The authors of Immigrant Workers begin by observing that ‘The race relations approach has dominated research on immigration in Britain’. footnote1 This approach has been mainly liberal in outlook, and frequently followed American models; ‘few British social scientists have paid any attention to . . . immigrants in the far closer countries of continental Western Europe’ (p. 2), and fewer still have looked at the question in a Marxist perspective. In a recent survey for example, Michael Mann’s Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class (1973), the problem is confined to one footnote.

The main aim of this work is to redress the imbalance; it is an admirable start towards doing so. The authors argue that ‘Virtually every advanced capitalist country has a lower stratum, distinguished by race, nationality, or other special characteristics, which carries out the worst jobs and has the least desirable social conditions’, and that rather than the familiar categories of colour and ‘prejudice’, the ‘basic determinant is the function which immigrants have in the socio-economic structure’. Immigration has become a long-term, possibly permanent feature of advanced capitalism (p. 6). It is having a profound effect upon both class structure and class consciousness; in particular, it helps foster within the indigenous working class ‘a view of society conducive to acceptance of ideas of individual advancement, rather than collective advancement through class struggle’ (p. 7). Furthermore, it has a notable significance for relations between advanced and under-developed lands (whence immigrants increasingly come), for ‘Labour migration is a form of development aid given by poor countries to rich countries’ (p. 8).