Under Trump’s second term, immigration has become arguably the single most important issue driving struggle in the US. The fightback against Trump’s anti-immigrant attacks took a qualitative step forward with the Battle of Minneapolis. In the aftermath of the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents, polls showed that 62% of people believe Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) makes us less safe and 65% think they’ve gone too far. The ensuing protests revived the general strike as a tool of the workers’ movement and took the anti-Trump struggle to a new level.

Neither the oppression of immigrants nor the struggle for immigrant rights are limited to Trump and the US. Election campaigns from Japan to Chile to Slovakia to South Africa have been dominated by right-wing demagoguery about alleged threats from immigration. Authoritarian regimes such as those in Iran and Egypt are carrying out brutal deportations. Walls and armed forces already exist or are being proposed at borders that were previously relatively open. But, as in the US, these attacks haven’t gone down without a fight.

The defense of immigrants against right-wing attacks is now a defining question for how to fight the right-wing establishment generally. Previously, during the tail end of the neoliberal order, immigrant workers in the US made their stamp on history with a massive immigrant strike in 2006 known as the “Day Without an Immigrant.” Now immigrant struggles are making their stamp on world history.

The growing polarization around immigration, with escalating attacks on immigrants being met with an explosive resurgence of struggle, reflects deeper processes at work in society. Understanding these processes and their implications is vital for Marxists. Through such an understanding, we can better formulate perspectives for how the movement will develop. From this we can elaborate a program which can not only take the movement forward, but can point the way towards doing away with the capitalist system as a whole.

Marxists have long elaborated a materialist understanding of different forms of oppression. Sexism can be traced back to the rise of the family as an economic unit accompanying the development of surplus value and class society. Anti-Black racism originated with the development of chattel slavery during the primitive accumulation of capital. The way these relations developed and transformed under capitalism shape our understanding of feminist and anti-racist struggles today. The immigrant rights struggle today demands a similar materialist analysis.

By understanding the roots of immigration and the oppression of immigrants under capitalism, we can get a better understanding of the stakes of the movement, the motivations of the ruling class, and the tactics and strategy necessary to fight back. That is the goal of this document.

Material Basis Of Immigration

Large-scale migration, with millions risking their lives and leaving their friends and families behind, can’t be explained by a simple desire for freedom of movement. Similarly, anti-immigrant xenophobia can’t be explained by an abstract fear of “the other.” Understanding the struggles of immigrants for their rights requires a Marxist analysis of immigration, rooted in the social and economic forces that drive it.

Migration has existed as long as humanity, but it’s been driven by different forces at different times. The migration of nomadic herders in Bronze Age Central Asia was driven by very different forces from the European colonial settlers during the primitive accumulation of capital, who were in turn driven by different forces from contemporary refugees and economic migrants.

For the past few centuries, immigration has been a product of capitalism. What provokes people to emigrate, where they move or flee to, how they’re treated on arrival, and who they can find common cause with in struggle: all of these are shaped by capitalism.

As capitalism established itself globally, so did the nation-state with its formally defined borders. The nation-state allowed capitalists to control the flow of capital and workers into and out of their countries to maximize profit at the expense of rival capitalists. This division of the world, along with subsequent imperialist squabbles over its re-division, was carried out without regard to the effects it would have on the workers in different countries.

Capitalism itself isn’t static, however. The US is currently experiencing the second of two big waves of immigration. In the late 19th and early 20th century, immigrants were mainly fleeing the poverty and conflicts caused by developing capitalism in Europe, though there was also a large contingent from East Asia. These immigrants, largely doing severely underpaid hard labor, formed the backbone of the rapid industrialization that paved the way for the US becoming a major imperialist power. With the onset of economic crisis in the 1870s, European immigrants and US-born workers began to compete for jobs traditionally reserved for Chinese immigrants. This provoked anti-Chinese riots and pressure, which led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, virtually ending Chinese immigration for nearly a century. At the same time, a key theme of nativist reaction in the US in the 19th century up through the 1920s was the drive to maintain the US as a white Protestant country and to stop the integration of Catholics into the mainstream of American life. This was a key goal of the second mass version of the KKK in the 1920s, for example.

This is the kind of strong anti-immigrant sentiment that swept the US at the end of the 19th century. In the 20th century, the ruling class moved to stop the flow of mass immigration for around 40 years, from the early 1920s to the 1960s/1970s. By 1970, just 4.7% of the population were immigrants. However, during the protracted economic boom following World War II, the descendants of the first wave of immigrants were integrated into US society creating the rose-tinted image of “the great American melting pot.”

This changed as the post-war boom exhausted itself, ushering in the neoliberal era. The capitalists re-asserted profitability by leaning on free trade to drive down wages and privatize social services. US imperialism established itself as the sole global superpower, imposing neoliberalism on the neo-colonial world. These devastating policies provoked the current wave of immigration.

These immigrants primarily come from Latin America (especially Mexico), but with significant components from the Caribbean, East Asia, and elsewhere. According to the Pew Research Center, immigrants peaked at 15.8% of the population in January of 2025, exceeding the 14.8% peak in 1890 during the first wave.

While the first wave of immigration was a US-centric phenomenon, the current wave is global in scope. The EU and other advanced capitalist countries are seeing increased immigration from the neo-colonial world, often the former colonies of the countries in question. This is accompanied by intra-EU immigration from poorer EU countries in southern and eastern Europe, who were the worst affected by the EU’s neoliberal austerity measures, even as those countries are the first stops for immigrants coming into the EU from the Middle East and Africa.

The most extreme contemporary influx of immigration, both in terms of numbers and exploitation, is found in the dictatorial but oil-rich, US-aligned monarchies along the Persian Gulf. Guest workers from South and Southeast Asia, regions that were some of the most affected by neoliberal globalization, are subjected to near-slave-like conditions through the kafala system. The UN reported that, as of 2024, Saudi Arabia had the third highest immigrant population in pure numbers after the US and Germany, totalling 13.7 million, over 40% of the population. 

The wave of immigration that began with neoliberalism has continued beyond the neoliberal era. Following the 2008 financial crash, the mass struggles of the 2010s, and the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, we’ve entered a new era of inter-imperialist conflict, centered on US and Chinese imperialism. Nationalism and protectionism have ramped up, with regional conflicts expanding into inter-imperialist proxy conflicts. Meanwhile climate change has exacerbated these crises, with capitalism’s destruction of the environment having an increasingly immediate impact.

Now, economic migrants are increasingly accompanied by refugees fleeing war and climate crisis. The year 2015 saw the largest influx of refugees into Europe since World War II, mostly from the Middle East. A second wave followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The refugee crisis isn’t restricted to the advanced capitalist countries, with waves of Sudanese refugees in Egypt, Palestinians in Lebanon, and Afghans in Iran.

A feature of the end of the era of neoliberal globalization, which has only accelerated since we clearly entered the new era of inter-imperialist conflict at the start of this decade, has been the whipping up of anti-immigrant xenophobia by the ruling class. Understanding this requires understanding the contradictory relationship the capitalists have with immigration.

Ruling-Class Attitudes

Capitalist class relations don’t just drive immigration. They also drive how society views immigration. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously remarked that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The popular explanation of the mistreatment of immigrants as stemming from human nature’s supposedly ingrained fear of “the other” obscures this fact. But the ideas of the ruling class contain a dialectical contradiction. The capitalists have a material interest in both promoting and cracking down on immigration.

For capitalists, immigration creates a pool of cheap labor that increases profitability. This isn’t limited to the “unskilled” labor typically associated with immigrants. For instance, highly skilled tech workers on H-1B visas may be well-paid, but their labor is still cheap compared to native-born tech workers. The increased number of potential workers also increases competition among them, resulting in a race to the bottom that hurts all workers while enriching the capitalists.

This isn’t simply a matter of greed. The drive to maximize profits is baked into the capitalist economy. Advanced capitalist countries are in the midst of a demographic crisis. The birth rates in China and Japan have reached record lows each year while in South Korea it’s only just starting to rise from the lowest in the world. These developments are harbingers for the West: the birthrate in the US has already fallen 25% since 2007. The declining domestic labor market and the increasingly aging population, which has to be supported by a shrinking working-age population, threaten the very functioning of the capitalist economy. For the capitalists, increasing the labor pool isn’t just a desire: it’s a necessity.

But this is only one side of the equation. Immigration can fuel competition among workers, but also solidarity. The ruling class whips up anti-immigrant xenophobia to cut across this. They strive to instill nationalist loyalty in native-born workers to their native-born bosses, while terrorizing the immigrant workers. Moreover, the infrastructure and social services necessary to give immigrants the life they deserve cuts into the capitalists’ profits.

Marxists have long understood these contradictory features of immigration under capitalism. Writing in 1845 on Irish immigration to England in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels wrote of how “the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.” But, in the very next chapter, he wrote of how “in part by a mixture of the races, and in part by the ordinary contact of life” the effect of immigration on the English workers intensified common struggle against the English bourgeoisie. For English and Irish workers alike, this “must, in the long run, be productive only of good for both.”

These contradictory features are mutually dependent. To use immigrants for cheap labor, capitalists must maintain their second-class status. Ultimately, the ruling class wants control over immigration. They want to be able to turn the flow on and off as needed. Their goal is a fearful and dependent workforce with few or no rights whose wages and benefits can be kept as low as possible.

The kafala system in the Gulf states is the most extreme example of this. Immigrant workers are legally bound to a specific employer. Any activity that displeases that employer results in deportation or worse. Unions are illegal for immigrant and native-born workers alike and labor organizing carries the threat of the death penalty. The result is countries with some of the largest immigrant populations, but the complete absence of a “great melting pot.” The reliance on and encouragement of immigrant labor comes alongside the most vicious crackdowns, as seen when Saudi Arabia carried out mass arrests of 21,997 immigrant workers in a single week in August 2025.

However, the capitalists don’t just get together in a room and decide what position to take on immigration. Different individuals and wings of the ruling class will reflect different aspects of the class’s overall attitude. Some industries rely more heavily on the exploitation of immigrant labor than others. Which industries different capitalists rely on for profit can inform their attitude towards immigration at a given time. As a result, one capitalist may champion immigration and another may call for mass deportations, but they’re still pursuing what they see as the best way to protect the interests of the ruling class. We see this through divisions in Trump’s base, where the big tech wing around Elon Musk supports H-1B visas, while the hardcore MAGA wing around Steve Bannon opposes them. This also means that the overall emphasis of the ruling class can shift from one era to the next.

The Bourgeoisie’s Reactionary Turn

Given the current right-wing assault on immigrants, it’s strange to think how different things were only a few decades ago. Leading Republicans of the 2000s seem unrecognizable, not only compared to Trump, but to today’s leading Democrats.

President George W. Bush championed (capitalist) immigration reform through an expanded guest worker program. New York’s billionaire Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg went further, declaring “I’m a businessman, I have to deal with the real world…The truth of the matter is we have people, they are here because we have wink-winked and let them come in. They are part of our economy. We need them. We need more.”

At the beginning of the neoliberal era, the 1986 “Reagan Amnesty” granted legal status to nearly all undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country before 1982. Through the actions of Ronald Reagan, the icon of modern conservatism and an all-around scumbag, nearly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants were approved for permanent residency.

The neoliberal era was defined by cutting through all restrictions on the free market. The 2008 financial crash and the rise of Chinese imperialism threatening the unipolar world led by US capitalism and imperialism, however, crushed that old laissez faire approach. We’re now in an era defined by nationalism, decoupling, and inter-imperialist conflict.

The end of the neoliberal era also revitalized the class struggle, which threatened the ruling class. Even before the 2008 crash, the 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” protests saw immigrant workers flex their muscles on an unprecedented scale, demanding far more rights than the ruling class was comfortable with. In response, ICE carried out a wave of mass deportations to beat the movement into submission. Faced with the global struggles of the 2010s, the bourgeoisie has taken an even deeper reactionary turn.

This isn’t limited to the far right. Before Trump, Obama was known as the “deporter in chief.” In the 2020 election, lesser evil arguments held up Trump’s separations of immigrant families and “Build the wall!” sloganeering as a reason to vote for Biden. In power, however, Biden continued both the family separations and the border wall.

It’s also not restricted to the US. Internationally, the far right is growing and the old neoliberal establishment is rushing to imitate them. In Germany, the semi-fascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has become the country’s most successful far-right party since Hitler. In light of the country’s Nazi past, chancellor Friedrich Merz proclaimed a “firewall” between the establishment parties and the AfD. But in 2025, he broke that firewall when he relied on AfD support to close Germany’s borders to refugees.

Deportations have become a political weapon in the inter-imperialist conflict. Trump has targeted Palestine solidarity activists and cracked down on international students under the guise of fending off Chinese influence. The same practices are employed by Iran, a staunch ally of Chinese and Russian imperialism. After the US and Israel bombed Iran in June of 2025, the government initiated a purge of Afghan immigrants under the pretense that they spied for Israel. The result was mass deportations of over 600,000 Afghan immigrants in a month.

In Eastern Europe, the inter-imperialist conflict has seen the rise of “weaponized migration.” Russia and Belarus have sent thousands of refugees across the border into Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland. The governments in those countries treated the refugees to tear gas, water cannons, and stun grenades, and pressured the EU to waive its protections for refugees on national security grounds. Meanwhile, the refugees are left freezing in a no-man’s land between rival imperialist blocs.

The imperialist powers have also brow-beaten other countries into serving their anti-immigrant crackdown. In 2014, the EU launched the “Khartoum Process” where they funded the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir to turn Sudan into a holding zone for refugees from the Horn of Africa. This money ended up in the hands of the Rapid Support Forces who have since waged a brutal civil war, making Sudan a new source of refugees. More recently, the EU paid Turkey $10.5 billion to host 3.6 million refugees. A similar $224 million dollar deal with Mauritania has sparked accusations of facilitating sexual assault, torture, and extortion of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, Trump has pressured countries like El Salvador, Uganda, South Sudan, and Eswatini to hold deportees who aren’t even from those countries.

It’s important to note, however, that the present and the neoliberal era are both manifestations of the same capitalist relations. The ruling class is driven by the same contradictory motivations discussed in the previous section, even if the balance has shifted.

The neoliberal era was no paradise for immigrants. That’s when the growth of the far right began, with parties like the French National Front, the Austrian Freedom Party, and Australia’s One Nation. In the US, it was the proto-Trumpian “Sensenbrenner Bill” that sparked the “Day Without an Immigrant” protests in the first place. While Trump has expanded ICE into the country’s largest interior law enforcement agency, ICE itself was formed in 2002 as part of the “War on Terror.”

Meanwhile, there are limits to how far the ruling class will go along with the current anti-immigrant crackdowns. There are rifts within the Trump camp, with tech companies defending the H-1B visas and agribusiness pushing back against the ICE raids. Capitalist societies still need immigration to keep their economy functional. This is especially the case with the current demographic crisis. When the US largely shut down immigration between the 1920s and the 1960s, the country had a much higher birthrate than today.

We see an example of this in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán pioneered the anti-immigrant politics later embraced by Trump and the global far right. Orbán tried to solve Hungary’s demographic crisis while maintaining his hardline anti-immigrant stance by spending 5% of GDP on subsidizing large “traditional” Hungarian families. This included a lifetime immunity from income tax for mothers with four or more children. But, as this failed to solve Hungary’s economic recession, he expanded a guest worker program centered on East Asian workers, even while he continued cracking down on refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

Regardless of the emphasis of a particular wing of the ruling class or a particular era of capitalism, a dialectical understanding of bourgeois attitudes is vital. Adopting a one-sided understanding of immigration politics can lead the workers’ movement astray.

Working-Class Attitudes To Immigration

While the origin of anti-immigrant attitudes can be traced to the ruling class, such attitudes aren’t limited to them. Xenophobia and other divisions within the working class are the result of the social system we live under and are actively stoked by sections of the ruling class at various times. The objective fact that capitalists use immigration to drive down wages and working conditions creates a material basis for anti-immigrant ideas to develop within the native-born working class. The popular right-wing lie that “immigrants are stealing your jobs” holds sway because it appeals to workers’ anxieties, while letting the real culprits, the capitalists, off the hook. Such reactionary ideas within the working class can take on a life of their own, regardless of the wishes of the ruling class.

This leads to sections of the workers’ movement capitulating to reactionary, anti-immigrant views. It also leads to sections of the immigrant rights movement blaming the “white working class,” rather than the capitalists, for anti-immigrant attacks. Both of these approaches are wrong.

Working-class attitudes aren’t fixed. They’re shaped by the state of capitalism and the class struggle. This is seen in the data collected by Gallup on Americans’ views towards immigration from 1965-2025, spanning the second wave of immigration and the rise and fall of the neoliberal era. From 1965 to 1995, the steady increase in immigration was accompanied by an equally steady increase in opposition to immigration. The austerity agenda of rising neoliberalism systematically undermined the working class’s standard of living during this period. Immigrants were a convenient scapegoat and that seeped its way into wider consciousness. By 1995, 65% of respondents said immigration rates should decrease. During those 30 years, the percentage who thought immigration should increase remained fixed between 6-7%.

After that attitudes became more erratic: A sudden surge in opposition to immigration followed 9/11, and a similar surge in support followed the 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” protests. Overall, the trend was for increasing support for immigration, especially during the struggles of the 2010s. By 2020, 34% of respondents thought immigration should increase while only 28% thought it should decrease. Following the ruling class’s reactionary turn in the 2020s, anti-immigrant views rose, culminating in 55% calling for immigration to decrease in 2024, the year of Trump’s re-election. However, as the movement against Trump’s ICE raids exploded, that figure rapidly dropped to 30% in 2025.

The Gallup collection doesn’t give a breakdown by class but, since the overwhelming majority of the American population is working-class, the figures paint a reasonable picture of working-class views. It also comes with a warning that, even at the 2020 peak in support for immigration, 28% of people still called for immigration to decrease.

This isn’t simply a matter of white workers being anti-immigrant and workers of color being pro-immigrant. The Gallup collection also includes a number of polls from 2013 broken down by race. Those polls showed 84% of Black Americans in favor of tightening border security, only slightly below the 85% of non-Hispanic whites who felt that way. Also significant was the 74% of Latinos who favored tightening border security.

Black and immigrant populations can find common cause as victims of racism. But the history of past generations of immigrants becoming assimilated while the Black population is left behind can fuel resentment. There’s also a basis for anti-immigrant views within immigrant communities themselves. Capitalists pit older, more assimilated generations against newer ones, and they pit immigrants who jumped through all their legal hoops against the undocumented. 

Assimilation is an important aspect of the process of immigration. Over time, different immigrant groups have been assimilated into US society. Race and religion play a role in this: many European immigrants, such as Catholics from Ireland, Italy, and Poland, as well as Eastern European Jews, were long considered “ethnic” and not fully white. But eventually the category of who was considered white was expanded to include those groups. Whiteness has been redefined many times throughout history, as have other racial categories. This shows how fluid these categorizations actually are, despite seeming rigid.

Anti-immigrant views in the working class can be cut across. This requires building a multi-racial, working-class struggle based on solidarity. Unfortunately, such an approach hasn’t  always been adopted by the workers’ movement.

Opposition To Immigration On The Left

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels declared, “The working men have no country.” They brought this principle into the First International, founded in 1864. One of many motivations behind the founding of the First International was the British capitalists’ importation of Belgian workers as strikebreakers. The most combative leaders of the workers’ movement recognized that this could only be challenged through international solidarity.

This internationalism, however, hasn’t been consistent throughout the workers’ movement. During the first wave of immigration in the US, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was known for its conservative craft prejudices. Not only immigrants, but Black workers, women, and unskilled laborers, were seen as competition and excluded from the unions. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the AFL’s anti-immigrant politics served as a declaration of loyalty to capitalism against subversive “foreign” ideas.

During the AFL’s heyday, their approach was challenged by smaller, more radical unions, like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Beyond moral failings, the AFL’s approach left them vulnerable to the “Fordist” industrialization that broke down the skilled crafts, leading to the federation’s decline in the 1920s. In 1935, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) took the pioneering work of the IWW and ILGWU to a higher level. Their focus on organizing all workers in an industry, including immigrants, spurred the 1930s labor revival.

Nonetheless, the merged AFL-CIO continued to oppose rights for undocumented immigrants. This only changed in 2000 when they pivoted to calling for undocumented workers to be granted citizenship. This was the product of decades of civil rights struggles and a recognition that organizing in the face of mass immigration couldn’t be accomplished without organizing the immigrant workers themselves.

Within the socialist movement, there were similar divisions. The Socialist Party of America (SPA) had vibrant language federations where immigrant workers were heavily represented in the party’s revolutionary wing. But the party also included open racists. The writer Jack London famously defended restrictions on Chinese and Japanese immigration, saying, “I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.”

At the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the Second International, delegates from the conservative wing attempted to get the international to support a ban on immigration from “the backward countries.” Vladimir Lenin, who was also a delegate, commented, “This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the ‘civilized’ countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need for international class solidarity.” Thanks to the intervention of Lenin and other revolutionary delegates, the anti-immigration motion was defeated.

Today, with the rise of Trumpism and the growing crackdown on immigration, many in the workers’ movement have been found wanting. Bernie Sanders, while opposing Trump’s ICE reign of terror, has also thrown unnecessary bones to Trump, saying, “I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain’t that hard to do. Biden didn’t do it.” Sanders’s attitude is representative of the views of a wide section of the working class who oppose ICE terror—people who may be reflected in polls showing increased support for immigrants—but still want a controlled border.

Beyond Sanders, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who was elected as an anti-establishment candidate, called protections for undocumented workers a “tough pill to swallow.” Meanwhile, Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate who ran on a platform mixing left-populist economic demands with right-populist demands of securing the border and increasing police funding, has received praise from left labor activist Steve Early and DSA intellectual Bhaskar Sunkara.

The approaches of Sanders, O’Brien, and Osborn reflect, to differing degrees, adaptation towards counterproductive anti-immigrant views. For others historically associated with the left, this can reach ludicrous extremes. In Britain, George Galloway developed a reputation as a left-wing firebrand when he was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 for his opposition to the Iraq War. Now, he’s calling for the deployment of warships in the English Channel to remove immigrants, saying, “The Royal Navy’s principal purpose and duty is to defend the shores of His Majesty’s realm, but they’re not doing so.” In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht had a similar firebrand reputation. But she’s since taken up advocating a “horseshoe alliance” with the far right, railing against “bizarre minorities” and insisting that refugees have “forfeited their right to be guests.”

Less crude arguments than those of Galloway and Wagenknecht, but more explicit than those of Sanders, are found in a 2018 article by Angela Nagle, a nominally Marxist intellectual from Ireland. Nagle points to many neoliberal ideologues, from Ronald Reagan to Milton Friedman, who have called for opening of borders in the name of big business. From this, she concludes that restrictions on immigration should be seen as a workers’ demand. Her arguments typify the problems that come when you only see one side of the ruling class’s contradictory views on immigration.

She opposes the aggressively authoritarian mass deportations and the border wall, but her proposed solution is using the E-Verify system to ban employment of undocumented labor. She portrays measures like this as worker-friendly, and even immigrant-friendly, on the grounds that they “place the burden of enforcement on employers instead of migrants.” In reality, this measure was put in place by the Bush administration in 2007 specifically as a means of beating down the growing worker solidarity following the 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” protests.

She holds up the legacy of union leaders’ opposition to immigration as a model to follow. Dissenting views within the movement from Lenin to the IWW and ILGWU are airbrushed from Nagle’s history. She reluctantly concedes that “union opposition to mass migration was sometimes intermingled with racism” but she hand-waves any deeper connection by writing off that racism as “present across American society” at the time.

Nagle’s approach exemplifies a failure to appreciate the end of the neoliberal era and the accompanying political changes. Activists who cut their political teeth under neoliberalism can see neoliberal capitalism as the “known enemy.” This leaves them unprepared when capitalism changes stripes and they’re faced with an unfamiliar enemy. This leads her to woefully mischaracterize the threat posed by Trump, saying, “for all Trump’s anti-immigration bluster, his administration has done virtually nothing to expand the implementation of E-Verify, preferring instead to boast about a border wall that never seems to materialize.”

Her undialectical understanding of immigration is revealed in a valid point she makes: “Lacking full legal rights, these noncitizens will be impossible to unionize and will be kept in constant fear of being arrested and criminalized.” But by blaming immigration rather than the lack of full legal rights, she misses out on the obvious solution: grant undocumented immigrants full legal rights so they can unionize and be freed from that constant fear. 

GAMA Strike

A useful counter to Nagle’s approach was found in her home country of Ireland, with the struggle of Turkish and Kurdish migrant laborers at GAMA Construction from 2002-2005. While these workers were documented, the conditions of their guest work program meant they could be deported if they lost their employment. As such they “lacked full legal rights and were kept in constant fear,” just as Nagle warned. This was especially the case for the Kurdish workers who faced repression at the hands of the Turkish state.

In 2002, it came out that GAMA had been funnelling off part of their wages into a secret Dutch bank account. Socialist Alternative’s cothinkers in Ireland at the time held elected positions in local Councils as well as the Dáil (Irish parliament).

The “constant fear” was real and initially discouraged the GAMA workers from fighting back. But we used our elected positions to publicly expose the mistreatment of the workers. This solidarity from native-born workers created strength in numbers, cutting across the threat of deportation. Following three years of public solidarity the workers got the confidence to go on strike in 2005, ultimately winning back pay for their stolen wages.

Drawing lessons afterwards, we wrote that “migrant labor, particularly from Eastern Europe, is increasingly being used to attack wages and conditions in the construction industry.” This is in line with Nagle’s own arguments. However, we drew very different conclusions from those facts, leading to a vastly different approach, one that strengthened the whole working class, native-born and immigrant alike.

Liberal Approaches To Immigrant Rights

The embrace of anti-immigrant politics by sections of the workers’ movement stems from a one-sided understanding of capitalism’s relation to immigration. Another one-sided understanding is found in the liberal wing of the immigrant rights movement. Here, the ruling-class interest in immigration is ignored or denied entirely.

There are class differences within immigrant communities and these ideas are common among the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie within those communities. Through NGOs, these ideas can be seen as the “official” views of the immigrant rights movement and are taken up by native-born activists aspiring to be good “allies.” When conservative labor leaders embrace immigrant rights but refuse to reject business unionism, they can be drawn to these ideas.

An example is seen in a 2018 PBS explainer debunking common anti-immigrant myths. In response to the claim that “immigrants are stealing your jobs,” the piece countered that “immigrants often have jobs that Americans tend not to take.”

To the extent that this is true at all, it’s less about the nature of the work and more because of the abominable pay and conditions. The bosses want to spread these conditions into more sections of the economy. Many of the jobs Americans will do got that way through hard-won victories over decades of labor struggle.

The claim also doesn’t hold across the economy. Tech workers on H-1B visas are doing high-paid labor that native-born workers would gladly do. Even where it does hold, it’s primarily during economic expansion. Once the economy stalls or contracts, all workers are pressured to take jobs they wouldn’t do otherwise, and competition between immigrant and native-born workers increases.

Beyond that, it’s insulting to immigrants to hinge their worth on their willingness to “do jobs Americans won’t do.” They deserve more than that.

Bourgeois economists have long championed immigration as good for the economy. Even with the ruling class’s nationalist turn, these arguments haven’t gone away. JPMorgan’s chair of global research cited GDP growth in 2024 as proof that “immigration into the US is helping to bolster the economy.” The IMF found that “immigration into advanced economies increases output and productivity.” The George W. Bush Presidential Center warned: “The native born labor force will not grow fast enough to keep up with the needs of our modern, robust economy.”

Studies like these have a vested ruling-class interest. They define what’s “good for the economy” in terms of maximizing profits. But such studies are often swallowed uncritically even on the left. In 2010, the International Socialist Organization, a now-defunct group from the revolutionary Marxist tradition, did its own mythbusting explainer that echoed liberal talking points. It referenced studies claiming that “immigration has an overall positive impact on the economy” and repeated that immigrants’ jobs “complement—rather than compete with—jobs held by native workers.”

The right-wing lies about immigrants stealing your jobs are just that: lies. But we can defend immigrant rights without prettifying the capitalist exploitation of their labor. In one of our own mythbusting explainers, we acknowledged that bosses “benefit from exploiting undocumented workers.” But we countered that “if we all worked less, we could employ all workers and use the gigantic profits of the billionaires to ensure no loss in pay” and called on unions to “be at the forefront of organizing undocumented immigrants and all workers to ensure well-paid union jobs for all, so that this divide-and-rule tactic of the bosses fails.”

Beyond the question of how immigration impacts the capitalists and native-born workers, we have to ask how it works out for immigrants themselves. The ruling class bears responsibility for terrorizing immigrant communities. But they also bear responsibility for exploitation of immigrant workers and for creating the conditions that force so many to leave their homes. The liberal defenses of immigration gloss over these points.

Entangling the defense of immigrants with the defense of the capitalists who exploit them can throw the workers’ movement off base. Unions like the SEIU and UFW, who were at the forefront of challenging the AFL-CIO’s opposition to immigration before it changed its position, got behind the Bush administration’s reactionary guest worker program in the build-up to the 2006 struggle. Many immigrant rights groups followed suit, championing the McCain Kennedy guest worker bill as a progressive counter to the Sensenbrenner bill. This confusion contributed to the eventual defeat of the movement.

When workers are drawn to anti-immigrant ideas, the liberal response is to shame them rather than make the case for class solidarity. This ultimately strengthens right-wing xenophobia, as seen in the Brexit vote in 2016, which saw the UK leave the EU. Supporters of Brexit were largely written off by much of the left as straight-forwardly right-wing and xenophobic. But there were, and still are, solid reasons for workers to oppose the EU. The EU’s austerity measures after the 2008 crash fueled mass movements especially in Greece, with countless occupations and general strikes. In 2015, the year before Brexit, the EU forced Greece to accept a brutal austerity package, crushing the movement.

In the UK, however, the most public opposition to the EU was the notorious far-right xenophobe Nigel Farage, who focused his opposition on immigration. Many on the left, seeing Farage’s xenophobia, opted to defend remaining in the EU. This included denouncing working-class Brexit supporters as racist. The result was ceding opposition to the EU to the actual racists. There were forces, including our organization, campaigning against the EU on a left-wing, working-class, anti-xenophobic basis, but this effort was unfortunately far smaller than what was needed to undercut the right.

Liberalism approaches immigration from a moralistic, rather than a materialist perspective. Moral indignation at the mistreatment of immigrants is fully justified. However, Marxists understand morality through its material underpinnings. Liberals hold up eternal moral principles like “diversity” detached from any social circumstances. To be meaningful, the fully justified moral indignation at the treatment of immigrants requires a materialist understanding of the class forces behind immigration, backed up by a strong, fighting, united working-class movement.

Lindsey Oil Refinery Strike

Once more, a concrete labor battle can serve as a counter to wrong views on immigration: this time, the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strike. In pre-Brexit Britain, the Total oil company utilized EU legislation called the Posted Workers’ Directive, which let them import temporary migrant workers from within the EU with pay and labor rights reduced to the legal minimum, undermining the gains of the union.

Total laid off part of the unionized workforce and brought in non-union Italian and Portuguese workers, who were housed in an off-shore barge. Liberal declarations that immigration is “good for the economy” or that the guest workers were “doing jobs Brits won’t do” held no water.

Initially, strikers adopted the slogan “British jobs for British workers,” popularized by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The media used this to attack the strike as racist. Some on the left, such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, opposed the strike on this basis. Our British co-thinkers, however, recognized that this was still a progressive class struggle against the neoliberal race to the bottom. 

We actively intervened in support of the strike but against the “British jobs for British workers” slogan. One of our members was elected to the strike committee. Under our influence, placards with that slogan were abandoned in favor of “Workers of the world unite.” The strike committee demanded that the migrant workers be incorporated into the union and be subject to the union’s contract. They also appealed to the migrant workers to join the strike.

After four weeks, the employers conceded a total victory to the workers. All redundancies were withdrawn, the migrant workers were put on the same pay and conditions as everyone else, and the union was given the power to check that migrant workers were being paid properly. What began as a capitalist attempt at divide-and-rule became a shining example of working-class internationalism. But this required the intervention of Marxists with a clear understanding of the forces at play. Not everyone passed the test.

Can Borders Be Abolished?

The failure of a moralistic, as opposed to materialist, understanding of immigration isn’t limited to liberal politics. On the more radical wings of the immigrant rights movement, the call for “open borders” or “border abolition” is popular. While figures like Nagle oppose this from a reactionary perspective, a slogan to “abolish borders” is utopian and ultraleft.

To be clear, Marxists advocate overthrowing the whole capitalist system with the aim of creating a classless, stateless society free from wars, poverty, and oppression. Such a society would inevitably be borderless as well. But class, the state, and borders can’t simply be abolished while capitalism still stands.

The demand for abolishing borders is part of a wider trend of “abolitionism” in activist circles. “Police abolition” and “prison abolition” were prominent in the Black Lives Matter movement. Deeper in activist circles you’ll find ideas like “rent abolition,” “family abolition,” and even “restaurant abolition.” These demands treat a particular evil of capitalism in isolation and demand its abolition without addressing the social forces that prop it up.

The Marxist understanding of the state recognizes it as a repressive instrument of class rule. As long as capitalism continues to exist, so will the capitalist state, with its police and its borders. In a socialist revolution, the workers smash the capitalist state and replace it with their own state. Under socialism, as the state apparatus, now a workers’ state, withers away, the political form of the nation-state becomes superseded by a classless society. The imperialist exploitation that drives people from their homelands ends, as does the need for a ruling class to restrict where people can and can’t move. Under this situation, borders become obsolete.

Actually overthrowing capitalism, however, requires organizing the working class in struggle. Opposition to borders is a righteous moral critique of one of capitalism’s evils, but a demand or slogan for open borders is an obstacle to bringing the working class into struggle. For the majority of the working class, it’s seen as absurd, like demanding “abolition of the wages system” in a union drive.

When “abolitionist” ideas are presented as achievable under capitalism, the result is defanging them beyond recognition. When police abolition gained popularity after the 2020 George Floyd uprising, the Minneapolis City Council announced its support for “dismantling” the city’s police department. Practically, this meant little more than speeches about “community-led public safety strategies” that amounted to nothing.

We see the same with “open borders.” When she was attacking Bernie Sanders in 2016, Hillary Clinton called for “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” Clinton’s model here is the EU. In the Schengen area, a much greater freedom of movement is allowed between EU states, resulting in the closest approximation we can find of “open borders” under capitalism.

However, the Schengen area doesn’t actually abolish borders. It’s an agreement among capitalist states over how to use their borders. The agreement itself is contingent on the member states accepting ruthless capitalist austerity. Free movement within the EU is accompanied by “Fortress Europe,” militarizing the border of the EU as a whole. With the nationalist turn in the global ruling class, these agreements are breaking down. In 2025, 11 EU states reinstated border controls. Suffice to say, it’s not the way to a world without borders.

This doesn’t mean we should just accept the militarized borders of modern capitalism as eternal and inevitable. The modern passport system was only established during World War I. As for ICE, plenty of us were alive when it was created in 2002.

This gives the “abolish ICE” demand a very different character from “abolish borders.” Dismantling ICE will require a struggle, but it can be won without fully dismantling capitalism. Similarly, it’s correct to demand immediate, unconditional legalization and equal rights for all undocumented immigrants who are already here, regardless of their job status. This may fall short of actually abolishing borders, but it empowers the workers, immigrant and native-born alike, and it strikes at the heart of how capitalists use immigration.

Marxists are not in the business of giving the ruling class advice on how they should run their state, borders included. In practice, we would oppose specific border control measures, be they aggressively reactionary like Trump’s ICE terror campaign, or “humane” those Angela Nagle proposes. And we’d oppose proposals from the ruling class to lift border controls in their interest. This can be compared to how Marxists oppose both free trade and protectionism. Instead, we support the struggles of workers, immigrant and native-born, against all forms of repression and exploitation, with the aim of creating a whole new socialist society.

Demands aren’t about describing an ideal future society. They’re about advancing the movement that can achieve such a society. They have to be based, on the one hand, on the present state of the movement and, on the other hand, on the objective needs of the struggle.

Fighting Back

At the time of writing, immigrants globally are fending off the blows of reaction. From the US to Europe, and from Egypt to Iran, repressive right-wing states are carrying out mass deportations and terrorizing immigrant populations. Far-right thugs are emboldened, and much of the old political establishment is more interested in imitating them than putting up a fight. The most pressing questions facing the movement are less about abolishing borders and more about stopping the endless barrage of attacks. However, the Battle of Minneapolis in 2026 showed that the movement’s demands and consciousness can grow by leaps and bounds in the heat of struggle.

Whatever challenges the movement faces, there’s a proud history of immigrants fighting back. And there’s a proud history of the labor movement taking the lead against deportations, mass firings, and other anti-immigrant attacks.

Between the two waves of immigration in the US, the ruling class waged a similar campaign of repression. Most notorious was a surge of mass deportations from 1932-33 directed against Mexican immigrants who were scapegoated for the Great Depression. Concurrent to this was the rise of groups like El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española and struggles like the 1933 Pixley cotton strike where unions, socialists, and communists fought back against the use of mass deportations as a union-busting tool. These struggles laid the foundations for the growth of the CIO later in the decade, as well as future immigrant rights and labor organizing during the 1960s.

The continuity of struggle continues to this day. Many activists in today’s immigrant rights movement carry the experience of struggles like agricultural workers’ strikes and the East LA high school walkouts of the 1960s. This is the tradition of working-class immigrant organizing that built the 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant.”

History isn’t just for nostalgic reminiscences. It shows how we can fight back and win. The 2006 strike defeated the Sensenbrenner Bill. In 2017, when Donald Trump signed the infamous “Muslim Ban,” bodega owners and taxi drivers went on strike and occupied the airports. As the protests spread across the country, Trump backed down for a period. In 2019, Trump shut down the government over funding for a racist border wall. TSA agents and air traffic controllers called in sick, leading to major disruptions at multiple airports. Flight attendants threatened to strike over unpaid wages, and they called on the wider labor movement to take up a general strike—ultimately this beat Trump back.

However, the value of history also lies in understanding setbacks and defeats. While the 2006 struggle defeated the Sensenbrenner Bill, it did not succeed in winning “equal rights for all workers,” which was one of its key demands. In the aftermath of the 2006 struggle, Socialist Alternative warned that “despite the scale of the actions by undocumented workers, if the movement does not win support within the wider American working class for the idea of amnesty, the most it can achieve at this stage is to negotiate the terms of indentured servitude.” In the end, the wider native-born working class did not take action in support of the movement, despite the fact it would have been very much in their interests, and despite the sympathy of many. This was primarily the result of the conservative union leadership’s unwillingness to take the lead. This allowed the ruling class to isolate, wear down, and savagely repress the movement. The Bush administration went after unionizing Latino workers though a series of targeted mass deportations. In the long run, the movement was crushed.

The consequences reverberate to this day. Even when the 2010s ushered in a new wave of global struggle, the immigrant rights movement never had a resurgence comparable to Occupy, BLM, or MeToo. The protests against the Muslim Ban and the border wall were significant, but never kicked off a full-scale revival of a mass immigrant rights movement. An important lesson from this is that defeats of true mass movements have very serious consequences. Twenty years later, the movement is only now beginning to take off again.

In the current anti-ICE struggle, we’ve seen the development of mutual aid and rapid response activity. Small local victories in stopping a deportation or saving someone’s job are important. But on their own they won’t be able to stop a reactionary ruling class that’s hell-bent on crushing the gains of the 1960s and 1970s for women, Black people, and LGBTQ people, as well as immigrants. The main value of those small victories is in elevating consciousness, raising expectations, pointing the way forward for the broader movement, and giving the working class the training and experience to wage larger battles. For those larger battles, the struggle needs to escalate.

The growth of reaction has also been met by mass protests. Trump sending the Marines and National Guard to LA triggered the first “No Kings” protest, the biggest by numbers in US history at the time. In Germany, the growth of the far right has provoked mass counter-demonstrations. But these are often limited to protesting for a day and going home. The “No Kings” protests have had liberal messaging with an aim of getting out the vote for Democrats. In Britain, Stand Up to Racism has actively pushed to depoliticize the demonstrations they organize under the guise of “broadening the movement.” In practice this means welcoming politicians who carry out their own attacks on immigrants. For mass struggle to succeed, it needs to be politically confrontational and led by the working class.

A key piece in the puzzle of escalating the movement is organized labor. The labor of the workers, including immigrant workers, creates the world’s wealth. Withholding that labor in an organized manner can grind society to a halt. The sheer numbers of a multi-racial working class fighting in solidarity can stop the capitalists’ attempts to divide, isolate, and repress individual segments of the working class.

As covered throughout the article, the history of the labor movement features both successes and failures in defending immigrant rights. More recently, we’ve seen Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien throwing undocumented immigrants under the bus. Left-wing UAW leader Shawn Fain has avoided actively pandering to anti-immigrant prejudice like O’Brien. But he’s narrowly focused on trade union demands, cutting him off from the growing anti-ICE movement. On the other hand, SEIU Local 26 and UNITE HERE Local 17, which had many of their members kidnapped by ICE in the Twin Cities, played key roles in detonating the general strike of January 23, which became a flashpoint of the movement. The movement is strongest when it recognizes unions and immigrants are facing the same enemy.

Where native-born workers have illusions in anti-immigrant politics, the solution isn’t to pander to those ideas or to ignore them. It’s to demonstrate that defending immigrants’ rights is in the interest of the whole working class. We’ve seen positive examples of this in the union drive at Amazon’s KCVG air hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, where Socialist Alternative members played a pivotal role. The workforce has a large West and Central African immigrant population and a large number of Trump-supporting native-born workers. Taking up demands for on-site translations and Muslim prayer rooms brought the immigrant community behind the union drive and showed Trump-supporting workers that those immigrant-friendly demands were in their interest. Unfortunately, but predictably, when the strength of that union drive waned and struggle was ebbing, anti-immigrant sentiment voiced by native-born workers became more prominent, even among those who supported the union. This shows that active struggle is key to changing consciousness.

The power of the labor movement goes beyond an individual union drive. To stop the deportation agenda as a whole, large-scale strike action is necessary, including general strikes. Exactly what escalations are necessary will depend on the situation. In a country like Greece, there’s a long history of one-day general strikes to the point where the Greek capitalists are able to easily wait them out. In such cases, two-day or even indefinite general strikes are necessary for serious change. In the United States, which doesn’t have the same history of general strikes, even a one-day strike, like the “Day Without an Immigrant,” which falls short of an all-out general strike, can be a big step forward. Regardless, escalations of this kind will be necessary.

The Battle Of Minneapolis

Precisely such an escalation came in the form of the Battle of Minneapolis. Through “Operation Metro Surge,” the Trump administration had launched its most brutal detention operation yet, deploying thousands of federal agents to Minneapolis and arresting over 3,000 people in a span of two months. Following the murder of activist Renee Good, the Twin Cities responded with a general strike on January 23, 2026. This saw the working class in a major US city bring back the political general strike as a weapon of struggle. Although ICE wasn’t decisively defeated once and for all, they were forced to make a significant retreat and detention numbers dropped nationwide in the aftermath.

When looking to Minneapolis for inspiration, many look to the mutual aid and rapid response groups that had developed in the city. These networks were impressive and put on full display the ingenuity and instinctive solidarity among the working class. Writing from Minneapolis in the aftermath of the January 23 general strike, we reported on these groups: “Sophisticated rapid response groups developed to monitor the movements of ICE agents, respond to raids and detentions, and document ICE arrests to provide legal support to those abducted….Thousands carry whistles every day and dozens of neighbors flock to respond when they hear them.”

However, we also pointed to the limits as to what these groups could accomplish on their own: “The organic development of these networks shows the impressive creativity and dedication of working-class people who are doing whatever they can to defend their neighbors. Early on, they succeeded at stopping some detentions, but as the occupation multiplied in size and brutality, the mainly defensive strategy of rapid response groups began hitting its limits. To begin to push ICE into retreat, the movement would need to go on the offensive, namely through mass working-class action—the strike.” The key role of this widespread, dynamic neighborhood organizing wasn’t as an end in itself. Rather it was that it became a crucial factor in providing the needed confidence and pressure to push a section of labor leadership onto the offensive.

The call for a one-day citywide strike against ICE came from SEIU Local 26 and an initial handful of union locals, immigrant rights, and community organizations in the Twin Cities. It soon attracted other unions as well as the statewide AFL-CIO labor federation of Minnesota. The militant mood on the ground, including rank-and-file union members, pushed the labor leadership into action and gave them the confidence to escalate the fight. Retail stores, grocery stores, schools, museums, unionized call centers, immigrant-owned shopping centers, cafes, and restaurants were shut down. With the momentum of mass working-class action, sections of the middle class were pulled into the movement, and 800 small businesses shut down in solidarity.

Minneapolis showed workers and immigrants how to win a battle. When the day after the strike, ICE again murdered union nurse and anti-ICE activist Alex Pretti, the real possibility of a second and even bigger strike led 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based corporations including many Fortune 500 companies to write an open letter calling for a “deescalation of tensions.” Trump was forced to abandon “Operation Metro Surge” and he has since backed off from launching new military-style invasions in other cities. But even further escalation is necessary to win the war. In the aftermath of the strike, union leaders set May 1 as a national day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” But for movements like these to succeed, it’s not enough for union leaders to put out a call under pressure from below. The organized working class needs to provide a bold lead.

Beyond The Next Steps

All this points to the question of leadership and the role of revolutionary politics. In the course of struggle, the working class creates, puts to the test, and sometimes replaces, its own leadership. Within the movement are committed fighters, but also union bureaucrats, NGO leaders, and bourgeois politicians who in different ways aim to hold back working-class struggle. The success or failure of different struggles, and the lessons drawn from those successes and failures, shapes how the movement can develop.

In struggles like GAMA and the Lindsey Oil refinery, the presence of conscious revolutionaries with an understanding of immigration’s relationship with capitalism ended up being the deciding factor for how those struggles played out. The presence of revolutionaries in the Battle of Minneapolis also played a certain role in shaping how the general strike played out. This doesn’t mean that every individual struggle will succeed with revolutionary leadership and fail with liberal or reformist leadership. But success in the long run requires the movement to build a leadership in line with its needs. And immigration is dominated by a capitalist system that can’t be reformed.

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky put forward the idea of a “transitional program.” The idea is to “help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution.” The “present demand” of the immigrant rights movement is centered on defensive struggles around stopping deportations, far-right thugs, and reactionary legislation. The objective need is to do away with a system that requires a fearful and dependent workforce with few or no rights whose wages and benefits can be kept as low as possible: capitalism.

For a movement facing the crushing blows of a right-wing ruling-class offensive, even small victories in a defensive struggle are a step forward. In Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, even winning basic democratic rights would be a massive victory. But as long as capitalism remains intact, the ruling class will always aim to claw back any gains that are made. Genuinely and permanently liberating immigrants from oppression requires overthrowing the whole capitalist system. Leading a movement from point A to point B is what the transitional method and a transitional program are about.

One demand that came out during Trump’s first term was “sanctuary cities.” In a sanctuary city, the local government would declare its intentions to protect immigrants from ICE raids carried out on a federal level. When taken seriously, this entails whole cities defying federal law, posing a serious threat to bourgeois rule. In many cases, however, Democrat-led governments made sure any sanctuary laws were sufficiently filled with loopholes to render them symbolic. Under Trump 2.0, even these symbolic gestures are under attack with moves to ban sanctuary legislation.

Backed by a mass movement, a serious sanctuary city struggle could be carried out, demanding that local governments refuse any collaboration with ICE and even protect immigrants from ICE. If local politicians reject such demands, that will just expose them before the masses. If a local government, backed or pressured by mass struggle, does put up a fight, it will deal a serious blow to the capitalist state.

The domination of politics by capitalist parties repeatedly acts as a barrier to struggle. Faced with limitations of the movement in its current state, movement leaders often limit their demands to whatever the “least bad” capitalist party (Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, Tisza in Hungary, etc.) will accept. This puts a brake on the movement, which ultimately invigorates reaction. Across the world, new, independent, mass parties of the working class are necessary.

We’ve already seen instances of left parties coming into being or massively growing in the face of anti-immigrant betrayals by capitalist parties. In Germany, Friedrich Merz breaking his “firewall” with the far-right AfD in order to close the border provoked a mass influx of youth into Die Linke. In most of the world, including the US, similar developments are possible and necessary.

Even left-wing parties like Die Linke, however, typically have reformist leaderships and confine themselves to implementing change within the framework of parliamentary norms and bourgeois legality. To succeed long-term against a malignant, nationalistic capitalism, we need more than electoral formations. We need parties of struggle that link their legislative battles to strikes and street protests.

The rebuilding of working-class organization—in the workplaces, in the streets, and in parliament—still won’t on its own be enough to overturn capitalism. But it gives workers the power to raise much farther-reaching demands than can be achieved by a small, local ICE defense campaign. Demands like abolishing ICE and granting full citizenship rights for all undocumented immigrants can take on real life.

In the workplaces, a revived labor movement can take on all sides of the ruling-class agenda regarding immigration. When the bosses threaten immigrant workers with deportation, a strong labor movement can intervene to protect them. When the bosses bring in immigrant workers to drive down wages, a strong labor movement can demand that all workers get high wages and union protection.

On this scale, it’s even more apparent that immigrant rights can’t be viewed as a single-issue campaign, but have to be seen as part of a wider anti-capitalist struggle. Immigrants are often scapegoated as a drain on social services. A powerful workers’ movement can counter that with demands for mass, publicly-funded affordable housing, free healthcare, and other social services. They need to be built with union jobs, and the capitalists, not the workers, need to foot the bill.

Large-scale struggles against the evils of capitalism can’t be confined to a single country. This is doubly so when immigration is involved. Mexican immigrants to the US are victims of exploitation and bigotry in the US, but they’re also victims of economic devastation in Mexico. Refugees in Europe are victims of civil war and counter-revolutionary terror that was funded by the same EU capitalists who deprive them of rights afforded to EU citizens.

Mexico has a long series of worker, peasant, and student struggles. Before Sudan’s civil war, it was the site of a revolution in 2019. The Gulf states with the notorious kafala system weren’t immune to the “Arab Spring” protests of 2011, even if the governments were able to maintain power. Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia, among the biggest sources of contract laborers in the Gulf states, also saw the initial blows of the “Gen Z Rebellions” around the neo-colonial world.

Building not only solidarity but common organization across borders is the most effective way to challenge capitalism. It gives the working class the ability to go after the mistreatment of immigrants and the root causes that force workers to flee their home countries in the first place. An international movement needs to be built against imperialist wars, national oppression, destruction of the environment, and all manner of ills capitalism has foisted on us.

The ruling class, however, won’t accept any of this without a fight. Their profits depend on immigrant workers being relegated to the status of second-class citizens and used to drive down working conditions overall. They depend on imperialist expansion and all the wars, repression, and economic devastation that results. To definitively stop the threat of gains being reversed, we need to decisively break with the ruling class and its laws, and we need to put the working class in power. The commanding heights of the economy need to be brought under public ownership, under democratic workers’ control. Workers’ self-defense against inevitable counter-revolutionary attacks lays the basis for working-class power. This would bring about a very different economy run by a very different state.

Immigration & Borders In A Workers’ State

A workers’ state isn’t just a replica of a capitalist state. The state in general is an organ of class rule, but the working class has very different interests in fending off bourgeois counter-revolution than the capitalists do in maintaining their rule. As such, even though a workers’ state can’t abolish borders instantaneously, it wouldn’t simply be a matter of adding trade union control to the border regimen of a bourgeois nation-state. It’s not the business of the working class to block or deport desperate people looking for a better life.

Our best example of the working class taking power is the Russian Revolution of 1917. The workers established democratically elected councils called “soviets.” Under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, the workers overthrew capitalism and brought the soviets to power. This was a state, as in an organ for one class’s rule over another, but one built by the workers and oppressed through their struggle for liberation against the capitalists. The Russian Revolution provides important lessons for how a workers’ state would function. At the same time, these lessons are limited by the bureaucratic Stalinist counter-revolution that followed. In terms of borders, the Stalinist counter-revolution was exemplified by the Berlin Wall. This was intended to keep people in rather than out, but it still has eerie similarities to Trump’s border wall.

Shortly after the Revolution, the deposed ruling class, backed by imperialist armies, plunged the country into civil war. Under these circumstances, defending the borders of Revolutionary Russia from the surrounding capitalist states was necessary self-defense. Even during the uneasy peace in 1922, Lenin warned of immigration through the Black Sea ports, including “profiteers, counter-revolutionaries and people of that sort.”

For workers fleeing to revolutionary Russia from capitalist oppression in their home countries, it was a different matter. In 1921, dealing with American immigrants fleeing to Russia, while the Russian economy was at a low point, Lenin put forward conditions far more lax than bourgeois states of today. The sole limits were based on the resources of the Soviet Republic. He argued they need to bring $200 with them, adding: “In substance: I am in favour, provided the American workers and settlers in general will bring along with them: (1) foodstuffs for two years (you say that this has been done before, which means that it is possible); (2) clothes, for a similar period; (3) implements of labour. No.1 (and No.2) are the most important. The $200 is less important”.

Internally, Tsarist Russia was notorious for its suppression of oppressed national minorities, earning it the moniker “prison house of nations.” For those oppressed nations, the struggle for self-determination was progressive and even revolutionary. In that context, “open borders” would, in practice, subject oppressed nationalities to Great Russian chauvinism. The Bolsheviks defended the right to self-determination, but saw it as a means to achieve unity among the working class. The result was the establishment in 1922 of a free and voluntary federation, named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

These examples show how a workers’ state can bring about a fundamentally different approach to immigration, even before borders can be done away with altogether. However, an isolated workers’ state can’t become a haven for the whole world’s poor and oppressed. The Bolsheviks, like Marx and Engels before them, never saw socialism as being achievable in a single country. The central importance of a socialist revolution in a given country was to serve as inspiration to the oppressed globally to overthrow capitalism. This would abolish the forces that compel people to migrate in search of a better life. It would also guarantee the freedom for those who, for whatever reason, want to leave their homeland.

The Russian Revolution did inspire a global wave of revolutionary struggles: from Germany in 1918, to Hungary in 1919, to Italy in 1920, and to Germany again in 1923. However, these revolutions were defeated, due to the reformist misleadership and the failures of weak revolutionary leadership. This left the Russian Revolution isolated, which laid the basis for the growth of the Stalinist bureaucracy who made virtue of necessity through the theory of “socialism in one country.” Under this process the state strengthened rather than withering away, as did its borders.

Stalin effectively sealed off the borders with the Soviet Union by 1935. Mass deportations became a totalitarian weapon and not exclusively for immigrants. Trotsky was forcibly exiled for his opposition to the Stalinist counter-revolution. This, combined with outside capitalist states’ insistence on controlling migration, led Trotsky to inhabit a “planet without a visa.”

As far as the right of oppressed nations to self-determination was concerned, the Stalinist regime’s USSR was a caricature of a free association of genuinely autonomous socialist states. Mass deportations once again became a weapon, but against national minorities Stalin distrusted. Following World War II, Stalin liquidated two Soviet republics, Crimea and the Checheno-Ingush republics. This entailed the mass deportation of 1,500,000 men, women, and children, and laid the foundations for national conflicts in those regions that persist to this day.

The example of the Soviet Union provides both positive and negative lessons for what a workers’ state could and should do. Even when borders aren’t able to disappear immediately, it shows what can be done to welcome workers fleeing oppression in their home country. The degeneration under Stalinism provides counter-examples of how a healthy workers’ state wouldn’t operate. The origins of Stalinism’s consolidation point to the need for revolutionary, working-class internationalism. This can create a global system where generalized want is abolished and the state, along with its borders, can wither away.

A World To Win

Understanding the connection between immigration and capitalism helps us understand that things don’t have to be this way. The world hasn’t always been defined by class divisions. Even when it has, the drive to maximize profit wasn’t always the motive force. The division, and re-division, of the world into nation-states wasn’t always the norm. Forcing people to flee their home country, exploiting them on arrival, and whipping up xenophobia against them among the native population, isn’t a fixed feature of human nature.

Only under socialism can we put an end to the forces that drive people to flee their country, only to subject them to repression and xenophobia in their new homes. While imperialism “develops” the neo-colonial world as a source of exploitation, a socialist world can develop the whole world on the basis of human need. This requires class struggle and internationalism.

We want to create a world where people aren’t forced to flee their home countries. And we want to create a world where people who choose to move are welcome wherever they choose to go.
All this is achievable. But it requires a materialist understanding of how things got that way and how they can change. Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto on the eve of a global wave of revolutions in 1848. In that document, they concluded, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Those words apply to this very day.