Amid chants of “Foreigners out!”, violence against the immigrant population broke out in Belfast on the nights of June 9 and 10. It was a full-scale hunt for foreigners, carried out by racist groups whose members, with their faces covered, attacked immigrants’ homes, smashing doors and windows and setting fire to houses, cars, trash cans, and even a bus. They also set up makeshift checkpoints to search for foreigners among the drivers and passengers of stopped cars.

The attack on immigrants in Belfast was certainly not a sudden outburst of violence following the June 8 stabbing of a local resident by a migrant, but was carried out through careful organization and coordination, to the extent that, before the violence began, the addresses of homes occupied by foreigners had been posted online, thus identifying the targets to be attacked, and men were present during the violence to direct the terror operations.

Nor was this an isolated incident, as early as June 2025, in Ballymena, near Belfast, attacks on the homes and shops of Romanians had occurred following an incident similar to the one on June 8. Meanwhile, in 2024, there were numerous arson attacks on shops and homes belonging to foreigners, particularly those of the Islamic faith. Furthermore, a week before the events in Belfast, following another news story, Southampton had been the scene of racist and anti-immigrant demonstrations.

In such a context, the hypocritical condemnations of violence against immigrants by the major political parties must not mislead the working class. Nor must they allow themselves to be drawn into the thoroughly bourgeois charade that tends to play out across various political formations, in particular, by identifying openly anti-immigration parties and movements, such as Reform UK, as the danger to be fought. The entire British political class and all the bourgeois “media” are responsible for this violence, having supported anti-immigration campaigns for years in the service of their own bourgeoisie, which needs a cheap labor force but keeps it in a state of constant blackmail precisely through anti-immigration policies and the spread of hate campaigns against foreigners. In the United Kingdom, forced and “voluntary” repatriations, which are effectively deportations, totaled 39,000 in the 12 months ending in March 2026, representing a 7% increase over the previous year.

To the working class, the events in Belfast must not appear to be confined to the local level and explained by specific dynamics, as a certain segment of the left tends to do by emphasizing the role played by loyalist paramilitary groups. The degree of organization behind the Belfast pogrom may also have stemmed from the deep roots of loyalist paramilitary groups in certain neighborhoods, groups that have accumulated considerable experience over the years in fighting the Irish Catholic population and maintain a degree of control over some neighborhoods in Belfast, but the phenomenon of the “hunt for foreigners” and, more generally, the spread of anti-immigrant attitudes and practices is rooted in the history of bourgeois domination, which is closely linked to the ruling class’s need to divide the oppressed, in order to create barriers that prevent the formation of a united proletarian front capable of overcoming religious, ethnic, and national divisions and rising up against the bourgeois order.

… to South Africa

Capitalism, which has spread on a global scale, reproduces its characteristics in the same way across all latitudes, without taking into account the supposed specificities of local populations, dragging all countries, each with its own national, ethnic, and religious particularities, into the same barbarism.

And so, shortly after the atrocities in Belfast, the Global South, too, witnessed its own hunt for foreigners. This refers to South Africa, where the terror directed against foreigners far exceeded the scale of the Belfast pogrom.

It is worth remembering that South Africa, which, for certain noble souls, represents a model of coexistence and respect for human rights, having abandoned the white racist regime in the mid-1990s, is now part of the BRICS group, part of the so-called Global South which, according to modern anti-imperialists, is building a multipolar world by challenging the nefarious dominance of American unipolarism.

In South Africa, too, capital’s need to keep the working class fragmented has given rise to its own anti-immigration movement, called “March and March,” one of whose goals is the expulsion of illegal immigrants, with a specific deadline set for June 30. Together with other similar movements, such as Operation Dudula, anti-immigrant demonstrations were organized in major cities, which then degenerated into violence and outright terror against foreigners, particularly against workers, complete with raids on industrial plants and other businesses, even leading to the closure of some of them. In addition to several murders of foreign workers, the result has been a massive wave of repatriations, which, according to government data as of July 11, totaled over 53,000!

It’s truly laughable to suggest that these are “voluntary or assisted returns,” as if a foreign worker under attack, whose life is at risk, were in a position to choose whether to stay or leave!

The rhetoric of “voluntary repatriation” serves to mask the scale of this mass expulsion, but in reality, the South African government is responsible for the deportation of thousands of foreigners, riding the wave of anti-immigrant protests while managing them from above: the triumph of the so-called rule of law! Of course, the government has condemned the violence, after all, the monopoly on violence is the prerogative of the bourgeois state!

In any case, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has publicly acknowledged that concerns regarding irregular immigration, border control, and the challenges facing public services must be addressed. Moreover, the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has been in crisis for years and cannot afford further declines in support. Although it won as much as 40% of the vote in the 2024 elections, the ANC, which has been in power since the first post-apartheid elections in 1994, fell below an absolute majority for the first time, and, lacking the numbers to govern alone, was forced to form a coalition. But even more serious for the stability of the entire framework of bourgeois democracy is the collapse in voter turnout, which hit an all-time low of 58%.

This is a sign of widespread discontent, not only toward the ANC but also toward an economic situation that is plunging tens of millions of South Africans into poverty. The country’s economic development in recent years has made South Africa one of the wealthiest economies on the African continent, thereby attracting migrant workers not only from other countries in Southern Africa but also from those in the Gulf of Guinea and the Horn of Africa. Today, however, the country’s economy is grappling with an unemployment rate as high as 32 percent, with rates exceeding 60 percent among young people. In such a context, social anger is being channeled by the South African middle class into hatred of foreigners, making migrants the target against which to unleash the unrest brewing in the country.

As in Europe, so too in Africa, and everywhere under bourgeois rule, the advancing revolution can be stopped only by shattering the international unity of the proletariat, pitting the proletarians against one another under bourgeois leadership.

Workers of the World, Unite!

The events in Belfast and South Africa are merely the most striking recent examples of the persecution of immigrants. These are not phenomena exclusive to recent times; rather, the issue of immigration has been present since the dawn of the capitalist mode of production, whose fundamental characteristics were already well established, even with regard to aspects that may seem relatively recent, as is indeed the case with the phenomenon of migration.

A few years before the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848, Engels had accurately described the conditions of the modern proletariat, also identifying the close link between capitalist development and migration:

“The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of St. George’s Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither.” (The Condition of the Working Class in England).

Even at that time, our class doctrine had a clear understanding of the issues at hand and the tasks facing the Party of the proletariat in light of the presence of migrant proletarians alongside the native proletariat. Marx discusses this in a letter from 1870:

“And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this” (Letter sent by Karl Marx to Sigfried Meyer and August Vogt, 1870).

In a speech in August 1919, Lenin addressed the issue of anti-Semitism and framed the issue from a broader perspective:

“The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital. […] It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. […]  The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races” (Anti-Jewish Pogroms, 1919).

From these few brief quotations, we can see that, for Marxism, the current issues surrounding migration and its consequences for the ethnic composition of populations in various countries around the world are not new developments we must grapple with, nor do they require us to revise or update our positions. Our doctrine is rooted precisely in the conviction that the proletariat, though divided by the barriers of bourgeois states, is an international class whose historical interests transcend national borders and any ethnic or religious differences. “Workers of all countries, unite!” we proclaimed in 1848. Nothing has changed since then.

Only proletarian internationalism is the antidote to the poison of racial hatred and a barrier against the persecution of foreigners.

On so-called remigration

Today, the issue of combating immigration is being touted with particular vigor by far-right, if not openly neo-fascist, organizations, which carry out their mission of sowing hatred against foreign workers even through seemingly new tactics, such as the aberrant theories of so-called “remigration,” that is, the forced deportation of migrants, a veritable ethnic cleansing. This absurd theory reflects nothing more than the attempt by petty-bourgeois strata to save themselves from the economic and social ruin into which they are destined to plunge, a ruin exacerbated by the current crisis of the capitalist mode of production, which has taken the path of imperialist war and is forcing every bourgeois state to engage in an arms race, diverting ever-greater resources toward strengthening its own army and thereby destroying that, albeit meager, welfare state built on the crumbs of imperialist plunder. The theory of remigration stems precisely from the narrow-mindedness of the petty bourgeoisie, which deludes itself, as in Germany in the 1930s, into believing it can save itself from its own historical ruin by sacrificing a portion of the population, namely the foreign population.

In this context, the risk is that opportunism will succeed in diverting the proletarian struggle toward the fight against fascism, against far-right parties, in defense of democracy, and in support of rights and the state.

The bourgeoisie will continue, using every means at its disposal, to keep the proletarian class divided. The international proletariat must not be deceived either by those positions that sow division between native and migrant workers, an old bourgeois tool for keeping its historical enemy subjugated, or by opportunism, which is always ready to divert the proletarian struggle toward an outcome compatible with the maintenance of bourgeois order.