What Do Socialist Immigration Policies Look Like Historically?
This article will look at different examples from the immense, if imperfect, history of socialism in the hope of encouraging constructive thought and discussion among Irish socialists on a topic of undeniable relevance today.
Imagine: It’s 2046. Five years have passed since the end of the American Wars of Secession. A socialist movement has definitively seized power in an all-Ireland republic after years of urban warfare with Zionist mercenaries which culminated in the rout of Tommy Robinson’s Armada upon their landing in Lurgan. There is broad consensus that this is a ground zero moment for Irish sovereignty.
Migration would be one of the many points of policy for a socialist Irish government to implement. While geopolitics is impossible to predict with any certainty, it is very likely that the wealth imbalance between the countries of the Collective West and large areas of the Global South will persist for decades - regardless of how events transpire. The migration patterns generated by that inequality are likely to persist as well.
Polls indicate that a majority of Irish people want stricter immigration controls than the current neoliberal standards. As tragic, violent incidents involving migrants proliferate amid a general decline in living standards, public opposition to the current levels of migration is likely to increase.
This article will look at different examples from the immense, if imperfect, history of socialism in the hope of encouraging constructive thought and discussion among Irish socialists on a topic of undeniable relevance today.
The socialist countries, a mix of contemporary and historical, were chosen for geographical balance and political variety. They are listed in alphabetical order. The focus is on immigration and refugee policies, as opposed to emigration and internal migration.
- China
Whether one agrees with Beijing that their system is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics or not, most would agree it is markedly different from the western neoliberal model. The economy is centrally planned, and the party retains the final word in most aspects of Chinese society. Their immigration policies are tightly controlled in comparison to the western neoliberal model, but also pragmatic in the socialist context. It must be noted that China is the only country in this list that can be called an immigration country - given its immense economic pull.
Immigration Policy
China received a significant number of settlers during the ‘Century of Humiliation’ preceding the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. By 1942, 140,000 immigrants lived in the international concessions in Shanghai alone. These small colonies were seized under war or the threat of war by Britain, Germany, Portugal, Holland and Japan.
It is no surprise then that Mao prioritised “cleaning the house before inviting guests”, and the foreign-born population declined until China’s opening up began in 1978. As state management of the economy loosened, so too did its control over internal and international mobility.
By 1999, China became an “ageing society” by UN standards. China’s population first began to structurally decrease in 2022, marking its first absolute decline in sixty years. The decline has continued since.
Chinese lawmakers have focused on attracting trade specialists and educated diaspora. Their work permit system uses a point-based three-tiered classification system to evaluate applicants’ eligibility for a work permit. The government’s approach can be summed up by its slogan: “encourage the top, control the middle, and limit the bottom.”
Compared to the western standard, China still restricts migrants heavily. They have not ratified the UN ‘Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers’. Chinese law does not state that foreign employees are entitled to all labour rights and protections of the current Chinese labour legislation. Only licensed employers are allowed to employ foreigners. Spousal visas do not allow for employment. The path to citizenship is notoriously difficult and requires applicants to renounce their first citizenship.
Although China has seen a relative increase in migrants over the last three decades, this is more due to an increase in economic and educational opportunities than any government policy. Today the official number of foreign-born residents stands at about 1 million, or just 0.07 per cent of its population. This compares sharply with an EU average of 14% foreign-born residents and 22% in Ireland.
China has so far declined to use large-scale immigration as a tool of economic development. Instead, the government has concentrated on mobilising domestic labour and upgrading technology.
Events suggest this restrictive immigration policy is in line with the wishes of the democratic majority. 2020 draft law that would have expanded permanent residency rights for high-income immigrants was withdrawn because of public opposition.
Refugee Policy
In the decades following 1949, the majority of refugees entering China were Han Chinese diaspora from countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. They were treated as “Overseas Nationals in Distress” instead of refugees governed by international law.
The next significant wave of refugees to China came from Indochina which suffered US “Interventions” during the 1960s and 70s. According to the People's Daily, in February 1979, there were more than 230,000 refugees from Vietnam in the PRC. Being somewhat overwhelmed, Beijing requested assistance from the UNHCR. Three years later, they signed the Refugee Convention and the Protocol.
Large numbers of North Koreans arrived in China during the Arduous March of the 1990s following the USSR’s collapse. The PRC has not recognised DPRK escapees as refugees, arguing that they are ‘illegal economic migrants’ and has not allowed the UNHCR to access the border areas and conduct refugee status identification procedures.
Similarly, refugees from Myanmar from the 2010s were classified as Border Residents - which allows them access with an entry-exit card instead of a visa. They usually stay in self-established camps with little state assistance. Reports suggest that preference was given to ethnic Han Myanmese and Kachin who are also an ethnic minority in China.
Apart from officially recognized Indochinese refugees, in 2023, there were 308 refugees registered with the UNHCR office in China. These are the so-called urban refugees, who live autonomously in cities, and not in special refugee camps or settlements. They usually arrive in China on a working visa rather than crossing the land border from a neighbouring state without proper travel documents.
In summary, China today still lacks an official refugee policy with legislation and institutions. The absence of a formal refugee framework acts as a deterrent to asylum applications, allowing China to accept only refugees from communities, and in numbers, that it does not regard as threatening social harmony.
- Cuba
Cuba - in the 68th year of its revolution in spite of renewed US political, economic and military pressure - updated its migration system as recently as 5 May 2026.
Cuban migration policy has more often been focused on stemming the migration pattern to the United States and responding to the US policy that induces Cubans to risk their lives in boats for an automatic green card. Their policy towards migrants and refugees arriving on their shores, however, has been consistent in both times of prosperity and crisis.
Immigration Policy
The Cuban approach to migration can be described as state-controlled and purely developmentalist. From the outset of the revolution, the US-backed terrorism of Miami Cubans has necessitated maintaining strict oversight of entry and residency.
Whether by choice or circumstance, Cuba never pursued inward immigration as a mechanism for economic growth. Foreign arrivals were typically socialist exiles, students, military personnel, or technical specialists rather than labour migrants. Internationalism was reflected through state-coordinated educational, medical and military exchanges.
By 1990, after the relatively prosperous three previous decades, the percentage of the foreign-born population in Cuba stood at 0.3% of the population. Today, after a far more difficult three decades, the migrant population is less than 0.1%.
Refugee Policy
According to the International Organisation for Migration, even today, “Many estimations have shown that Cuba is also the host country of the biggest number of refugees in the Caribbean”.
Despite not being a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, the Cuban Constitution permits granting individuals asylum for: “their ideals or struggles for democratic rights against imperialism, fascism, colonialism, and neocolonialism; against discrimination and racism; for national liberation; for the rights of workers, peasants, and students; for their progressive political, scientific, artistic, and literary activities; [or] for socialism and peace."
Cuba hosts a UNHCR office but does not legally bind itself to their decisions. This allows for a state-led, controlled intake of refugees. Even at a peak in the early 2000s, the country hosted only around 1,000 recognised refugees and asylum seekers, most notably Sahrawis from Western Sahara, a people with few allies in Europe and North Africa.
So instead of a mass refugee program, Cuba has maximised their humanitarian impact by focusing on accepting people without options, like the Western Saharans and US Black Panther revolutionaries, filling humanitarian gaps in a US-dominated world. It is also worth noting the humanitarian impact of the Chernobyl Children Program (1990-2011), where 26,000 patients from the former Soviet Union received an extraordinary level of care in the Cuban seaside resort of Tarara.
- The Soviet Union
There was no formal Soviet immigration legislation until 1959, when the USSR Council of Ministers approved the first officially published Regulation on entry into and exit from the Soviet Union. Soviet legal doctrine treated immigration and emigration, not as the right of the individual, but as a practice governed by the state’s discretion.
Immigration Policy
Soviet migration policy was primarily concerned with regulating internal migration within the Soviet Union between different Soviet Republics. The USSR sought to mobilise and redistribute its own labour force through central planning. External immigration was therefore never viewed as a significant instrument of economic development. Like Cuba, the Soviet external immigration model was developmental in character, but naturally on a much larger scale.
The Soviet state did, however, welcome selected categories of foreigners whose presence was considered beneficial to socialist construction or international solidarity. In the 1920s and early 1930s, foreign specialists were recruited to assist industrialisation projects. AMTORG, the first Soviet office in the United States, helped facilitate the arrival of thousands of American workers and engineers during the Great Depression.
In 1960, the People’s Friendship University of Russia was established to train students from newly independent countries in Africa and Latin America, and more than 60,000 people from 165 countries studied there during the Soviet period. By 1990, there were 180,000 foreign students in the Soviet Union.
Some temporary labour migration was allowed from other Socialist countries. A training and employment agreement was signed with Vietnam in 1981 that allowed for over 100,000 Vietnamese to work in the USSR in the following decade.
Even where foreign labour was admitted, it was generally through state-to-state agreements rather than market demand. Migration was treated as a matter of planning and diplomacy rather than an individual economic choice. The Soviet leadership sought to determine not only who entered the country, but also where they worked, how long they stayed, and under what conditions they could settle permanently.
Right up until the Gorbachev era began, the USSR upheld its side of the Iron Curtain strictly, limiting both entries and exits. Foreigners could obtain citizenship, but the process was arbitrary, depending on local bureaucracy and Supreme Soviet directives.
Refugee Policy
Discourse on refugees in the USSR usually focuses on the large-scale forced relocations of ethnic communities deemed disloyal in the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet Union didn’t work with the UNHCR until the Gorbachev era, viewing it as an instrument of Western imperialism.
Soviet refugee policy was shaped by ideology as much as by security concerns. Unlike the post-war Western refugee regime, which increasingly framed asylum as an individual legal right, the USSR generally viewed displacement through the lens of geopolitics and class struggle. Asylum was available, but it was usually granted on political grounds and often to individuals considered sympathetic to socialism or anti-colonial movements. The Soviet approach emphasised state discretion rather than universal entitlement.
In 1921 the USSR annulled the citizenship of millions of exiles who were granted refugee status by the League of Nations. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Moscow cooperated with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and later the International Refugee Organization in repatriating more than five million Soviet citizens who were outside the USSR.
When the Geneva Convention on Refugees was established in 1951, the USSR refused to sign. Applications for asylum in the USSR had been possible only on political and ideological grounds.
When internal migration rules were relaxed, ethnic conflict appeared as early as 1988 in Nagorno Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Within a few years, ethnic violence had spread to Central Asia, most of the South Caucasus region, Moldova and to the Baltics. Every former Soviet republic ratified the Geneva Convention and Protocol in the 1990s apart from Uzbekistan.
By the late Soviet period, the USSR had accepted students, specialists, workers and political exiles from across the socialist and developing world, yet it never developed a large-scale immigration or refugee system comparable to those that emerged in parts of Western Europe after the Second World War. Soviet policymakers generally regarded population movements as matters to be directed by the state rather than left to market forces or international institutions.
- Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was unique in the European socialist bloc for the extent of its independence from the USSR. This is reflected in their immigration and refugee policies.
Immigration Policy
Yugoslavia allowed for significant labour mobility with Western Europe. Beginning in the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav citizens worked abroad in West Germany, Austria, Switzerland and elsewhere. This policy was primarily designed to reduce unemployment and generate remittances rather than encourage immigration into Yugoslavia itself. According to the 1971 census, more than one million Yugoslav citizens lived abroad.
On 1 January 1967, Yugoslavia was the first communist country to open its borders to all foreign visitors and abolish visa requirements. Visa-free regimes with neighbours helped to stimulate a tourism industry which attracted holidaymakers from both east and west.
As a middle-income socialist country rather than a major industrial power, Yugoslavia did not attract large-scale inward migration. Most foreign residents consisted of diplomats, students from the Non-Aligned Movement, technical specialists, and individuals connected to state-sponsored development projects.
Refugee Policy
Following the Second World War, Yugoslavia hosted significant numbers of Greek and Italian political refugees. They were signatories to the 1951 Convention on the status of refugees and hosted a UNHCR office.
Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that participated in the Western-led international refugee regime and acted as a transit zone for those hoping to reach the West from Warsaw Pact countries.
Despite its role as a transit zone, socialist Yugoslavia did allow a few refugee groups to settle in the country. In 1968, the UN reported there were 2,046 Albanian refugees in Yugoslavia. Aegean Macedonians were also resettled, but only as much as housing stock permitted. Annual quotas prioritized experts and skilled workers, even though the majority of Aegean Macedonian applicants were unskilled workers.
In 1974, Yugoslavia admitted around 100 Chilean refugees after General Pinochet’s coup against the socialist government of Salvatore Allende the year prior. A smaller number of left-wing exiles were admitted from Argentina as well. However, most Latin American refugees later resettled in Western Europe, which Yugoslavia showed as proof of their transitory role for refugees when the UNHCR wanted them to host more refugees in the 1980s.
The Yugoslav case demonstrates that socialist migration policy was not monolithic. Nevertheless, even Yugoslavia did not pursue large-scale labour immigration as an engine of economic growth.
Conclusion
While these examples differ enormously in culture, geography, economic development and historical circumstance, several common themes emerge.
In each case, immigration was viewed through the lens of state policy as opposed to a market mechanism. Apart from Yugoslavia sending workers west, none of these states saw it fit to use mass immigration as a means of stimulating economic growth.
What immigration was permitted was guided by developmental considerations, targeted towards specific economic, educational or technical goals. Governments sought to determine who entered, in what numbers, and for what purpose. No socialist state offered to become large-scale hosts of refugees, often arguing in diplomatic forums that the burden of resettling the displaced should be on those who displaced them.
The examples examined here suggest that socialist governments have generally prioritised national security and social stability when designing migration policy, even when doing so limited potential economic benefits.
It is difficult to say whether these policies arose from socialism itself or from the circumstances of these states, such as central planning, imperialist aggression and geopolitical chaos. A socialist Ireland would likely face similar pressures.
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