As the UN’s International Migrants Day shines a much-needed spotlight on the invaluable contributions’of migrants, it’s worth revisiting the actual net value they bring to the UK.
The study of values – axiology – helps us see how reactionaries in today’s society cannot reconcile their support for working hard, paying taxes and contributing to society with the benefit offered by the presence of migrants
The most valued British institution, the NHS, would collapse without the benefit that migrants bring the nation. The strain on the NHS, caused by an ageing population, is not on course to reduce. Care homes and support work roles increasingly rely on migrants to fill gaps generated by a high turnover of staff. Migrants’ worth aligns closely with British institutional worth and care for vulnerable adults. The British values of equality and democracy, however, are denied by the deepening ‘financialisation’ of the UK economy.
How the UK economy became financialised
The devaluation of British dreams began during Thatcher’s revaluation of Britain as a market-based economy. The policy of selling council houses moved investment away from productive areas and into price inflation.
The speculative cartels operating among the UK’s seven largest house builders continue to keep property prices high through underdelivery. Commercial real estate’s financialisation is part of a wider macroeconomic financialisation within the UK economy, where the banks’ capital and credit-creation abilities have grown severalfold compared to state spending.
The impact on public services
Ironically, financialisation forgets the fundamental British value of working hard for a fulfilling life, for which both migrants and citizens strive. Instead, it values shareholder profits over quality in products and services, causing previously public-oriented corporations such as water companies to enact ‘under-investment, asset sell-offs and global tax evasion’.
Meanwhile, essential workers – often migrants – navigate these failing systems without recognition.
This anti-egalitarian shift is antithetical to the Keynesian principle of recirculating wealth into the UK economy and instead vampirically sucks economic value from it while not delivering benefits. As River Action’s CEO, James Wallace, said, “Nearly all our rivers have been polluted by water companies which, since privatisation over 30 years ago when all their debt was wiped, have adopted vulture-like business models. The financialisation of public utilities is a driving factor behind the polycrisis and well precedes the European ‘refugee crisis’ of the 2010s.
The rise of the precariat and ‘cloudalism’
While the interests of shareholders are increasingly prioritised, the labour worth of both migrants and many native workers is devalued under financialised working conditions and by what economist Yanis Varoufakis terms ‘cloudalists’. These are the cloud-based ruling classes, such as the shareholders of Amazon and Uber, who extract labour from ‘cloud proles’ running the non-unionised Amazon warehouses and the gig economy.
Migrants absorb this exploitation, while large value is extracted tax-free by Bezos and his counterparts. They have joined the fast-growing class of insecure workers on zero-hours contracts and in online or on-location platform work.
At the same time, migrants join the ‘precariat’ of White working-class men and growing numbers of university graduates denied access to opportunities through AI-driven job automation. Migrants form the bedrock of the precariat – being vitally valuable because they are prepared to face working conditions that native workers will not.
These insecure workers are essential to the economy, yet are exploited by the very systems they keep running. They have been failed by financialised corporatists and cloudalists, whose powerful lobbyists have ensured that Thatcher’s successors back them politically.
Economist Richard Murphy understands that the precariat’s constituent White working-class men ‘have been profoundly failed’ by the political consensus. Flocking to Reform, however, devalues both themselves and the migrants in their interest group who are absorbing this exploitation.
How populism misdirects anger
This tidal turn to Reform reflects Varoufakis’s second component of the cloudalists’ dominion – ‘cloud serfs’ or digitally dependent workers. These workers are misdirected by elites through the endless feedback loop of populist and right-wing commentators who reinforce the memeworthy misattribution of migrants.
Platforms like Elon Musk’s increasingly politicised X (formerly Twitter) has created ‘a gateway to technofeudalism, one that would allow him to attract users’ attention, modify their consumer behaviour, extract free labour from them as cloud serfs’. Musk allows encultured elite interests to use memetic warfare to divide the disaffected from migrants.
Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson blame migrant ‘military–age men’ because it is electorally efficient to employ the symbolism of inverting the Normandy landings on the Kent coast. Evoking an image of the ‘White Cliffs Country’ being overrun by a foreign invasion transforms structural grievances into cultural resentment. Platforming this nationalistic narrative provides the voter with a target that cannot fight back.
Counternarratives of migrant coworkers in vital services, or working in conditions intolerable to the average native, are lost in a cacophony of rage-baiting migrant crossings and AI-edited TikToks of migrant bogeymen’s antisocial behaviour, so platforming all migrants homogeneously. Unfortunately, Oxford University’s Migration Observatory’s findings that ‘non-citizens are underrepresented in the prison population’ lack the charge of a platformed Farage barrage.
The Reform Party, however, unanimously voted against the Employment Rights Bill, which seeks to reform zero-hours contracts and challenge unfair dismissals. Not only does this devalue the contribution of dedicated migrants, but it devalues those hit hardest by suffering caused by the elite.
What International Migrants Day really highlights
International Migrants Day highlights what life is like for those who share the interests of working people who, via memetic warfare and a metanarrative of nationalism, are told of a rebirthed Britain. But this is a Britain that will benefit only a few, bolstering ballooning offshore bank accounts.
Migrants’ work ethic, resilience and net benefit – despite the deregulation of workers’ rights – is of uncountable value to the UK’s economy and public services. By recognising their pivotal contribution and capacity for absorbing exploitation, empathising with those with shared interests becomes objectively apparent, instead of misattributing suffering, inequality and hardship onto scapegoats chosen by the elite.
On International Migrants Day, it is worth acknowledging that the people keeping Britain running are often the ones facing the most insecurity, and that their contributions deserve both recognition and protection.
Robert Klim is Social Media Officer for the South East Green Party with a Masters in Media and International Development and background in campaigns and the charity sector.
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