Anti-immigration politics and the police-state vision of fascists in Ireland

Far-right actors like Herman Kelly, Justin Barrett, Malachy Steensen, Gavin Pepper, and Derek Blighe leading political and social mobilisations in Ireland over the past couple of years primarily focus on immigration as a means of organising and exploiting the anger of ordinary people. Xenophobic slogans like “Ireland belongs to the Irish,” and “house the Irish first” are commonplace among far-right circles and their supporters. One new party has even adopted as their name a variation on a fascist slogan from 1930s USA (and revived by Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters), “Ireland first.”

But what kind of vision does an “Ireland First” and anti-immigrant right-wing political outlook have for Ireland? What kind of society would they construct if they suddenly seized power and started following through on their violent threats against the diverse working class of Ireland and why is scapegoating immigrants so important to achieving that vision?

It is actually quite easy to picture. The 2006 film Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and based on the novel by P.D. James, provides one of the most compelling depictions of the near future for so-called western liberal democracies as the various crises facing the capitalist global order compound and spiral out of control in the absence of a socialist political alternative.

The film follows Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a middle-aged civil servant in a not-so-far-fetched version of London with an autocratic police state regime. Most of the world’s major cities have fallen into varying stages of civil war brought about by the inability of capitalist imperialism to respond to crises like poverty, climate change, famine, and pandemics. The desperate propaganda of the day unconvincingly boasts that “only Britain remains” after the world has collapsed and demands illegal immigrants be reported in a “see something, say something” campaign. Added to these crises is the existential threat of inexplicable universal female infertility, spelling certain doom for humanity.

Such a scenario fits neatly into a “fortress Britain” and post-Brexit disposition that seeks to isolate a country from perceived foreign threats despite being inextricably linked to not only the rest of the world for many historical and economics reasons, but also participates in creating the violent conditions that it wants to keep from its shores. We know wealthy capitalist countries with imperialist pasts and presents attempt to outsource its violence, to keep it hidden. But history shows us that this violence always comes back to the imperial core. In Children of Men, the methods of state violence and control are exaggerated, but only slightly, exposing the inherent and necessary brutality of the capitalist system.

Fascism and the existing capitalist state machinery

What I always find striking about Children of Men is how much it resemblesthe way the world is now. The refusal by liberal and right-wing ideologues to address human need by adequately and justly investing in housing, health, industry, and the environment results in systems like Direct Provision and the warehousing of asylum seekers, slum conditions for poor communities, preventable deaths in under-resourced hospitals, preventable deaths from under-resourced community health. In on our society, outside of a humane solution to the rising homeless population, the state chooses to use a blunt-force “security” solution, or permits fascists to attack homeless people and arsonists to burn potential accommodation sites, outsourcing the police option which will inevitably be used more widely if no political alternative redirects the course of history.

The compounding of crises is also a convenient excuse for disinvestment for liberal reformers. As parties such as Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, and Sinn Fein have given in to their political right, they’ll present their policies as pragmatic responses to difficult decisions that prioritise austerity and heavy-handed security, rather than addressing the root causes of inequality, oppression, war and economic destabilisation. 

Instead of marshaling resources for good, liberal politicians focus on encouraging the conditions that accept a certain amount of misery while giving a freer hand to market-driven solutions. This approach also accepts the proliferation of reactionary politics and the violence it brings with it. 

Children of Men is a dramatic expression of nationalist chauvinism that applies a fortress attitude to a homeland and sees the world outside of that as chaotic and violent, full of potential invading threats. The defence of that homeland is only possible by turning that violence inwards, towards domestic populations. This is what happened in Nazi Germany when the concentration camp policies of colonial Africa were imported back to the centre of the empire. This is what we see in the United States as militarised police and mass surveillance express the war dominated outlook of its foreign policy.

Take the scene from the film where the protagonist is attempting to sneak into Bexhill, a coastal city that has been turned entirely into a refugee camp/ open-air prison. The police violence is utterly indiscriminate even though two of the people sneaking in are British citizens and only pretending to be refugees, ostensibly the ones the system is designed to “defend.” In a society that has nativism, ethno-nationalism, and racism as part of its core ideology, there is no guarantee that it doesn’t turn the atrocities that are designed to police foreigners against its own, to use the vulgar us/them language of the far right. In fact, history shows us that this is always the case. Self-dealing and opportunism are also rampant in such an anarchic prison-city, as immigration cops facilitate the local drug trade in and out of the camp. One could imagine that a person doesn’t necessarily need to be, deep down, an out-and-out racist to benefit from a racist apartheid system.

One excuse you’ll hear from supporters of the far-right is that they don’t have a problem with immigrants, but they have a problem with “unvetted, military-aged men who are scamming the Irish people,” as part of a “great-replacement” or new plantations. Ok. So how do they know who is who? What’s to stop the senseless murder of anyone who might be branded as an outsider from getting hurt? The recent murder of a Croatian man in Dublin who was beaten to death after being told to speak English exposes how ludicrous their position is. And maybe the fear of harm, backed up by random acts of racist violence, is enough to control elements of the population so fascist street-thugs might carve out a petit-bourgeois layer of power and exploitation for themselves like the immigration cops in the film.

For the anti-immigrant political leaders, the violence is the point.

The only system that these fascists could construct in order to “secure the nation’’ is a police state. One that would require a heavy, militarised police force, most likely with gangs of paramilitaries augmenting the state violence like the Black and Tans, doling out beatings to anyone who might not be carrying the correct papers, or carrying a union card, or expressing themselves politically by handing out a socialist leaflet.

Profit and pain

There are also sinister ambitions of fascist politicians that are perfectly in-line with capitalist ambitions. Marco D’Eramo’s essay “Barbed Wire” in the New Left Review analyses some of the contradictions of anti-immigrant politics in the 21st century. “Another often overlooked aspect of migration politics,” he writes, “is that the rhetoric of tight border controls has a two-fold advantage for the lobbies that benefit from migration. On the one hand, it leaves intact… the migratory flow that is indispensable to a labour market increasingly in deficit.”

He goes on to say:

“[Anti-migration politics] generates huge demand and ballooning profits for the surveillance industry… Between 2012 and 2022, the budget of Frontex, the EU’s border agency, soared from €85 million to €754 million. For the period 2021–27, the European budget for ‘migration and borders management’ totalled €22.7 billion, compared to €13 billion for the previous six years. In the United States, in 2018, the budget for border enforcement was $24 billion – three times the budget of the FBI ($8.3 billion), and 33% more than the sum of spending on the other major federal law enforcement agencies combined. This bounty rains down on the big arms manufacturers – in Europe: Airbus, Thales, Finmeccanica and BAE – and leading technology companies, such as Saab, Indra, Siemens and Diehl.”

Anti-immigration politics fits perfectly within the capitalist political system we live in today. The world of Children of Men, a world with no future, still has its wealthy in a deeply divided society. When Theo is visiting his cousin, a high-ranking state official running a program called the Ark of the Arts, rescuing culture from the wreckage of the world, he is driven by limousine into the parts of London still occupied by the rich.

It’s a world of walls, gates, guns, and horrible inequality. But within the walled city for the ruling class, there are still beautiful parks, circuses, bands playing, happy families out walking as if lifted from some Victorian era painting of a pleasure garden demonstrating the moral superiority of the elites. This is what the likes of the National Party, the Irish Freedom Party, and Ireland first will invest in on top of what the likes of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are already doing. The far right won’t dismantle Direct Provision systems, they won’t stop the huge payouts to major weapons and surveillance corporations, they’ll just put the already ballooning profits of misery on steroids, stealing more wealth from the working classes to pay corporations who benefit from turning society into one big prison system.

D’Eramo’s essay also notes how capitalists are finding other ways to extract profits out of such a system. Where someone puts up a wall, someone will offer to get you over it, for a fee. The hypocrisy of anti-immigration politics is betrayed by the same class of owners and bosses that depend on workers. D’Eramo writes:

“Then there is the additional industry spawned by the barriers to entry, which have created the need for intermediaries who know how to interpret and circumvent the cumbersome (and often contradictory) national and, in the case of Europe, supranational legislation. This industry feeds huge multinationals specialising in the ‘administration of workers’ such as the Dutch Randstad (€24.6 billion turnover) based in Diemen, the French-Swiss Adecco (€20.9 billion turnover) based in Zurich and in the American firm Manpower ($20.7 billion) based in Wisconsin. These three multinationals ‘administer’ more than 1.6 million workers worldwide (rising to 4.3 million with Adecco’s recent expansion into China) and occupy a central position in the import and export of labour: global gangmasters in advanced-capitalist guise.”

Bringing it closer to home, the SIPTU researcher Michael Taft has an article explaining “The Political Economy of the Far Right” in Ireland. Similar to D’Eramo, his article demonstrates how the politics of the far-right are based on a deliberate misinterpretation of social issues and labour markets with anti-immigration as a tool for entering into the political fray without intending to even live up to their own ambitions beyond self-serving theft. Taft shows the diversity of economic sectors, skills, and areas where immigrants in Ireland work. They’re an essential base of the labour market without which entire sections of the economy would crumble, adding to the immiseration of working people under capitalism and liberal reform. 

The far-right are knowingly lying about what they would do about immigration. They only have the option of convincing the people in the Republic to leave the EU and the CTA to limit free movement of labour across the common-market and also shut-down immigration from the rest of the world. The first is a gargantuan political task which they do not have the organisational capacity to pull-off, nor do they have a  vision for a better society outside of the EU. The second would undercut essential services across the economy in health, IT, communications, industry, manufacturing, and logistics that ordinary people (the people they pretend to represent) depend on. Taft concludes that “Many far right activists… should admit from the outset that they cannot do anything about most labour force immigration… And if their programme is to target non-EU workers, they should be honest about the consequences for all of our living standard.” Economic and social impoverishment goes hand-in-hand with racism. That’s all the far right can offer.

Only socialism provides a positive vision for a future Ireland based on solidarity and with democratic control of the economy by the working class, by the people who create the value in society, no matter what country they come from. This working class has no country until, as Marx says, it seizes political control and constitutes itself as the nation. In Ireland, that vision is the inheritance of Connolly’s vision of thirty-two county socialist republic.

Only socialism offers a future based not on violence and apartheid, but on liberty and human flourishing. For socialists, the point of politics is to turn our collective power against those who exploit and oppress. For the fascists using immigration as their wedge-issue, they offer nothing but more degradation for everyone, including the people who might support them in the streets or at the polls.

Videos of the film can be found on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=161h1o168xU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imT3wQIy6p4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrALRx95mHs