Race and Racism - Part 2

    M.D.A Freeman and Sarah Spencer, in Immigration Control, Black Workers and the Economy is an analysis spearheaded by material conditions with a Marxian lens. It describes immigration control and its economic basis and does so by explaining the impact of black workers to capital. Three of the major pieces of legislation regarding immigration control in this period are mentioned to help show the connection that racism has with British immigration legislation, the British Nationality Act 1948, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. To define in broad terms, the legislation in 1948 was passed after World War II and granted British citizenship for all citizens of the United Kingdom or any of its colonies. The legislation in 1962 and 1968 had different motives; laws to tighten the regulations on immigration, requiring those entering the United Kingdom to have a government-issued work voucher, or trying to get immigrant settlers to be immigrant contract workers. The major difference in the two were of the groups classified as citizens, the former regarding Commonwealth citizens, defined as British citizens from the legislation of 1948, and the latter regarding British citizens in colonies owned by the British that were excluded from the legislation of 1962. “’Numbers’ became the name of the game; questions of human rights became very secondary considerations.” This statement, by Freeman and Spencer, epitomizes the racial discrimination underlying the legislation and its execution, describing the issues that would arise in the interest of capital and economic stability. A social division is created in this, now, “number’s” control because, those that see these increasing black numbers as a burden, to economy and society, set their goal to reduce black migration into the U.K. This division becomes directly related to race, in that it becomes a conflict of white and black; an impact to race relations that stem from legislation regarding immigration control in the interest of economic stability. 

    Lydia Lindsey builds off of this Marxist tradition but describes racial antagonisms as coming from a conflict of multiple elements, and “challenges the idea that racial antagonism is created only by the capitalist class.” These multiple elements were embodied in her approach of the split-labor phenomenon; one that finds the racial divisions produced from a conflict of interests between the exploitative capitalists, higher-paid white labor, and exploited cheap black labor. It is in this connection of class and race that Lindsey describes the West-Indian workers marginalization in the working class. The restrictive legislation, that “controlled the influx of black workers and relegated them to the status of contract laborers,” would divide the working class into two uneven groups, according to the split-labor approach; one being the higher paid white worker and the other being the marginalized West Indian worker. As she basis her argument off of Freeman and Spencer’s connection of black workers to capital, she directs her approach to the racial divisions that occur because of the class division. What we find is that these class divisions are a direct result of the immigration control during this period.

Sources

M.D.A Freeman and Sarah Spencer, “Immigraton Control, Black Workers and the Economy, British Journal of Law and Society 6/1 (1979): 53.

Lydia Lindsey, “The Split-Labor Phenomenon: Its Impact on West Indian Workers as a Marginal Working Class in Birmingham, England, 1948-1962,” Journal of Negro History 78/2 (1993): 84.