>> Evidently, "thousands of refugees" will be going to Turkey, Norway,
Germany &
>> even the USA. Who'd a' thunk it?
michael wrote:
>I heard on the news today that we'll take 20,000, and Germany 10,000. When
>there's 300,000 already on across the border, and supposedly 300,000 more
>on the road, this seems cosmetic.
cosmetic is, in one sense, better than nothing. footage of macedonian police beating back refugees was not going to play well in the propaganda war. which is also to say that settling for the cosmetic is not really acceptable.
Blair has legislation before parliament to restrict even further refugee intakes, as does australia. if two elements need to be brought into stark relief at this moment, I think these are it.
nation states are certainly with us. but saying that avoids the simultaneous reality of the world at the moment: i.e.., that nation states (including the aspirational one of the kla) only exist within a matrix of international relations. moreover, there are two intimately connected moments in capitalism today: globalisation of capital (lesser so, trade) and the intensification of a nationalization of labour.
the left opposes things like the mai and so on, for very good reason. but the way it opposes this is through reference to the need for more national regulation. include within this that immigration and refugee movement has not only never been so difficult this century as now, *and* that population movements have never been so pronounced as now, you get to see a pattern emerging which, combined with the increasing use of informal (and impermanent status) laws which segment workers within countries, means that capital's freedom is premised on a reterritorialisation of labour.
globalisation does change the character of the nation-state with respect to finance and budgets, but it has only heightened the nation-state's role in the definition of labour markets.
so: repeating 'the problem of unemployment' as that which somehow self-evidently relegates refugees and immigrants to the status of 'a problem' both plays into this intensification of national (and nationalistic, racist definitions of the labour market) and does little to challenge the seemingly self-evident equation between unemployment and poverty.
angela
ps. yes, rakesh, I am being idiosyncratic here. but adopting a backseat geopolitical analysis is not the same thing as a class analysis. no matter how seductive it is.