An Attack on Immigrants Is an Attack on all Workers

Feb 26, 2024

What follows is part of a presentation given at a public meeting in Detroit on February 18.

When Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, his garbage mouth ranted about people coming in from Mexico. He said they were all criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. He said he was going to build a big wall along the Southern border. And later he called people from certain countries such as Haiti, El Salvador and places in Africa as coming from “shithole countries”.

You probably thought it couldn’t get worse. But now politicians are joking (or not joking) about KILLING immigrants. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott talked about shooting people trying to come to the United States, and then said the only reason he can’t is because he would probably be accused of a crime. Then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, Mike Collins, suggested some illegal immigrants could be murdered by throwing them out of a helicopter.

Politicians like this have encouraged attacks on immigrants, asylum seekers, and border-crossers. For example, we now have the so-called “God’s Army” in Texas that you may have heard about.

Some of the racist politicians today have also supported and talked about what is known as the “Great Replacement Theory.” This right-wing white-nationalist movement pushes the theory that white people are the victims.

But the anti-migrant campaign is not restricted to right-wing Republicans. Republicans and Democrats alike have been denouncing migrants who are turning up at the border every day.

Biden, while campaigning in 2020, said, “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.” But today he says, “Don’t come. Shut Down the Border."

And in case you didn’t know, more people were deported under President Obama than were under Presidents George W. Bush or Donald Trump.

Almost every day, you can hear news stories about migrants at the southern border, referred to as “the Border Crisis,” and “the Immigration Problem.” So why do politicians and their mouthpieces in the news media repeat all this? Why is the issue of immigration in the news prime time? It’s NOT a new issue. Just the opposite. More likely, it is because it is an election year.

Determined and Desperate—and Our Allies

Today, an average of 5,000 people are trying to come across the southern border every day. While previously many of the migrants had come from Mexico, today the majority of the poor immigrants are not from Mexico, but actually coming from farther south, from Central and South America, from the Caribbean, and even as far away as the African continent. Some of these countries are even poorer than Mexico. It is almost impossible to comprehend what some of the people go through to try to immigrate to the United States.

In 2022, over 800 people died just trying to cross the border. This does not take into account the degradation they must go through to get to this point.

The determination of these people is evident: enduring the treks of thousands of miles; the money they have to spend to even get here; and even if they do get here, what they have to endure in the worst jobs at the lowest wages…. Who would do this if they did not have to??

They are ordinary workers, very poor farmers and very poor people who, like the immigrants of the past, are fleeing from poverty and hunger and desperate situations.

Today’s migrants who are trying to come into the U.S. are fleeing disasters created by the U.S.—by U.S. imperialism, which has waged economic and military wars all around the world in order to super-exploit the workers and extremely poor farmers of many countries. It is U.S. imperialism that causes the devastation and poverty, the political repression, provoking one refugee crisis after another.

And when they get here, these refugees face untold physical and economic challenges, not to mention the attacks by the so-called God’s Army and the insults coming out of the mouths of the politicians.

Yes, we are bombarded with the propaganda that there is a border crisis. That we need to keep “them” out. But this propaganda isn’t meant to end immigration for the most part. It is directed at working-class people here, so that we succumb to this propaganda and accept to direct our anger toward other workers, who happen to be coming today, much like our relatives came decades, or maybe centuries ago.

Capitalists Want Immigrant Workers

At the same time, the reality is that certain sections of the capitalist class, in fact, want immigrants here—just like they wanted massive numbers of immigrants in the 1800s and 1900s. They want certain immigrants here for cheap labor, thereby driving down the wages of everyone else. And then they can turn around and use this as a way to divide the working class, directing the working class who has been here longer, to blame the newer working class arrivals for their problems.

The bosses want immigrants here, but on THEIR terms—low wages, bad working conditions, with no legal rights, therefore being unable to fight back for fear of being sent back. AND they want the children of immigrants here to use for cheap labor even if their parents are not here.

A recent New York Times (1/14/24) article entitled “How to Fix America’s Immigration Crisis” lays bare capital’s goal in its last line, which said the goal is, quote, “to bolster our work force.”—in areas of the economy ranging from agriculture, food processing, construction, to landscaping, etc.

Here is an example of the bosses bringing in immigrants for their own needs: In 1994, in Morton, Mississippi, black workers at a chicken processing plant formed a union and began to strike for higher wages. The bosses in that industry went to Mexico and hired workers from there, shipping them in to break the strike.

And where are the immigrants working? In meatpacking plants, in hotels, on golf courses, in grocery store chains. They make up 70% of the agricultural workforce in Michigan. And while we don’t see recent immigrants a lot working in auto here in Michigan for the Big Three, they do work in the small, non-union auto suppliers. Just like they work for low wages in Ford, GM, and Stellantis plants in Mexico, and Central and South America. The low wages there cause workers there to try to come to the U.S. But they face comparatively low wages here, too.

In the past two years, almost 400,000 children crossed the border without parents. Some were sent home. But others are now working in deplorable conditions in this country. The meatpacking industry is one that often has immigrant children working dangerous hours, in horrible conditions.

Today, the food processing industry in the South is made up of migrants, many of them “illegal”: slaughterhouses employing 14-year-old migrant children, often in the most dangerous jobs. Slaughterhouses, like one in Mississippi that supplies chicken to Chick-fil-A, employ children, two of whom were killed in the last two years after having been sucked into de-boning machinery.

Big well-known corporations like Tyson and Perdue—yes, we eat their chicken products—have been charged with hiring young teenagers in their food processing plants.

Today, also, you can see how more recent immigrants have been contracted by low-wage companies and funneled into a series of jobs that had formerly been done by unionized city and county workers—jobs on roads, in construction, in paving, etc. And contracted into jobs in housekeeping, landscaping, roofing, concrete, drywall, carpeting and painting.

Fall for the Propaganda or Stand as a Class

In the past there were attacks on immigrants. And we see this today. How is this accomplished? Lies. Divisive, often racist language. The news media quotes people over and over even if they know it is lies.

One example of the lies about immigration that we have heard: for years lies circulated about immigrants not paying taxes. First of all, it’s just not true—think for a second, when you go to a store, do they ask about your citizenship before the store decides if you have to pay the 6% sales tax? Of course not.

In fact, the opposite is true—immigrants pay MORE in taxes than they get out of the system. For example, an immigrant who works here for a few years pays into Social Security and Medicare but never lives here long enough to get a penny out of it. Immigrants are estimated to pay 12 billion dollars per year more into Social Security than they get out of it. From the IRS website: “Wages paid to resident aliens employed within the United States by an American or foreign employer are subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes under the same rules that apply to U.S. citizens.”

Politicians and media try to divert U.S. workers’ anger by making migrants the scapegoats for what the capitalist class is responsible for here in this country and all over the world. The anti-immigrant propaganda of today may be used as a threat against the millions of migrants today, but its main purpose is to address native-born workers, covering up what the capitalists are doing to us. Taking our jobs, slashing our wages and benefits, in all the ways capital always does, with or without immigrant labor. Scapegoating undocumented immigrants diverts native-born workers from our real enemies and pushes us to turn against immigrant workers, thus allowing the very class that exploits all workers to divide the working class against itself.

Competing with each other is a fool’s game. If we fall for it, we help the capitalist class drive down the standard of living of every working person. We shouldn’t fall for their disgusting, false arguments. When we allow ourselves to be divided—whether now or in the past—whether it’s anti-Black, anti-Irish, anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, we only hurt ourselves. It isn’t about our nationality, or our color. It is about our class.

Do we fall for the propaganda, or do we stand for the idea that the working class has the answer? We talked earlier about the politicians’ threats of violence against immigrants. When that happens, they do not get their hands dirty. They drive other people to do it. But what if we were all united and we did not let them use one group of workers against another?

If WE don’t defend the least among us, then this hurts everyone. But to be clear, it is not the immigrants who are the problem, it is the system that we live under that hurts the whole working class. We have a common fight alongside workers who are coming here now AND along with workers in other countries.

Immigrants ARE a part of the working class. They are our sisters and brothers. They have already shown tremendous courage, bravery and self-sacrifice just to be able to make it to this country, just to try to support their families. We must all come together to take on our true common enemy, the capitalist class.

Today the organizations that spew the anti-immigrant garbage to workers here in this country against other workers include right-wing organizations like the Army of God and the Proud Boys. But as we have said, it’s also the two parties, the twin capitalist parties, the Republicans and the Democrats.

Our job is to unite workers based on our class, the working class, rather than believe the lies of those trying to divide us. That is why the working class needs to build its own party—that is, a Revolutionary Working Class Party.