by Emerson Shaw

The government and ICE are using the threat of deportation to strike fear into our hearts. It is because they want to stop people and workers like us from working together — from trying to create genuine positive material change in our lives and workplaces. How and why does the owning class align with and use the state to prevent our unity? They know that when we are divided is when we are most exploitable.

They want to convince us that immigrants and citizens are somehow fundamentally different, despite immigrants living and working in the same community as us. They want us to think that immigrants are aliens or foreigners, when they call the same cities home. The ruling class enforces a border and ever-stricter legal barriers on movement from country to country to keep us divided, when the only real difference between citizens and immigrants is that immigrants are forced into fear of deportation should they speak up or try to organize when their employers or the state exploit them.

While the extraction of labor value is inherent to capitalism, immigrants are much more exploited, being paid less and subjected to significantly worse conditions.

Immigrants are forced into submission and squeezed for every last droplet of profit.

Every moment they step outside, there could be a ‘legally’ armed swarm of masked bandits to abduct them.

This is not acceptable.

This is fascism, and this is our reality.

The owning class has a long history of implementing the divide and conquer strategy towards workers, legally and socially supporting racial segregation, and racializing immigrant groups as somehow different from citizens. It has been done to exploit existing populations, as with Irish immigrants entering into “whiteness” to gain a position of social superiority over Black workers. It has been done to exploit incoming populations, as with Chinese immigrants in California during the 19th century. This strategy has been used repeatedly, around the United States and worldwide. Our history is a history of exploitation fueled by the profit motive.

Let us consider why there are so many immigrants here from Latin America today. What economic and personal hardship could they be fleeing, or what greater opportunity does the U.S. provide?

Consider that the U.S. has repeatedly destabilized Latin America for centuries. The U.S. has sent its agents to coup any government that might turn against U.S. hegemony. It has turned Latin America into an economy of extraction, with resources being exported and very little money flowing back in.

U.S. imperialism, another extension of capitalism’s need to expand and find more exploitable methods to drive higher profit margins, has created the migration that the imperialists and fascists now portray as invasion.

We created this displacement crisis, and because climate change disproportionately affects the overexploited global south, there will be significantly more people seeking refuge and a place to start over. 

Yet the U.S. stops immigrants at our arbitrary border and says, “Even if you enter, you will not be free.”

You are marked for life, and unless you want ICE to come knocking on your door, you can never protest, you can never fight back. 

You will never be free.

Never forget that those who endlessly scapegoat immigrants for all of the inevitable horrors of capitalism are the cause of their own problem. Capitalism is a gluttonous system. It cannot help but decay, because infinite growth is not possible, when there is nobody left to exploit here or abroad, and when all limited resources are inevitably extracted.

First, fascists find a target, be it immigrants, queer people, or any marginalized group. Then, the fascists attack those groups because it is an easy narrative to say: “Immigrants are the ones taking your jobs and bringing wages down.” The narrative that immigrants drive down wages because “they will work for less” has to be defeated. Immigrants do not voluntarily choose to work for less than the full value of their labor; exploitative work is the only option offered to them. Additionally, wages are only “brought down” when a manager or a member of the owning class chooses to lower them.

It is easy to blame every societal problem on already marginalized groups, because it gives the masses an easy out, a narrative to follow, rather than forcing themselves to come to terms with the full scale of their oppression. It is easy for the fascists to create their own “problem” and then use the promise of solving it to gain power. Anyone who has studied the Holocaust understands this to be the case. This is the same method the Nazi party gained support in Weimar Germany, and it is the same method the Trump administration used to gain power today.

They want us to accept their narratives rather than face the reality that immigrants are the same as all legal citizens — they are people, they are workers, they deserve endless kindness, love, and respect, they deserve the same access to education, welfare, and basic amenities as we all do.

We must understand that immigrants are often the most exploited workers, and that liberals and conservatives alike use their immigration status as a means to force them into low-paying jobs. The narrative that we only accept immigrants because they “do the jobs citizens don’t want to do” must be eradicated. It is the justification for using immigrants as what amounts to a slave class: people only allowed in society as long as they engage in the most exploitative labor.

All immigrants are welcome. We must eradicate the narrative that any immigrant is more valuable than any other because of how long they have been involved in their current community, or how much they have produced within it. These factors are irrelevant. All immigrants deserve to have their needs met, just as every other human does.

The idea that we must organize society from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, does not stop at an arbitrary national distinction. It does not stop at the racial border perpetuated in our minds. 

We must understand that immigrants would not be illegal if those in power did not make them illegal. They decide to arbitrarily restrict movement and to create national boundaries. They choose the criteria for legal entry and set the threshold as high as they wish.

The abolitionist struggle cannot stop at state policing, incarceration, or ICE.

We must abolish borders as well. 

Likewise, the socialist struggle cannot stop at capitalism or imperialism.

We must abolish borders as well.

Today, we must come to a realization. Immigration was never the problem. Borders themselves are the problem.

They exist for no reason but to divide us — to divide the people so that we may not rise up together against our oppressors.

If the owning class can drive us apart by nationality and race, then they can exploit us. If the owning class can tie these with immigration status, they can and will use ICE to destroy our communities.

We will no longer let that happen.

As organizer and author, Harsha Walia writes in the conclusion to Border and Rule:

We understand that “man-made borders shall never fully thwart human movements compelled by the upheavals of our era.”

We fight for the idea that “the freedom to stay and the freedom to move are revolutionary corollaries refusing imperial bordered sovereignties, with home as our shared horizon.”

Abolish ICE!

Abolish Borders!

None of us are free until all of us are free.

Sources:

Border and Rule by Harsha Walia (Ch. 4; Conclusion)

Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books, 2021.

How the Irish became White by Noel Ignatiev (Introduction)

Ignatiev, Noel. How The Irish Became White. Routledge, 2009.

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai (Ch. 4, s. 3)

J. Sakai. Settlers: the Mythology of the White Proletariat. Morningstar Press, 1989.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano (Part 1, Ch. 3)

Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press. 1973.