With the 2024 election only three months away, immigration has become a hot-button issue at the forefront of American electoral politics. This year has seen a surge of immigration, as millions flee deteriorating political and economic conditions, war, and poverty. This recent influx, particularly on the US-Mexico border, has triggered a crisis that neither the Democrats nor GOP are willing to solve. Instead, anti-immigrant rhetoric is ramping up, and migrants are pitted against US-born workers. While right-wing Texas state governor Greg Abbott has spent $150 million bussing migrants to sanctuary cities, Democratic governors in cities like New York and Chicago house migrants in desolate conditions while complaining about high public expenditure. This drives anti-immigrant sentiment among working people.
Growing global instability caused by climate change will only increase immigration as more climate refugees are displaced from their homes by natural disasters, droughts, and other extreme weather events. Rising global immigration has already taken a central role in European politics. The far-right has been able to grow by weaponizing the anxiety of working people facing inflation, wages, and cuts to social spending, and the failures of the left in addressing those issues.
In France, the far-right won twice as much of the vote as President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party in the EU elections on a nationalist, anti-immigration platform. Similarly, the Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni doubled her party’s seats in the assembly on a similar ticket. In Britain, the far right has used a mass stabbing in Southport to stir up racialized, xenophobic violence against Muslim communities. Let’s be clear about what the rise of the right and attacks on immigrants represent – the scapegoating of the oppressed in the face of a system that is failing all working people.
Faced with a crisis of profitability, the US corporate elite similarly encourages US-born workers to blame their problems on immigrants “stealing jobs”. In his interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump, in between his racist rants questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity, dedicated most of his time to fearmongering around immigration. Trump’s absurd proclamation on the protection of “Black jobs” from immigrant workers is an attempt to sow divisions between the Black working class and other workers.
The Democrats, unfortunately, use anti-immigrant talking points that are no better – claiming immigration is “good for the economy” because “immigrants do jobs Americans won’t do”. Democrat politicians say this while Biden expedites the construction of Trump’s wall, signs an executive order to enact a near-total ban on immigration, and oversees the cruel deportation of Haitian refugees amid violent unrest and political instability.
Bosses use deportation to keep immigrants in a vulnerable position while continuing to depress wages. Capitalists make a show of deporting some of the most vulnerable immigrants claiming that they are “cracking down”, but they can never carry out mass deportation on a scale that would threaten their labor pool. Deportations not only destroy the lives of migrant workers, but are an expensive waste of taxpayer money, money that should be spent paying all workers higher wages. Trump’s recent promise to carry out the largest deportation in history reflects the boss’s need to prevent immigrant-inclusive labor organizing.
Sanctuary cities have subsequently received pushback from historically marginalized groups, most notably Black residents who often lack access to affordable housing, face worsening living conditions, and increasing job insecurity. Growing resentment within marginalized communities is reflected in a sentiment that cities should “take care of their own” before housing and feeding migrants, a sentiment felt by working people everywhere, especially as homelessness reaches a record high in the U.S. Black workers feel the pressures of job insecurity more acutely, and the unemployment rate for Black Americans is the highest of any racial or ethnic group. Without a strong left alternative to the do-nothing Democrats, layers of Black workers are particularly vulnerable to populist, anti-immigrant appeals promising job security. This is the ruling class’s divided-and-conquer strategy on full display.
All workers, regardless of nationality share the same interest in struggling against the bosses. Scarcity in terms of wages and jobs are controlled and imposed by capitalists upon the working class while they hoard the wealth created by workers, immigrant or otherwise. The bosses depress wages and limit hiring to ensure profits, not immigrant labor. Immigrant labor under capitalism is crucial for staffing low-paid and “unskilled” jobs to maximize profits and cut wages. Questionable legal status and language barriers leave immigrant workers vulnerable and less able to protect their rights in the workplace or pursue better job opportunities. In turn, the ruling class can use immigrants as scapegoats for all manner of social ills under capitalism, such as crime and underfunded social services. Workers in the US have felt pressure between inflation, low wages, and soaring costs of living.
The ability for immigrant workers and US-born workers to improve wages and living conditions is impossible without them uniting in struggle against the bosses, thus the labor movement must integrate immigrant workers into the movement. Collective demands that raise wages and living conditions and for all workers regardless of immigration status denies the capitalist class its tool to divide workers. Union workers have to demand shorter work weeks with no loss in pay.For capitalists to produce at the same rate, they would be forced to create more jobs with living wages, raising living standards for immigrants and US-born workers alike. Forcing capitalists to hire more labor without loss in pay robs capitalists of the leverage they utilize to keep immigrant labor subdued for fear of reprisal. As more immigrant laborers move to the US for warehouse jobs in key logistics industries like Amazon, the opportunities for solidarity between immigrant and US-born workers has explosive potential.
Workers may need to struggle against their own union administrations to raise those common demands. Their struggle can be undermined by labor leaders like Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, who delivered a speech to the RNC in which he was very clear in his stance on “protecting” American workers. He called on both sides of Congress to enact trade policies that “put American workers first”, and keep companies in America. If Sean O’Brien wanted to take on the bosses and protect the interests of workers he would fight for the admission of immigrants into unions. Labor leaders should be calling for good union jobs, not just for American workers but for all workers.
Unions must take on immigrant workers, full acceptance of all workers, demand jobs, not deportations, and shorter work weeks without a loss in pay. The ruling class claims that the US working class cannot afford to accept immigrants, that could not be further from the truth, in fact, it is the capitalists who must pay up to fully employ the workforce. It is crucial for solidarity between immigrant workers and US-born workers is built around a program that targets the bosses as the enemy, not each other.
Workers should own the economy, rather than the economy owning us!