Questions from ILPS Commission No. 15,
December 17, 2021
1. Is it correct to say that the main cause of modern-day migration of peoples can be basically rooted to the internal socioeconomic and political conditions of their home countries? Can migration of peoples be a barometer of the crises in countries of origin?
JMS: Yes, it is correct to say that the main cause of modern-day migration of peoples can be traced to the internal socioeconomic and political conditions of their home countries. The migration of peoples is a barometer of the crisis in the country of origin.
It is often claimed that, even outside crisis conditions, the natural rise in population coupled with a locality’s limits in carrying capacity will already drive migration. It is true that as more and more new households arise while the local resource base does not equally expand, they will usually out-migrate to nearby areas with more livelihood opportunities. This was probably true in the heyday of feudalism. Under semifeudal and semicolonial conditions, however, these migratory tendencies become class-stratified, intensified, systematic and oppressive, and turn not just into indicators but also as complicating factors of the system’s chronic crisis.
The severe conditions of exploitation and oppression in semicolonial and semifeudal Philippines are the main cause of the migration of at least 10 million documented and undocumented Filipinos to more than 100 countries in the world. In concrete terms, the high rate of unemployment, low incomes and mass poverty have compelled Filipinos to seek employment in urban areas and abroad. The trend has been worsened by other push factors such as the neoliberal policy of cheap labor export, land grabbing, large-scale militarization, environmental degradation and the lucrative business of labor recruitment.
The gravity of the socioeconomic crisis of the ruling system is the most conspicuous factor of forced migration. The migration of 10 million Filipinos means that a sizeable proportion of the country’s working-age population cannot be employed in the Philippines. In fact, the Philippine Statistics Authority of the Philippine government considers overseas Filipino workers as no longer part of the country’s official labor force of 48.8 million; they are not even counted as part of the country’s working-age population of 75.1 million (both figures are June 2021 estimates).
As of June 2021 (PSA Labor Force Survey), at a time when the Covid lockdowns were starting to ease up, another 10.2 million Filipinos staying in the country, or more than one-fifth of the official labor force, were either unemployed or underemployed. The PSA-estimated high employment rate of 93.8 percent (June 2021) is empty propaganda because, first, it includes what it underestimates as underemployed at 14.2 percent and of course the huge mass of seasonal farm workers and odd jobbers in both rural and urban areas; and second, it discounts from the labor force such major categories of de-facto unemployed as housewives, those who have given up job-seeking, or those still listed as overseas workers but have been stranded or repatriated due to Covid shutdowns and layoffs.
The distribution of those employed is supposed to be 18.1 percent in industry, 24.2 percent in agriculture and 57.6 percent in the service sector as of June 2021. In each sector, most of those employed have no job tenure and receive subhuman incomes. The service sector is the most notorious category for concealing the underemployed and odd jobbers from the surplus population or reserve army of labor from both rural and urban areas.
2. How do the crises of global monopoly capitalism shape modern-day migration? How has the current neoliberal framework exacerbated forced migration?
JMS: For context and comparison with current migration trends, let me share some historical trends in the capitalist era.
Countries that have undergone the process of capitalist industrialization through the 18th and 19th centuries—from Europe to America, Russia and Japan, for example—have experienced massive migration from their countrysides to their respective cities and industrial zones. This is because, whenever capitalism is allowed to run rampant, that process is one of the easiest ways for generating cheap labor for the burgeoning industries, and also for freeing the land to be turned into capitalist farms, mines, industrial facilities, and new towns connected by road and rail. We only have to be reminded of the Enclosures (first in England, then in other European countries), which essentially resulted in forced migrations first to rural towns, then to cities.
The requirements of imperialism, from the late 19th through the entire 20th and early 21st centuries, has further intensified and globalized these migration trends. Remember that the USA relied not only on freed Southern slaves and migrants from the poorer countries of Eastern and Southern Europe for its heavily industrialized East and Midwest, but also on very cheap coolie gangs from China and its Philippine colony to fill up labor scarcity in the fast-developing West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska, to be followed later by Latin American migrants.
The crises of global monopoly capitalism continue to shape modern-day migration. The problem of stagflation arose in the US as a result of the crisis of domestic overproduction in the 1970s, aggravated by the reconstruction of industries in Western Europe and Japan which had been devastated by World War II. The US economy was also distorted by massive war production, deployment of hundreds of overseas military bases and wars of aggression.
Neoliberalism was a fringe trend of thought until it was adopted by US imperialism as the fake solution to the problem of stagflation. At the core of this problem was the decreasing income of the working class and therefore decreasing demand for consumer goods. The US made the other traditional imperialist countries follow its lead through the Washington Consensus (IMF, World Bank and the GATT series of talks leading to the WTO) in adopting the neoliberal policy regime.
This policy regime is founded on the dogma of unbridled greed, that the monopoly bourgeoisie is the creator of wealth and jobs and that it must have the utmost freedom to accumulate and centralize capital in its hands. The objective is to undermine and weaken the working class and the trade union movement by attacking job security and trade union rights, press down wages, decrease taxes of corporations and individual investors, cut back on labor benefits and social services, liberalize trade and investments, privatize public assets and abuse public debt for the private benefit of the monopoly banks and firms.
Since its adoption in 1979 by the US and other imperialist countries, neoliberalism has accelerated the extraction of surplus value from the working class by the monopoly bourgeoisie and has degraded socioeconomic conditions in the traditional imperialist countries. Marxists and most bourgeois sociologists alike are agreed that the neoliberal assault was one of the main causes of the marked decline in trade-union gains, workers’ rights, and strength of the workers’ movement as a whole in the industrial capitalist countries.
In the undeveloped countries, like the Philippines, neoliberalism teamed up with neocolonialism to further disemploy and impoverish the people and increase rapidly the number of the unemployed vulnerable to recruitment for cheap labor export alongside the export of cheap raw materials. In certain countries targeted by the US-led “war on terror,” such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and parts of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, the deadly combination of neoliberalism, neocolonialism and neoconservatism has created humanitarian disasters of horrific proportions—the most visible symptoms of which, such as militarized refugee camps, mass treks by land and sea, and breakdown of social services, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Neoliberalism also teamed up with modern revisionism in the former socialist countries to accelerate the restoration of capitalism and the domestic exploitation and export of cheap labor from these countries. Some former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, such as Poland, the Balkans (former Yugoslavia), and the Ukraine, have turned into major pools of migrant labor for the more industrialized countries of the EU.
3. Is modern-day migration, therefore, forced migration in essence? What do you say to agencies who claim that migration is an individual choice, positive and can be a tool for national development, or that migration is a natural phenomenon borne of globalization?
JMS: Modern-day migration is forced migration in essence. What can be more forcible than be compelled to accept cheap and risky employment abroad and separation from one’s family under the pain of unemployment, hunger and death. When they get employment abroad, the migrant workers are liable to get the dirtiest and lowest-paid jobs and become easy prey to the violation of fundamental human rights and basic democratic rights.
State and private agencies are lying when they claim that migration is an individual choice, positive and can be a tool for national development, or that migration is a natural phenomenon borne of globalization or professional advancement. There is the superficial appearance of free individual choice only because the migrant workers apply individually for recruitment and travel, even if the overseas migrant worker usually has the advantage of being able to converse in English over the far less educated seasonal farm worker and general run of odd jobbers in the Philippines.
The false illusion of free choice is also strengthened in a handful of cases where the migrants are the lucky few recipients of graduate-school scholarships, scientists and engineers, health professionals, top corporate personnel, or long-term diplomatic posts, or of wealthy Filipinos expanding their overseas interests —which are certainly a small part and not representative of the international migration flows.
In the underdeveloped and less developed countries, which are the largest source of cheap migrant labor, there is the official rationale that migration is a tool for national development. But the foreign exchange earnings of the migrant workers have been used entirely or mainly for import-dependent consumption, for guaranteeing the neoliberal credit for building shopping malls and skyscrapers and for foreign debt repayment by the states.
Seen as a systemic social phenomenon and not merely as individual decisions, migration reveals many levels of being forcible even in the absence of open state coercion. Social conditions may be so severe and ruling-class interests so contrary, especially in the face of environmental disasters and armed conflicts, that entire communities are obliged to relocate elsewhere.
In the extreme, forced migrations are the direct result of state law and armed coercion used to achieve concrete ruling-class aims, such as when the US government herded native American tribes into reservations, or when Nazi Germany herded entire Jewish populations into concentration camps. Let us recall the long record of modern imperialist states in committing such crimes amounting to genocide or ethnocide.
Even the UN World Food Programme acknowledges that there is a wide continuum of causes and types of migration, in which the category at one pole conveniently called “economic migration” (migration by choice) gradually blends into “forced migration” (migration out of necessity) at the other pole. A key finding in a 2019 UN-WFP report was that hunger and armed conflict were the key drivers of migration. The report stated: “Countries with the highest level of food insecurity, coupled with armed conflict, have the highest outward migration of refugees. Additionally, when coupled with poverty, food insecurity increases the likelihood and intensity of armed conflicts.”
Migration is indeed a conspicuous phenomenon related to the imperialist policy of neoliberal globalization and the war-like character of imperialist states. But it is not something that is unavoidably natural. Patriotic and democratic peoples and governments in underdeveloped countries can decide to become independent of imperialist and reactionary dictates, pursue their own economic development through national industrialization and genuine land reform, and on that basis, ensure democratic governance, justice and peace.
While we view migration, especially in the massive scales we see today, as objectively driven by the mechanisms of imperialism, we should realize that it also triggers strong pushbacks and complex crosscurrents within host countries. These include racial/ethnic conflicts which the ruling classes manipulate for their own ends, anti-immigrant laws and sentiments, and even harsher border controls and police restrictions especially in times of economic and political crisis.
The anti-immigrant pushbacks in the US and EU, which were already simmering by the late 1990s, became prominent starting in 2015-2016, and further tightened during the Covid lockdowns of 2020-21. These counter-trends bear close watching for their possible long-term effects both among migrant peoples in the host countries and on the social economies of their homelands.
4. How best to solve the problem of forced migration? How much of it can be through reforms or as international agencies will say, “management of migration”? Isn’t social revolution the real answer?
JMS: The best way for the Filipino people and other peoples in underdeveloped countries to solve the problem of forced migration is to assert and realize full national independence from the dictates of imperialism and its puppets and to carry out a policy of economic development through genuine land reform and national industrialization that would immediately generate jobs for the huge number of unemployed and underemployed.
Under the aegis of a truly democratic state, economic development would sustainably provide decent wages, health and housing benefits, and other social services that the people in underdeveloped countries have long urgently needed, but for many generations only saw such “comforts” in more developed countries.
Endless calls for reforms or reformism and availment of superprofit-seeking foreign investments or “assistance” by pro-imperialist agencies and their NGO agents will not enable the people of underdeveloped countries to achieve a situation where they can achieve economic development. The people and their revolutionary forces in the said countries have to achieve national and social liberation through the people’s democratic revolution.
5. In the context of rapid migration of peoples, has it changed the principle of waging revolution in national boundaries under the era of imperialism?
JMS: The rapid migration of peoples has not changed the principle of waging revolution within national boundaries in the era of imperialism. On one hand, such migrations do create potentially more favorable conditions for a common working-class consciousness, cutting across multiple nationalities and ethnicities and developing a strong internationalist orientation. But even if we are proletarian revolutionaries, we do not advocate world wars to win the world proletarian revolution.
We remain committed to the principle that social revolutions are carried out within national boundaries, unless the imperialist powers carry out the cross-border war and they need to be rolled back—as in the case of the Soviet counter-offensive against the German and other fascists in World War II, or in the more recent cases of the Kurdistan and Palestine peoples who are still fighting for a national homeland and so their revolutionary armed struggle have had to extend across certain national borders to adjacent territories (or refugee camps) in neighboring countries.
The migrants are usually a minority in relation to the host people. They can and must support the revolutionary struggles of the host people but must not take away from them (the host people) the revolutionary initiative and main effort to carry out the social revolution. The migrants have the right and duty to pay attention to their own needs and democratic rights and to support the revolutionary struggle in their motherland. But they also have the right and duty to support the host people in their revolutionary struggle in the spirit of anti-imperialist solidarity and proletarian internationalism.
We do realize that as the second and third generations grow up from migrant families in host countries, the expected tendency is for migrant roots to fade and for host-country ethnic identities to predominate. But this is not an automatic process. The US experience, for example, has good examples of migrants retaining their ethnic identities and close ties with their respective motherlands. These identities and ties may remain robust after many generations, and even become a steady source of national pride and solidarity through appropriate types of social institutions, organizations, and traditions. Many of these have developed closely with the anti-imperialist and democratic or revolutionary movements in the original homelands.
6. Do you think that national and social liberation movements should pay attention to arousing, organizing and mobilizing their compatriots who migrated in other countries? Can they (overseas compatriots) be considered a positive force for national revolution?
JMS: Definitely, national and social liberation movements should pay attention to arousing, organizing and mobilizing their compatriots who have migrated to other countries. The overseas compatriots are a positive force for the national revolution in their motherland.
Marx and Engels living in exile in their own historical time, followed by Lenin and the Russian emigré revolutionaries, had all experienced migrant life in other countries of Europe. Many Asian revolutionary leaders of the 20th century such as Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Ho Chi Minh also became politically active while working or studying in Europe, US or Japan. They too saw the great value of arousing, organizing and mobilizing their compatriots and support groups from other nationalities. Together with their respective proletarian parties, they relied on overseas mass organizations and encouraged all kinds of actions and linkages in support of the struggle in the homeland.
Being aroused, organized and mobilized to support the revolutionary struggle in their motherland, the overseas compatriots can gather from among themselves moral and material support for the aforesaid struggle as well as from the host people and other migrant peoples in the host country.
Gathering moral support involves information and education campaigns and obtaining expressions of political and moral solidarity and support. Gathering material support involves realizing solidarity partnerships and exchange of publications and visits between organizations of the motherland and host country and obtaining financial, technical and other forms of material assistance for the people in need.
7. But surely there are reactionary classes and revolutionary classes among overseas migrants. What then should be the guiding principle in organizing migrants?
JMS: Indeed, there are reactionary classes and revolutionary classes among overseas migrants. We need to recognize the fact that there are migrants who belong to the exploiting classes, including highly-paid diplomatic officials, business representatives, and top-level corporate professionals, and students of various ideological persuasions.
But the overwhelming majority of migrants belong to the working class and lower middle class; they have a strong tendency to side with their own class. Although it’s often observed that rank-and-file migrant workers in an advanced capitalist country may well display middle-class lifestyles upon their return to the homeland, this is unsustainable. Generally, the objective material conditions and their exposure to class politics will continue to favor conditions for arousing, organizing and mobilizing them.
The guiding principle in organizing migrants is to bring them together in accordance with a national and democratic program. We need to promote and develop the united front in which we rely mainly on the working people, win over the intelligentsia and other urban petty bourgeois and take advantage of splits among the upper classes and reactionaries.
While we are mindful of classes and the class tendencies of those who belong to them, let us be meticulous enough to know that there are individuals who do not think and behave according to their class origin. There are communists who have upper class origins. There are a few workers and students who are anti-communist and opposed to the national democratic movement. There are also individuals who do not know any better at some time but who can be subsequently enlightened and become patriotic and progressive.
8. Should the struggle of compatriots in host countries therefore be principally focused on supporting and contributing directly to the national liberation movement of their home country? How about the struggle for the rights and welfare of their communities in the host countries?
JMS: I presume that most of overseas compatriots, especially the wage-earners, are preoccupied with their wage and living conditions and with paying attention to the rights and welfare of their community. They tend to join the trade unions of their host country (when they are recruited) and also the migrant workers’ association which tends to be the biggest organization of migrants.
We also recognize certain sectoral particularities among compatriots, such as among women and youth, who will have their distinct sectoral interests and issues. There can also be a strong interest in their homeland’s culture, language or ethnic traditions, or the even more particular issues and concerns of their home regions or home towns.
Within every form of migrant organization, there is a calibration in the focus of compatriots on supporting and contributing directly to the national liberation movement of their home country. At any rate, compatriots who join our migrant organizations tend to be more concerned and militant about Philippine issues and the national liberation movement in the Philippines than those migrant compatriots who do not join the national democratic migrant organizations.
9. What contributions can overseas compatriots make to the advance of national and social liberation of their home countries?
JMS: As I have earlier pointed out, the overseas compatriots can gather moral and material support from their own ranks and from the host people and other migrant peoples in order to contribute to the advance of the revolutionary struggle for national and social liberation in their countries. The contributions include expressions and concerted actions of anti-imperialist and democratic solidarity and proletarian international and financial, technical and other material forms of support and assistance.
10. How can migrant organizations contribute to the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and democratic struggles in the host countries as well as internationally?
JMS: The migrant organizations of various types can contribute to the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and democratic struggles in the host countries as well as internationally by promoting and developing relations of solidarity and cooperation with the pertinent organizations according to class interest or social concern and by joining the International League of Peoples’ Struggle.
11. What is the role of the working class in the host countries in organizing migrants in relation to the liberation movements in sending countries?
JMS: The working class in host countries has the role of organizing migrants both for the purpose of building the working class movement in the host countries and encouraging them to support the revolutionary struggle in their homelands.
The working class and unions in advanced capitalist countries have an anti-fascist tradition and socialist aspirations even as the monopoly bourgeoisie continues to subject them to imperialist, racist and chauvinist propaganda in order to fracture and pit them against each other along racial, nationality or ethnic/immigrant lines.
The working class movement must counteract the big bourgeoisie’s divide-and-rule policies by stressing the commonality of the workers’ economic and political struggles, i.e., the struggles for trade union rights, and the struggles for democracy and against imperialism.
