Statement of International Migrants Alliance On the Commemoration of International Migrant Day 2020
Fight for our rights, dignity and the well-being of all
Build a new world order on the foundations of justice and solidarity
In commemoration of International Migrants Day, the International Migrants Alliance (IMA) calls on all migrants, refugees and their families to unite and fight for our rights, dignity and the well-being of all. The still uncontrolled coronavirus pandemic continues to take its toll in terms of lost lives and livelihoods the world over, compounding the ravages inflicted on the people by imperialist plunder, exploitation, and war. As the world is placed under lockdown, migrant workers and students, migrants in transit and in camps, refugees and other displaced persons have been trapped in even more vulnerable situations.
Because of our legal status and occupations, we are at higher risk of contracting and transmitting the coronavirus. We have seen this in the COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories in Singapore, the Maldives and the Gulf, slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in the United States and Germany, Canadian farms, detention centres in Malaysia, and camps for displaced persons in Greece and Bangladesh and of migrants in Mesoamerica and South América.
Despite this, we are often last in the line to receive medical attention or health services, if we even have access to health facilities at all. While we are denied our fundamental human right to health, racist and xenophobic acts against us are mounting as migrants are scapegoated as carriers of the virus or as freeloaders on public services that have been stretched thin by decades of neoliberal cutbacks and privatisation.
While we are last in line to health care, we are first in line to joblessness. Strict lockdown measures implemented by many governments have had a bigger impact on sectors that rely more on migrant labour such as transportation, shipping, tourism, gastronomy, hospitality, domestic service, retail, construction and agriculture. Many temporary visa holders such as students have also lost their means of financial support. But lockdowns and border closures have left thousands stranded, unable to support themselves where they are and unable to go home. Yet they are also denied government assistance due to their migratory status. As a result, many of us have fallen into destitution, forced to rely on charity for our basic needs, or forced to accept even more exploitative work conditions just to survive.
But the abuse and exploitation experienced by migrants and refugees are not merely the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the ongoing health and economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus is once again demonstrating how migrant labour is a form of flexible labour that has become a vital tool of monopoly capital for propping up the rate of profit as well as for managing capitalist crises, especially in the era of neoliberalism. During economic expansions, hiring migrant labour helps counter the tendency for wages to rise as the labour market tightens in particular industries, sectors or the economy as a whole. During downturns such as the current one triggered by COVID-19, migrant workers can be even more useful to capital best of all the undocumented workers. They can be easily laid-off, deported or retained but under highly exploitative and abusive conditions. Again, capitalists save on having to pay separation benefits, unemployment insurance, and so on.
Meanwhile, labour exporting countries, long plundered and underdeveloped by imperialism, are left to cope with higher unemployment and lower remittances, lower revenues, and deeper indebtedness. Repatriated migrants join the swollen ranks of the unemployed while those who manage to find new jobs abroad are targets for mandatory fees to refill the governments dwindling coffers.
But migrants also demonstrate the unbreakable bonds between the peoples of the world. Migrants are at the frontlines of providing care to the ill and dying. In the advanced capitalist countries, one out of five health care workers is a migrant. While the worlds population seek shelter in their homes, migrant labourers continue to toil in the fields, deliver food and essential goods, care for the children, clean the houses and maintain the infrastructure that has kept us alive. Their remittances continue to sustain domestic consumption in labour exporting countries, keeping households and the economy afloat.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a jarring reminder that we need a new social and economic system where labour is employed to ensure the needs of all, continuously enhance the peoples well-being, and care for the environment instead of merely enriching the few. It reminds us that those who benefit from the existing system the monopoly capitalist elite and the governments that serve them are the principal obstacles to our vision of a just new world order.
Instead of prioritizing public health measures and social welfare, many governments have adopted a militarized response to the pandemic even using the pandemic as pretext to suppress dissent and curtail civic liberties. They are harassing and intimidating human rights defenders, censoring journalists and media, using excessive force and jailing street and informal traders and protestors without trial, weaponizing the law against migrants and their critics and ramping up spending on the military and state security apparatus. Some are deploying state security or paramilitary forces to conduct extra-judicial executions.
At the same time, monopoly capitalists are using the COVID crisis as an opportunity to grab more subsidies (corporate bailouts) from the public treasury and adopt new means for extracting more superprofits from the exploitation and oppression of working people. These include the use of new technologies such as advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, the internet of things and digital platforms for monitoring and controlling how we work, how we buy, how we move, how we socialize and how we think. This is their idea of building back a better world.
The International Migrants Alliance calls on all migrants and refugees, in host countries and countries of origin, to defend our dignity and assert our rights amidst the global pandemic and its aftermath. We must strengthen our unity and resolve to stop discrimination and violence against migrants; end criminalization and brutal crackdowns targeting migrants; stop targeted raids and deportations of migrant workers involved in trade union or political activities; demand the safe repatriation of migrants stranded on land and at sea the same as well the immediate and conditionless regularization of undocumented migrants..
We must raise awareness among migrants and people about the roots of forced migration, exploitation, discrimination and war the system of monopoly capital or imperialism itself. We must continue to organize our ranks and build our movement. We must strengthen solidarity with peoples organizations, unions, and movements, who are also confronting imperialists' numerous machinations.
It is through our continuing struggles that we build our collective strength so that we can ultimately demolish the monopoly capitalist international system and build a new world order on the foundations of justice and solidarity.#