use direct violence against disobedient plebs (hard to pay people to kill their own family and frieds, easier to hire newcomers to do that, or to create mob groups), making it harder for labour to organize against bosses (exploit cultural duvisons), and even dividing the political scene with "ethnic parties".
In the political fight to take power away from the oligarchs, the left has nothing to gain from mass immigration and everything to lose. This has nothing to with wage levels (those are a rather unimportaht thing in the whole picture), everthing to do with the mechanics of power, with how the class war is really fought. Becuase, never mistake yourself, no ruling class ever meekly abdicates its own power. When they seem to do it it's accdentally, a scheme gone wrong and unforseen loss of control over events. Changes in political power really are
fought over. Either socilaists have a good strategy to win this fight , and fight they must on every front, or they will keep losing. Immigration is one of the most critical fronts in this class war over control of political power.
