was also found in expanding industries which suffered most severely from the general labour shortage, such as the engineering industry in the West Midlands.
But modern capitalism remains unstable, and with the end of long term growth afler the mid1960s, immigrant labour began to fill a new role. As the French employers' magazine Urine Nauselle, put it: *The existence of this immigration gives our economy greater flexibility, since the immigrants are very mobile, are willing to switch factories or regions, and if it becomes necessary, to become compensated unemployed.
METHODS OF CONTROL It is this characteristic of flexibility" which is the most important feature of immigrant Tabour for capitalism in a period of economic difficulty. This Yexibility" is guaranteed by a series of measures which vary in relative importance between one country and another. The contract system has been developed furthest in Germany and France: this ties entry to the needs of the employers, since it in they who authorise the contracts, Immigrant workers are thus prevented from entering the country without a specified job, and from changing jobs. The contract has to be renewed every one or two years, which means that employers can use the threat of deportation to force acceptance of speed-up, wage-cuts, etc. They can also get rid of troublemakers' - workers who Join unions or political organisations, or who go on strike - in this way. In Germany in 1967, during a recession, 250,000 workers were deported; in France, after May '68, thousands of immigrant workers who had taken part in the General Strike were similarly deported. A method of control that has recently emerged in France is the active encouragement by employers, and the passive acceptance by the gorernment, of 'illegal" immigrants. Their illegal status is then used as a threat against these workers should they try to challenge their exploitation or improve their conditions.
The super-exploitation of immigrant workers forces them to live in slums and ghettoes, where they come to suffer from a higher rate of such diseases as tuberculosis than indigenous workers and inevitably a higher death rate.
These conditions serve to demorslise immigrant workers and make it easier for the ruling class to 'use" them as it sees fit.
A final method of control is that inherent in the climate of racialism and prejudice common to all Western European countries, At one level this. But the social roots of working class this leads to attacks on immigrant workers by police and fascist thugs; on another, it isolates immigrant workers from other workers, thus reducing the possibility of effective orpanisation.
These "controls' enable the ruling class to superexploit immigrant workers, to force them into those areas of industry where capitalism needs them, and to incroase divisions in the working class.
By he suing last to justry the epidertone and the should be afforded to the white colonists for obtaining possession of land bitherto occupied by the native tributes, and secondly, that the Kaffir population should be made to furnish an Large and as cheap a supply of labour as possible.' The social basis of racialiam ia the exploitation of black people, But historically it has gained some autonomy from this economic toot. The crude racialism of the last century does not go well with neo-colonialism, but racialism has now embedded itself firmly in Western culture, and is continually strengthened by the persistence of imperialist exploitation.
The working cluss ilself is by no means free from racialism. The way in which bourgeois culture dominates the whole of society ensures racialisin differ from those of rucialism in the ruling class. In the working class it is fuelled by the insecurities imposed on workers by capitalism: tears of unemployment, wage-cutting, inadequate housing, and loss of status as rationansation replacos sile. Such insecurity is the breeding ground for nicialist attitudes as they are transmitted via education, the mass media, and political demagogues like Enoch Powell. This racialism has two functions for capitalism - it disunites the class, and leads to the isalation of black workers and other immigrant workers. Thus the ability of both black and white workers to resist their exploitation is weakened.