Trump has already started preparing to take action against immigration even before taking office, and now he plans to bring back the anti-immigration official Homan for his first term.
But doesn’t the existence of illegal immigrants expand the reserve army of industry and suppress wages? Why is this the case? If immigrants are deported, wouldn’t the bourgeoisie end up hiring more expensive workers?
When there is a relative surplus of labor, they are expelled; when their presence is needed to lower wages, they are introduced. Moreover, Trump says one thing and does another; his own businesses extensively use Mexican workers, and the number of work visas issued during his presidency was even higher than during the Obama administration.
Talking about the so-called immigration issue, in fact, it is largely just a means of political propaganda by bourgeois politicians. The bourgeoisie are fundamentally united in their economic interests; they are all eager to exploit cheap labor from third-world countries to meet their needs for expanding production, but they do not want foreign workers and their families to settle or reside long-term in their own countries because the cost of living there, due to the level of productivity development and other factors, is inevitably higher than in third-world countries, leading to an increase in wages, which are the monetary expression of the value of labor power (the value of the living materials needed for the reproduction of labor power). This creates a contradictory phenomenon—the so-called “anti-immigration” politicians and parties also secretly use immigration; for example, Trump extensively used “illegal” immigrants in his own businesses (notably, Musk, Trump’s biggest financial backer, is an illegal immigrant from South Africa); on the surface, politicians and parties that “encourage” immigration also restrict it in actual policies; for instance, the Biden administration announced restrictions on asylum seekers entering the country in June this year, even citing the same “Asylum Law” clause that Trump used in 2018 to close the southern border. Therefore, whether it is encouraging or opposing immigration, it can be said that both are just political showmanship. The Democratic Party uses the former to portray itself as open and inclusive “leftists,” while the latter is used to promote racism and nationalism, diverting people’s attention from class struggle. The claims of both sides seem opposite but are actually united in covering up and erasing the class contradictions within the United States.
This article may be of some help to you, and you can refer to it:
Immigration issues have always been a complex ethnic conflict in the ethnically diverse United States. Soon after the founding of the United States, the then-second president John Adams issued the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, implementing reactionary policies of discrimination, exclusion, and expulsion of immigrant workers, which were only repealed during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson after struggles by the American people. Subsequently, with the development of American capitalist industry, impoverished immigrants from Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world came to the U.S. for work, forming the current immigrant population, making the U.S. a typical multi-ethnic country.
However, the ruling class in the U.S. has always been a single ethnicity, a small bourgeoisie among white people. To protect their own class interests, they suppress immigrant workers’ wages, undermine solidarity between native and immigrant workers, and vigorously promote falsehoods that immigrants cause “rising crime rates” and “steal American workers’ jobs,” inciting American workers to see their class brothers as enemies while viewing American capitalists who exploit and oppress them as friends. In 2001, the Bush Jr. administration, citing the 9/11 attacks, incited an anti-immigrant wave, ruthlessly passed the Patriot Act to restrict legal immigration applications, and enacted the Secure Fence Act, with the newly established Department of Homeland Security building large-scale walls along the US-Mexico border to prevent “illegal” immigration. Afterwards, although the Obama administration slowed down restrictions on legal immigrants for various reasons, it continued to enforce the harsh policies against “illegal” immigrants established by the Bush administration. The subsequent Trump administration became even more notorious, openly promoting reactionary rhetoric against immigrants, loudly claiming “we need to build a wall,” spreading nationalist rhetoric targeting Muslims and minorities, and increasing searches and deportations of illegal immigrants. Although the Biden administration, after Trump, verbally expressed disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies, it has never relaxed its persecution of illegal immigrants primarily engaged in labor, still viewing their entry into the U.S. for work as “illegal.”
The reason why the American bourgeoisie vigorously promotes anti-immigrant fallacies is not accidental nor based on personal preferences of politicians, but has deep political and economic motives. The American bourgeoisie has always used immigrant workers as cheap substitutes for native workers and as weapons to fight against them, a fact well documented (see David L. Wilson’s “The Part of ‘Illegal’ They Don’t Understand” in the Monthly Review). Here, the focus is on the large-scale migration of Mexican workers to the U.S. after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. Studying this typical example of U.S. immigration issues will provide a paradigm for understanding the entire U.S. immigration problem and directly refute various fallacies propagated by Trump against immigrants.
Poverty-stricken Mexicans crossing the border to work in farms and big cities in the U.S. has been a phenomenon since the 19th century, but it became particularly prominent after NAFTA came into effect in 1994. To illustrate the specific consequences of NAFTA, here is a quote from David Wilson’s “Immigration Politics: Questions and Answers”:
… NAFTA and other trade agreements forced Mexico to lower or eliminate protective tariffs, more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers lost their income sources, had to sell or abandon farms; total agricultural employment fell from 8.1 million in the early 1990s to 5.8 million in the second quarter of 2008… After NAFTA, export-processing enterprises indeed created about 660,000 manufacturing jobs, but this was far from enough to offset the 2.3 million jobs lost in agriculture, and due to competition from countries like China, export-processing sectors also began losing jobs from 2000-2001. Meanwhile, from 1980 to 1996, the real purchasing power of Mexico’s minimum wage declined by nearly 60%. After NAFTA’s implementation in 1994, the minimum wage continued to fall, down 25% from 1994 to 2009… Rising unemployment and shrinking wages widened the wage gap between Mexico and the U.S. By the 1970s, Mexican workers’ wages were about a quarter to a third of American workers’ wages (Mexico’s cost of living is generally much lower than in the U.S., although prices for electronics, cars, and branded clothing are often higher). After the decline in real wages in the 1980s, by the late 1990s, Mexican manufacturing workers’ wages were about one-eighth of those in the U.S. for similar work; in some professions, Mexican wages were only one-fifteenth of those north of the border… (A few years after 1981), the same Mexican factory worker’s real purchasing power dropped to about one-third of what it was before, but now, they could earn eight to fifteen times more by working in the U.S. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s 2009 study concluded: “One paradox of NAFTA is that Mexico now has more ‘exporting’ population than ever before, and more of them are residing long-term in the U.S. without documentation.”
【Note: Bold text added by the editor】
How despicable! The bourgeoisie that advocates “Make America Great Again” and fervently supports exporting cheap goods is precisely the culprit that introduced Mexican immigrants into the U.S., yet now they pretend to be unrelated and blame impoverished Mexican immigrants seeking work in the U.S. It is precisely because the American bourgeoisie, through their cheap goods, violently trampled on the homes of Mexican workers and farmers, destroying their livelihoods locally, that they had to leave their homes. As the old saying goes, “To wear the crown, one must bear its weight.” Since imperialist America enjoys the “freedom” to export goods recklessly to Mexico, it must also bear the “freedom” of Mexico to export immigrants to the U.S.—these two “freedoms” are two sides of the same coin.
But how do the bourgeoisie, supposedly opposed to immigration, actually view the large influx of Mexican immigrants into the U.S.? Undoubtedly, they verbally claim they want to deport all “illegal” and even “legal” immigrants, trying to make the petty bourgeoisie believe they truly intend to do so. But facts speak louder than words. Let’s look at how Trump, known for his anti-immigrant stance, actually treats immigrants in practice, not just in words:
Trump repeatedly claims that foreign workers “take American jobs,” but in reality, his own government has steadily used workers from other countries to fill U.S. jobs. In fact, the Trump administration increased the number of H-2A visas for temporary agricultural workers. In 2016, the last full year of President Barack Obama’s term, 134,368 H-2A visas were issued; by 2019, this number rose to 204,801.【David Wilson, “Trump Welcomes More Guest Workers Amid Crisis While Rejecting Asylum Seekers,” The Exposé】
Of course, Trump sometimes also exposes his hypocrisy verbally:
“Foreign workers, do we agree? We must have them.” Two years ago, at a rally, Trump announced this. On April 1 this year, at a White House briefing on pandemic response, he used almost the same words: “We want them to come… I have made a promise to farmers: they must continue to come, or we will have no farmers.” (Same source)
But his advocacy for anti-immigration laws, his loud calls to build a border wall, and his actual actions are not contradictory. On the contrary, these moves align with his real purpose. The American bourgeoisie clearly desires Mexican cheap labor to replace “expensive” native workers, but they do not want these workers to gain “legal” status in the U.S., and when labor is relatively abundant, they prefer to temporarily expel them to maintain low wages—so that their wages do not rise along with the cost of living. Even those who are “welcomed” are still considered “illegal” legally, and can be deported at any time! Evidence of this is not hard to find—just look at how Trump himself used大量"illegal" immigrants as cheap labor in his business ventures (David Wilson, “Trump and Forced Migration,” The Exposé).
The point is clear: laws against deportation are not really meant to deport immigrants, and anti-immigrant rhetoric is not truly opposed to immigrants. They are tools used by the American bourgeoisie to exclude immigrants and suppress their wages, and they are exploited to divide and weaken the unity between native and immigrant workers. The notorious American yellow union, the AFL-CIO, has long supported racist laws of U.S. imperialism and loudly claimed that immigrant workers are stealing American workers’ jobs, thus exerting a very negative influence on the American labor movement.
So, what is the Marxist view on immigration? Over a century ago, Marx commented on the consequences of Irish mass migration to Britain: “Ireland… continuously supplies its surplus population to the British labor market, thereby lowering wages for the British working class, worsening their material and spiritual conditions… Ordinary British workers hate Irish workers, seeing them as competitors who lower their living standards… Irish people… see British workers as accomplices and blind tools of British domination over Ireland… The press, churches, satirical publications, in short, all tools controlled by the ruling class, artificially maintain and deepen this antagonism. This antagonism is the secret behind the British working class’s lack of power despite having their own organizations. This is also the secret behind the ruling class’s ability to maintain its influence.” (Marx, “Marx’s Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt,” April 9, 1870)
In Marx’s view, the influx of large numbers of immigrant workers into advanced capitalist countries does indeed lower the wages of native workers, but this is not a narrow-minded reason for xenophobia. Ultimately, these immigrants are fleeing their homeland, ravaged by imperialism to the point they cannot survive there in the old ways, and come to enemy countries to seek new livelihoods. The primary cause of wage reduction should be blamed on the domestic bourgeoisie responsible for foreign invasion, who are the common enemies of both native and immigrant workers. Fundamentally, the low wages of immigrant workers are not due to a fabricated “national character” meant to oppose workers from advanced countries, but because they are in a foreign land, new arrivals, weak and unable to resist the ruling bourgeoisie, and under threat of expulsion, they can only endure and accept wages that are incomprehensibly low—still several times higher than their income in colonies.
Therefore, the greatest and only difficulty here is that immigrant workers, despite their strength, lack the “local connections” to provide initial assistance and guidance for their struggle. For native workers, their greatest and only difficulty is that they have not yet convinced immigrant workers that even if they challenge capitalists, they will not lose their jobs or face deportation, and thus they are willing to fight for higher wages. The entire problem lies in the fact that these two groups of workers, who can and must help each other, are divided by the nationalist prejudices instilled by the bourgeoisie, causing serious consequences—one side suffers from extremely poor working conditions, and the other faces intolerable unemployment and further wage cuts. Only by uniting can both sides gain the strength to fight against capitalists.
Finally, the conclusion on the U.S. immigration issue is that immigrant workers are not the enemies of American workers, but their most powerful allies; American workers are not enemies of immigrant workers, but their impoverished brothers they have never met. The unity of the international proletariat is not an abstract or unrealistic moral connection as distorted by the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie. For the proletariat, it is not an issue of abstract justice or philanthropy, but a primary condition for their own social liberation. In an era where chauvinism once again pervades American society and the world, we should once again recall the solemn slogan declared by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto—Proletarians of all countries, unite!