Open the borders!

There have never been as many displaced people - and it's all down to capitalism's destructiveness

Faced with the horrific images of a drowned toddler on a Turkish beach and the dramatic scenes of thousands of desperate refugees camped at a train station in Hungary, you’d have to be pretty tough nut to reduce this human tragedy to just a numbers’ game. Yet that is exactly what the ruling classes across Europe are doing. Germany’s offer to give asylum to a million Syrian refugees might be prompted more by the country’s ongoing concerns with its falling birth rate rather than genuine humanitarianism. (Although it rather show up the pathetic response of the British government that has granted asylum to just 300 Syrians. The 4,000 refugees that Cameron has just been forced to accept has not altered that fact).
 
Of course, we oppose those hypocrites calling for military action against Syria. Yassamine Mather has previously explained imperialism’s role in creating the region’s descent into chaos, horror and fragmentation and how the rise of Islamic State can be traced back to the interventions of Tony Blair, George W. Bush and their predecessors. (Also see this video). War and grinding economic hardship for billions of people are organic to capitalism as a system. A huge growth of mass migration is inevitable under these conditions. And who can blame people for trying to flee a life of misery and war? As we say in the CPGB’s Draft programme:

“As a matter of principle communists are for the free movement of people and against all measures preventing them entering or leaving countries. Simultaneously, we seek to end poverty, lack of opportunity, war and persecution everywhere.”

We fight for the right for people to live and work wherever on the planet they choose.