the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 26, 2025
Included in the Republican “One Big Beautiful Bill” tax and budget plan is a new 3.5% tax on money transfers out of the country. This tax is to be imposed on non-citizens—that is to say, immigrant workers.
Workers in the U.S. wire 65 billion dollars a year back to Mexico, 12 billion to Guatemala, and billions more to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, to the Middle East, to India and the rest of Asia. The tax could reduce the national income of Mexico by almost one percent. That money tends to go to rural states there—poor places that workers left, so they could try to make more money. These transfers represent a big part of the economy in many poor countries: 20% in Guatemala and Haiti, for example.
Immigrant workers pay taxes in the U.S. already, when they work, when they shop, when they pay tolls. Moreover, many are shut out from social services available to those born here. Trump proposes to fund tax cuts for the billionaires, and his military budget, by squeezing the part of the working class made up of immigrants. It’s one more blow in the long chain that his administration has rained down on immigrants in this country.
Trump spreads a poison: that attacking the immigrant part of the working population will somehow benefit others. No—brandishing scorn for immigrants is one of his ways of trying to divide the working class, while he shovels money to the capitalists.