Attacks on Immigrants Serve the Capitalist Class

Nov 11, 2024

Trump and the Republicans made attacks on immigrants a centerpiece of their campaign this year. Trump called immigrants “animals” and blamed them for every problem under the sun, from the lack of jobs to the decline in health services, and ran countless fearmongering ads about “migrant crime.”

And far from defending immigrants, the Democrats ran ads claiming they would be better at “securing the border,” reinforcing the idea that immigrants are a threat.

These attacks on immigrants are attacks on part of our class, the working class.

The vast majority of immigrants, whether they came “legally” or not, whether they came from Mexico, or Venezuela, or Haiti, or Honduras, or Poland, or Iraq, or the Philippines, were workers in their original countries, and will remain workers here.

Most came here fleeing the results of U.S. policies aimed at ensuring the domination of U.S. corporations over the whole world. U.S. imports and investments drove millions of small farms and businesses into bankruptcy in Mexico. U.S. sanctions destroyed the Venezuelan and Cuban economies. U.S.-backed militaries in countries from Honduras to Haiti carried out wars against their own workers, often allied with gangs. U.S. invasions and bombing campaigns have laid waste to entire countries from Iraq to Syria to Libya to Afghanistan.

In other words, immigrants are fleeing destruction caused by the same people destroying workers’ standard of living here: the U.S. capitalist class and the state apparatus that serves it. That class, which owns the corporations and banks, and which runs both Democrats and Republicans, is our common enemy.

The capitalist class makes up a tiny percentage of the population in this country. One key strategy they have always used to stay in power, and keep the rest of us producing their profits, is to divide and conquer the working class. White against Black; men against women; old against young—and of course, those who arrived yesterday against those who arrived today. Blaming immigrants for workers’ problems has been capitalist policy since the working class was born. It has always been a way to make workers fight each other, instead of fighting those who exploit us.

The immigrants Trump rails against didn’t close the factories. They didn’t speed us up. They didn’t understaff the hospitals. They didn’t steal the money for workers’ schools. They didn’t drive up the price of everything. No, the capitalist class did all of these things.

Of course, the capitalists take advantage of the desperation of immigrants to pay them less and force them to work under the harshest conditions. And yes, the capitalists use that desperation as a battering ram to lower the pay and intensify the work of everyone else. But making immigrants more afraid will only make it easier for the capitalist class to use immigrants’ desperation to drive down every worker’s standard of living.

It’s impossible to tell how many people voted for Trump because of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, or despite it. In any case, it is a huge problem that so many workers gave their votes to a candidate who ran squarely on a program of setting one part of the working class against another.

But it is not an insurmountable problem. Many times, in the past, when the working class has moved, immigrant and native born workers, from all over the world, have found the way to unite around our common interests and against our common enemies. For the working class to begin to address the crises we all face, we will have to find a way to do that again.