Where the struggle for migrants’ rights can be risky and divisive, informal organising by ‘illegals’ is a means to ensure survival. But both formal and informal organising can combine to protect an essential buffer zone of invisibility for undocumented workers — writes Unterschreber

All immigrants are equal, but some are more equal than others. The introduction of a points-based immigration system in the UK will intensify workers’ vulnerability to the state and employers, reports Javier

The vulnerability of illegalised workers forces them to accept the worst pay and conditions and produces conflict within the working class as a whole. Here Seemab Gul examines how the production of this illegality is the main goal of the UK’s immigration laws
 

Under the guise of humanitarian work, established inter-governmental agencies like the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and International Labour Organization (ILO) handle the enforcement of neoliberal migration management. While the IOM takes pride in being the world’s largest ‘human-trafficker’, having moved more than 11 million people, the ILO is responsible for a ‘brain-drain’ of educated people from poor countries. Western governments recognise that immigrants are an additional resource for the economy since they meet the demand for cheap labour. If the demand for labour falls or their numbers exceed the demand, the immigrant workers become a burden to the state. They are then imprisoned in camps or detention centres or forcibly deported. While governments may try to maintain this situation, many undocumented migrants remain illegal to avoid the harsh detention and deportation regime.

Text inspired by Will Barnes 'Climate and capital' (see Mute #2 Vol. 5)  with a more scientific and technical approach.  

Views on climate change  

Jaya Klara Brekke talks to four UK based groups working to improve conditions for migrants and asks ‘how does one organise in the dark?’

Brief historicization (from www.spiked-online.com) of the latest inter-governmental eco-policy deal, looking into the way certain branches of capital established the 'Green' agenda long before its discovery by counter-culture and adoption by mainstream moralism.  The ideology of Scarcity is perpetual, but it took on this distinct institutional form during the late 20th century Supply Side ascendancy.  Incidentally the implicit contradiction between an 'eco-imperialist' drive to keep the 'underdeveloped' world that way (as a 'non-capitalist' source of loot) and industrial capitals' need to draw ever more labour-power into their orbit was explained by Rosa Luxemburg in 1913 in 'The Accumulation of Capital': "The conditions for the capitalization of surplus-value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital – a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a counterpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate".