On January 23, the working class of Minneapolis dealt the heaviest blow yet to Trump when tens of thousands of workers forced the shutdown of hundreds of businesses and packed the streets in mass protest. This historic general strike, the first one in a US city in decades, forced the Trump regime to pull out the vast majority of the savage ICE and CBP forces from the Twin Cities, remove reactionary leaders of the deportation forces from their positions, and reshape their deportation strategy.

In other words, it wasn’t the Democratic Party or the courts that forced Trump to make a retreat on his signature issue—the only thing that has so far worked against this authoritarian regime is the mass organization and collective struggle of working people.

However, since pulling out their main forces from Minnesota, the deportation machine has still continued to terrorize immigrant workers across the country.

While it’s significant that ICE arrests in March and April were down to about 7,000 per week from 9,000 earlier in January, it’s clear there’s still more work to do if we aim to stop the deportation machine in its tracks. Socialist Alternative stands in solidarity with immigrants facing the horror of deportation. All working-class people, from undocumented and documented immigrants to US-born workers, share the same interests and should unite in the struggle against Trump’s billionaire government.

Trump Changes Strategy—Same Struggle Needed

An important part of Trump’s psychopathic deportation strategy has been to strike fear in the hearts of tens of millions of immigrants throughout the country. This campaign has included ultra-nationalist social media posts by multimillionaire former DHS head and cosplay hobbyist Kristi Noem, Trump, and others. The goal is to create a division between immigrants and US-born workers, a division that serves the bosses in their eternal drive to lower wages and benefits for all workers.

Facing backlash, the administration has moved to a more low-profile, systematic campaign which includes causing “self-deportation” and cracking down on documented immigrants as well. The New York Times summarized this particularly cruel effort:

“In February, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a new federal rule blocking ‘mixed status’ families from living in publicly subsidized housing, which could cause an estimated 80,000 people to lose their homes, including about 37,000 children, nearly all of them U.S. citizens. Starting in March, roughly 200,000 immigrants began losing their commercial driver’s licenses, under a new ban on truckers who are asylum seekers, refugees or undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. The Trump administration has reportedly weighed an order that would require banks to verify their customers’ citizenship status…Starting last month, noncitizens can no longer obtain small business loans through the federal government, even if they are here legally.”

Bosses Worried About Their Profits

However, not all wings of the capitalist class support mass deportations. Many liberal economists have correctly pointed out that mass deportations harm the capitalist economy. In short, this is because a higher population means more workers, higher productivity, and a higher level of investment and economic activity. This is especially true as the US and other industrialized countries have seen a historic decline in birthrate, leading the Trump administration and others globally to try and ramp up population growth—a task that stands in opposition to mass deportations. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee found that mass deportations may cause as much as 7.4% decline in GDP by 2028.

On top of the supply chain and oil shocks stemming from the war in Iran, the profound impact of deportation on the agricultural sector has even forced Trump to expand the guest farmworker H-2A visa program. This, however, was done by further cutting the wages and benefits of those workers, fully siding with the interests of the bosses.

Texas restaurants have suffered so much from the deportations that the conservative Texas Restaurant Association is now backing an industry campaign demanding Congress and the White House create work permits for “long-term, law-abiding immigrants playing critical roles from farms to restaurants.” True to the profit motive, however, the organization “made clear that it was not calling for amnesty, nor was it asking for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants,” according to the New York Times. 

Herein lies the conflict at the heart of the capitalist exploitation of immigrants: they would like to keep them “in their place,” too frightened to organize for their rights so that they will tolerate low wages and bad working conditions. That is why the ruling class, despite some of them not preferring Trump’s approach, will never dismantle their own violent deportation machine. But at the other side of the conflict is the fact that there is a limit to this system of hyper-exploitation. Those at the top don’t understand the basic law of resistance—oppression leads to class struggle.

Deportations Hurt All Workers

Mass deportations should be opposed from a working-class point of view, because on top of being cruel and deeply unfair, deportations hurt the efforts of all workers to fight for our collective interest in better jobs, wages, and conditions.

The same Congressional study found that mass deportations can push prices up to 9.1% higher and cost 44,000 US-born workers their jobs for every half a million immigrants who are removed from the labor force.

A major study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and at the University of Texas–Austin found that US-born workers’ employment share fell by 0.3% and their hourly wages fell by 0.6% as a result of the Secure Communities program, which led to roughly 450,000 deportations from 2008-2014. This is the opposite of the right-wing mantra that “fewer immigrants equals higher wages.” The studies show that when the super-exploited workers are deported, companies tend to hire less rather than pay higher wages to attract US-born workers. This is especially true for sectors such as farming, healthcare, and construction. Secondly, as mentioned earlier, the lower economic activity stemming from a smaller population leads businesses to reduce hiring, therefore raising the US-born unemployment levels.

For A United Struggle By Immigrants & US-Born Workers

The history of the labor movement in the US and across the world shows that just as all workers share the same basic interests, we are also strongest when fighting together. History is filled with examples: from immigrant workers uniting across nationalities in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to desegregating the auto factories of Detroit—united struggles benefit all workers.

This is precisely what frightens the billionaires and their corporate politicians the most, and is why year after year, they find creative ways of separating us along gender, race, religion, sexuality, or national lines.

As millions of us are being thrown back into poverty and violence, or facing horrific conditions at newly constructed ICE detention facilities, we need to take our inspiration from the mass resistance and strike action in Minneapolis, as well as the brave workers—whether they were born in the Twin Cities, Latin America, Africa, or anywhere else—who stood up to Trump’s deportation thugs. We need to escalate the movement, organize mass protests, strikes, and assert workers’ power over the domination of Wall Street and the political elite.