Trump’s War Against Immigrants in Political and Historical Perspective

Peter Hudis

Summary: With Trump’s war against immigrants about to begin, it is important to explore the roots of the present crisis and what can be done to challenge it—both in theory and in practice — Editors

The extent to which the second Trump administration presents us with a reality most people in this country have never fathomed, let alone experienced, is nowhere more evident than in his impending wholesale assault on the rights of immigrants.

Drastically reducing the numbers of those with temporary or permanent residency while deporting as many undocumented as possible is the signature issue that has defined Trump’s trajectory since he entered politics. He and his allies have been planning for years to enact an assortment of policies to help “make America white again,” and there is every indication they will hit the ground running. They are prepared to implement their agenda, and must we prepared to resist it.

Trump’s second term will not be like the first, when his effort to take a sledgehammer to immigration by ending DACA, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Family Preference Visas (mistakenly termed “chain migration”), and reducing asylum claims to close to zero were limited or blocked by the courts. This is not only due to him having a six to three majority on the Supreme Court (with many Circuit and Appellant judges as his appointees) but because restrictive immigration policies today have much more popular support than in 2017. This is a major reason he won not just the electoral college but the popular vote—aided by Harris’s studied refusal to sharply distinguish herself from his anti-immigrant position.

No Democratic Party candidate over the past 50 years campaigned on a more strident anti-immigrant platform than did Harris in 2024. This was in keeping with Biden’s policies of the last several years, which imposed some of the most severe restrictions on the right to asylum in recent memory. But this does not mean there is no difference between Harris and Trump when it comes to immigration: much as she and the Democratic Party establishment have bought into the narrative of stopping the  “flood” of migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico (and to a lesser extent the U.S-Canadian) border, she has never proposed shutting down almost all immigration from the global south down and/or deporting at least ten million undocumented residents.

Trump is a first in this regard, and we need to take a closer historical as well as conceptual look at how matters have reached this point.

 

Making it Harder (for Many) to Get In

Trump tried to take down the immigration system during his first term by issuing over 500 Executive Orders (EO) aimed at abolishing immigrant-friendly policies and creating new highly restrictive ones. He will use EOs again even though the Republicans now control both houses of Congress, since it saves him from needing 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster. He has promised to use EO’s to re-enact the Muslim Ban, which will prevent most from Muslim-majority countries from obtaining visas; end the TPS Program, which allows 1.2 million from Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador, Lebanon and Ukraine to remain in the U.S.; and reinstate Third Party Agreements and the Remain in Mexico Policy, which prevents asylum seekers from filing their claims in the U.S.

The latter is crucial since current conditions indicate that ending the right to file an asylum claim inside the U.S. is akin to eliminating the possibility of asylum itself. According to international law, as codified in the UN Convention on Refugee Rights (which the U.S. has been a signatory to since 1967), a refugee has the right to cross an international border without permission to claim asylum in a country they are fleeing to. This is to protect refugees from having to live for months or years under a repressive regime while their asylum claim is processed. International law also stipulates that they must be treated humanely while in the host country and cannot be sent back to their homeland if there is “credible fear” of being harmed upon their return (this is termed non-refoulement).

In recent years it has become much harder to legally obtain a visa to enter the U.S., while border policing has become more extensive and punitive for those trying to enter without one. As a result, growing numbers cross the border and then give themselves up to the authorities in order to file an asylum claim. Since the system is hopelessly backlogged (in part because Trump cut the budget for judges and officials who process such claims), growing numbers of migrants have used the asylum process to remain in the U.S., since they know it can take years before getting a hearing. Better to take a chance of staying at least a while in the U.S. than getting busted and returned right away across the border.

In this sense, the “crisis at the border” is manufactured by border policy. The harder it becomes to legally enter the U.S., the more those desperate to escape political repression, war, environmental destruction, sexual violence, and poverty try to enter the U.S. by other means. The harder it becomes to avoid arrest and deportation (the budget for border police has skyrocketed over the last 20 years) the more migrants try to enter and remain in the country in other ways—such as through asylum. Even though a relatively small number ever receive asylum (generally no more than 125,000 a year—Trump cut it to 15,000 by 2020), it has become a vital conduit to enter the U.S. Entirely shutting down the option of claiming asylum in the U.S. as Trump intends, is tantamount to shutting the border itself.

That Trump’s effort to annul the right of immigrants to file their asylum claim in the U.S. is a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law does not trouble Trump in the least. After all, his predecessors have been doing so for years (more on that in a moment).

This effort to make it more difficult for the impoverished masses of the global south to gain entrance to the U.S. extends to the Canadian border since growing numbers of migrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America are trying to enter the U.S. from the north (until recently Canada has had more liberal immigration policies than the U.S.). But even closing all borders will hardly stop the flow of immigrants, since two-thirds of the undocumented never crossed a border to begin with: they instead overstayed a student, work, or tourist visa. Trump will clearly make it harder to obtain such visas—except for those who do not come from what he calls “shithole” countries (that is, Northern and Western Europeans) as well as migrants from the non-Western world that have financial and capital assets to bring with them. Yes, class also determines immigration policy!

 

Making it Harder for Most to Stay In

No one can take seriously Trump’s claim that he will begin deporting twenty million undocumented immigrants—there aren’t twenty million to deport. But there is somewhere between ten and twelve million that can be. Deporting even a proportion of that number will entail a draconian use of force that will impact all aspects of U.S. society.

Trump plans to declare a national emergency and unleash the military to make arrests and deportations on an unprecedented scale. But is there a national emergency? Although border crossings reached an all-time high of eight million under Biden, the number of arrests each month at the border since June 2024 has averaged 56,000—a steep decline from the 250,000 arrested each month in the latter half of 2023.

Nevertheless, Trump does not need authorization from Congress or any change in U.S. law to enact mass deportations. The easiest to reach are those in jail awaiting trial, but that is hardly a huge number (first-generation immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens). Next in line are those ordered to leave the U.S. but were allowed to stay if they reported for regular checkups (the government has their contact information). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will no doubt move forward with mass roundups along the Texas and Arizona border of whoever cannot provide proof of citizenship, which can then be extended to many other areas. Trump is calling for the construction of “vast holding facilities” (a euphemism for concentration camps) to expedite the ensuing expulsions.

Moreover, Trump also intends to end the TPS program, which allows 1.2 million to remain in the country and have jobs, attend school, etc. George H.W. Bush signed TPS into law in the early 1990s to cover refugees in the U.S. who could not return safely to their homelands due to natural disasters, war, or severe political repression (immigrants from El Salvador were initially the prime beneficiaries). Enrollees typically need to reapply every six to 18 months—which means the government has their contact information as well. About 350,000 Venezuelans, 200,000 Haitians, and 175,000 Ukrainians are covered by TPS. Although the courts prevented Trump from ending it in 2019, they are unlikely to do so again.

Trump would also like to end the DACA program, which allows half a million youth to remain in the U.S., but there is no need for him to act on that right now: the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is deliberating whether to end the program, and a decision is not expected until the spring. Most of its justices are Trump appointees, so they may well kill it—which would lead to the deportation of hundreds of thousands who may have been infants when they crossed the border with their parents. Enrollees must reapply at regular intervals, so the government knows where to find them as well. I should add that DACA is such a popular program that even Trump has at times suggested it should not be ended (he shifted gears in 2018 when his hard-Right base threw a fit). If a program that recent polls show is still supported by 67% of the U.S. public can easily be annulled, it means that every other policy that in some way protects the rights of immigrants can be axed as well.

Those arrested for deportation have a legal right to a hearing, but the question is whether the administration will honor that. Trump and his supporters have never been reticent about ignoring laws they don’t like, so it is more than likely that his lawyers and advisors are working to see if there is a way around that. He could invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to quickly remove the undocumented, but that is allowed only in the case of war between the U.S. and a foreign country. But this is hardly reassuring: the Palmer Raids of 1918-1920 expelled thousands of communists, anarchists, and socialists (mainly from Eastern Europe) based on the Sedition Act, passed by Congress in 1918 and upheld by the Supreme Court (it was rescinded in 1920). Thousands of vigilantes who were not employed by the state apparatus took part in arresting people on its behalf. Trump has far more supporters today willing to do the same, many of them armed to the teeth.

As of the end of 2024, 3.7 million in the U.S. are waiting for their immigration claims to be resolved. Of that number, 1.6 million are asylum seekers. The immigration courts cleared 900,000 cases between October 2023 and October 2024—the most ever in a 12-month period. If Trump tries to deport as many as 11 million, at the current pace it will take until 2040 to clear the backlog. Even if the rate of processing expulsions is greatly accelerated, there is the problem of where to send them—since many countries are not willing (or able) to take them. The U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Venezuela or Nicaragua, so no mechanism exists to send them back. And Haiti has no functioning government at all (even the airport in Port au-Prince has been shut down by gangs).

It would be naïve to presume that Trump’s minions are not aware of these facts, even if he is not. His threat to impose tariffs of 25% on Mexico and Canada if they do not “completely shut their borders” is clearly part of a strategy to pressure them to also take those targeted for deportation. Both depend on the U.S. for close to 80% of their external trade. They may have little choice but to comply.

Of course, the mere threat of mass deportations has a material effect. There are already reports of thousands making plans to leave the U.S. so as not to be subjected to the humiliation of arrest and deportation. There is a precedent for this: in 1954 the Eisenhower administration deported a million Mexican Americans in the Southwest in a few months (some estimate a third were citizens—mostly children born in the U.S.). Though it is hard to pin down the exact number, many left the U.S. before the government had a chance to deport them due to the threats issued against them. For a business-minded oligarch like Trump, this is the most cost-effective approach.

Some have argued that Trump won’t follow through with mass deportations because of the enormous harm it would do to the economy (over half of workers employed in meatpacking and a far larger number of those harvesting crops are undocumented immigrants). That may or may not be the case: the new administration might try to handle that by bringing back a version of the Bracero Program (from 1944 to 1964), which brought tens of thousands of workers from Mexico into the U.S. on temporary work contracts, where they were housed in barrack-like conditions isolated from the general population.

 

Immigration in the Historic Mirror

The critical question is why has anti-immigrant sentiment reached such a fever pitch today—and not just in the U.S. but around the world? What explains the shift of a large section of the electorate toward supporting mass deportations? In the U.S. it is hardly restricted to Republicans—at least 30% of registered Democrats and over 50% of independent voters support deporting all undocumented immigrants.

To claim “this is just the way things have always gone in this country” is not only factually incorrect; it demonstrates nothing more than laziness of thought. Nor do economic reductionist arguments suffice—such as that immigrants are welcome when their labor power is needed and turned way when the rate of unemployment declines and their labor isn’t needed. The U.S. is today experiencing a labor shortage (especially in critical industries that require specialized skills, like the medical profession), and expelling millions of immigrants makes no economic sense.

Clearly, racism plays a critical role. What we are facing today is the failure of a country to take account of its racialized past and present. Which in turn raises the question of why it is failing to do so. For that, a brief excursion into the history of immigration is in order.

There is no question that race and racism have long played a critical role in attitudes toward immigration. The very first immigration restriction, imposed in 1803, banned “the importation of any freed Negro, Mulatto, or other person of color from Haiti,”[i] which had just secured its liberation through the first successful slave revolt in the Caribbean. Yet no restrictive immigration laws were created in the decades that followed for Europeans, even though Scottish, Irish Catholic, and German immigrants often faced discrimination upon arriving in the U.S. Except for the 1803 Act, the U.S. had open borders throughout most of the nineteenth century. The first political party to push for broad anti-immigrant laws, the American Party of the 1850s, failed to do so since it gained relatively little popular support.

Nevertheless, the 1870 Naturalization Law limited citizenship to white and Black Americans (the latter encoded in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution) but explicitly denied it to other non-whites. Asians soon became the target: the 1875 Page Law prohibited Chinese women from entering the U.S., which the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act extended to all Chinese (which was often applied to Asians in general). This racist series of restrictions was supported by sections (but by means the entirety of) the U.S. labor movement—which Karl Marx took issue with in some of his very last writings (in reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act) in stating that the attempt to exclude Asians shows “the disposition towards sharp repressive measures which is aroused among the wealthy classes by the symptoms of dissatisfaction and aggression by the poor.”[ii]

The Chinese Exclusion Act, originally intended to last for ten years, was periodically renewed in the following decades. Yet the U.S. imposed no other major immigration restrictions for the next 40 years (aside from the Immigration Act of 1903, which barred entry to anarchists—a political, not a racial restriction). The borders remained open for all others. There was no visa system, and no federal border patrol, and even states like Arizona did not make it a crime to cross the U.S.-Mexico border until 1929. By no accident, from 1890 to 1914 the U.S. experienced its highest proportion of immigrants per total population of any period before or since. Millions flooded into the U.S.—many from Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, but the vast majority from Eastern and Southern Europe.

This massive migration, the largest in absolute numbers of any country in the world at the time, marked the period when hostility towards immigrants began to sharply increase. Much of the animus was directed against the numbers of Jews, Slavs, Italians and Greeks flooding into the country. Ethnic discrimination against non-white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, long a feature of U.S. society and especially found among the elite, now began to obtain mass support, bolstered by the pseudo-science of eugenics and claims that new immigrants were “poisoning the blood of real Americans.” Not long after the Red Scare of 1919, which deported thousands of radicals, Congress imposed the Emergency Law of 1921—the first nationwide, comprehensive program to restrict immigration in U.S. history.

The 1921 law created for the first time a visa system, based on ethnic origins quotas. It capped total immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere at 350,000 a year, with the number of visas allotted to each nationality limited to 3% of those living in the U.S. as of 1910. In 1924 Congress made this even more severe with the Johnson-Reed Act, which capped total yearly immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere at 150,000, with the number of visas allotted to each nationality limited to 2% of those living in the U.S. in 1890. The latter number was clearly aimed at making it relatively easy for Northern and Western Europeans to enter the U.S. while making it extremely difficult for those from Southern and Eastern Europe to do so—after all, 1890 was the year that just began the massive immigration from those areas. Yet Mexico and the rest of Latin America were exempt from both anti-immigrant laws—largely because agricultural interests in the southwest, hungry for cheap labor, lobbied Congress not to include them.

The anti-immigrant hysteria of the 1920s (unlike now a period when the economy was booming) reduced Jewish immigration by 97.5% between 1922 and 1925. That was its intent—just as it intended to radically reduce Italian, Polish, and Russian immigration. While Latin America was not subject to these restrictions, Asians were—the Chinese Exclusion Act was not ended until 1943. From 1921 to 1964 the U.S. could no longer claim to be welcoming of immigrants because for the most part it clearly wasn’t.

But that changed in 1965, when Congress passed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act. It ended national origin quotes, explicitly rejecting the racist and ethnically exclusive laws that had defined immigration policy since 1921. Each nationality was now allotted the same number of visas a year (20,000), to “equalize” the playing field. For the first time it instituted Family Preference Visas, which allows a permanent U.S. resident to sponsor a direct family member from their country of origin; this makes it possible for those allowed in to exceed the limit of 20,000. The Act allotted 75% of visas to family preference, 20% to employment (with a preference for skilled labor), and 5% for asylum.

Most Members of Congress who voted for the Hart-Celler Act—which is still in effect (albeit modified over the years)—did not intend it to dramatically increase immigration, but it had precisely that effect. It made it possible for unprecedented numbers from the global south to enter the U.S. who were previously prevented from doing so. But this does not mean it didn’t have serious flaws, since it included Mexico and the rest of Latin America (left unmentioned in the 1920s laws) in the overall cap of 350,000 visas a year. It’s privileging of skilled workers also made it harder for the unskilled (working in agriculture, construction, and domestic labor) to get visas. This helps explain why over 60% of West African immigrants to the U.S. have B.A. degrees—a much higher percentage that white U.S. citizens. The Hart-Celler Act also inhumanely barred entry to the U.S. from those deemed homosexual (this was ended in 1991).

Despite these limitations, there is no question that the Hart-Celler Act changed the fabric of U.S. society by making it possible for tens of millions of people of color to arrive in the U.S. over the last half century. In addition to enabling many Asians and Africans to do so, it made it possible for many Latin Americans to enter through Family Preference Visas, since numerous Latinx had resided in the U.S. long before 1965. The percentage of the U.S. population born outside the U.S. in 1965 was 4.7%—and most of them were white Europeans. Today it is 15.2%. Many countries have a larger percentage of residents born outside its borders, but none have as total a number of immigrants as the U.S.—at last count 46.2 million, 88% of whom are non-Europeans.

So, what brought about this radical change, given that one can hardly claim that racism no longer infected U.S. society in 1965? It was far from a gift of some enlightened elite. The critical factor was the Civil Rights Movement, which had a dramatic impact on U.S. society—most of all on Black America, but also in helping to inspire Chicanx, Puerto Rican and Native American movements as well as labor, feminist, and LGBTQ struggles. The Civil Rights Movement’s success in generating cross-racial support made it increasingly incongruous to hang onto legislation from the 1920s that measured the “worth” of an immigrant by their race or ethnicity. Those who portray today’s anti-immigrant sentiment as no more than a continued expression of an unbroken history of racist policies, neglect the subjective agency of Black masses-in-struggle that helped force open the gates of entry to those which U.S. society has oppressed and marginalized.

What then explains the shift in direction today, when opponents of immigration (hardly restricted to Trump voters) want to reverse the legacy of Hart-Celler? There were always vocal opponents of the U.S.’s more liberal immigration policies post-1965—indeed, many of were in the Democratic Party, who decried immigration for suppressing the wages of “real Americans.” And the Republicans were hardly united on this: even such a rightwing demagogue as Ronald Reagan signed the Refugee Reform Act of 1980 which made it easier for Africans to come to the U.S.—and six years later signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided three million undocumented with a path to citizenship while imposing employer sanctions on companies hiring undocumented workers (the latter proved largely ineffective). So, what explains the strident embrace of anti-immigrant sentiment by so many today?

 

The Economic, Political, and Psychological Roots of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

We cannot begin to answer this question without dealing with the phenomenon of deindustrialization and its impact on the Western world. The devastation wrought on the working class by free trade globalization, neoliberalism, strip-mining of industries, and the virtual elimination of family farms—actively promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike—produced a series economic and psychological shocks, the consequences of which are still being felt today. Hundreds of millions around the world felt the floor come out from under them—at the same time as levels of inequality reached unimaginable levels. In response, some moved to the Left, which drove the Seattle and Montreal anti-globalization protests of 1999, the Occupy Movement of 2011, the Sanders campaign of 2016, and the upsurge in labor organizing by young workers (many of them recent immigrants) during the pandemic and right to this day. Many moved to the Right—especially those who lack access to a perspective that shows that the source of their distress are structural factors such as the drive of capitalism to accrue ever-more monetary value as an end-in-itself. And those in rural areas and small towns have less access to such a perspective of anyone. What also facilitated this change is that most liberals as well as many academic leftist anti-liberals have had little if anything to say to the working class (assuming they converse with workers at all) about what to do about the deindustrialization that has ruined so many lives.

When so many feel adrift in a racist society, it is to be expected that those who accept its parameters will be inclined to blame their distress on racial or ethnic minorities rather than the system that offers them at least the pretense of privileges the others lack. And what better encapsulates this than to target immigrants—who since the 1970s have overwhelmingly consisted of people of color? This helps explain why Black Americans, who were the first to be impacted by deindustrialization (Huey Newton of the Black Panthers was already critiquing it in the late 1960s) have not moved to the Right in response: they know all too well what it means to be scapegoated.

This does not mean, of course, that all African Americans are immune from anti-immigrant sentiment—polls indicate that about 30% of Black males favor mass deportations. There are many reasons for this (such as job competition with recent immigrants willing to work for lower wages in industries that traditionally employed large numbers of Black workers), but the figure is far lower than among whites, including working-class whites. It goes without saying—or at least should go without saying—that just because racist whites denigrate “people of color” as a whole, does not mean people of color are an undifferentiated whole that necessarily shares common interests.

In any case, what drives anti-immigrant sentiment today is not simply deindustrialization per se as much as the failure of capitalism to provide a corrective to its corrosive effects in the 40 years since it was consummated. The global economy has pumped out tens of trillions of dollars of accumulated capital in the past decades (much of it speculative or fictious capital) but has proven unable to meet the basic economic, medical, and educational needs of a vast majority of its subjects. Life is more atomized, fragmented, and alienated than ever—while the economy is concentrating capital in ever fewer hands. Neoliberalism has driven this process, as has its hybrid form in the semi-state-controlled economies of China or Russia. Neither “private” nor statist capitalism has been able to overcome the structural limitations that have defined the global economy since the 1970s.

Most tragically, a viable alternative to all forms of capitalism that addresses the needs and aspirations of masses of people has not been formulated and projected in response to this situation. Our activism cannot become uncoupled from the effort to develop such an alternative. It is hardly sufficient today to proclaim “socialism or barbarism”: the phrase is empty unless we envision what socialism means for today, in contrast to the bastardized forms it assumed for much of the past 100 years.

The levels of frustration and anomie felt by those who see no way out of the structural formations that characterize the political economy of capital is especially egregious in a land that has yet to take account of its racialized past and present. Appeals to limit (or eliminate) immigration become a ready default option, as seen in efforts to reverse what the U.S. has increasingly become since the 1960s—multiethnic, multiracial, and multi-gendered. “Make America great again” is a not-so-coded call to return to a world before the Civil Rights Movement—and before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which raised the profile of immigrant, trans, and Indigenous rights to a new level (the percentage of Americans stating they wanted lower levels of immigration hit a low of 30% in 2020; today it is 57%).

The fact that today’s anti-immigrant sentiment has deep objective roots by no means ensures it will be supported by most of the populace, let alone most of the working class. As recently as 2020 a clear majority of Americans supported increased immigration. It is blatantly obvious that everyone who voted for Trump knew his anti-immigrant proposals and are therefore complicit in the crimes he is about to commit. So, how did his proposals (rejected by even mainstream Republicans as extreme in 2016) win over not just the entirety of the Republican Party but by now many independent and Democratic voters?

To answer, we need to look at what Biden did after 2020. He came to power promising to reverse Trump’s anti-immigration policies, and in his first month presented a bill to provide a path to citizenship for eight million undocumented. But he never pushed for it (it is doubtful it would have passed in any case), preferring to prioritize COVID relief, infrastructure development, and a $300 a month per child payment for working-class families—the latter succeeded in reducing childhood poverty by close to half (too bad it lasted only a year). By 2022, however, in the face of criticisms over the level of border crossings, he kept in place Title 42 (Trump’s effort to close the border under the pretense of the pandemic) and other policies (even as he eliminated ones like Remain in Mexico). By the time he got around to ending Title 42, the governors of Texas and Florida got the bright idea of exporting large numbers of migrants seeking asylum (especially from Venezuela) to northern cities like New York, Chicago, and Denver. Faced with a lack of resources committed to these newcomers—resources for the unhoused have failed to keep up with the demand for years—many in these Democratic-Party majority areas started demanding that the administration “do something” to slow the flow of migrants over the border.

Biden did plenty to slow the flow—including by having border police violently force many Haitians back across the Rio Grande River (some had walked and hitch-hiked from as far away as Chile to get there). He deported more immigrants from 2021 to 2024 than Trump in his first term in office. But the criticism of him being “soft on illegals” continued, and Biden responded in June 2024 with new draconian anti-immigrant restrictions.

Biden implemented a new EO that temporarily blocked a vast majority of asylum seekers from crossing the U.S./Mexico border and allowed the Border Patrol to swiftly deport them. It said the restrictions would be lifted if border crossings dropped below 1,500 a day for a week. That never happened, and on September 5, 2024, Biden made the restrictions permanent. That this occurred in the middle of the election campaign was no accident: the idea was to insulate Harris from charges of being “soft on immigrants.”  Biden went further on October 2, announcing the numbers would have to drop below 1,500 for 28 days for the restrictions to be lifted. Gone and forgotten was the law passed years ago by Congress that anyone setting foot on U.S soil to seek asylum must be allowed to stay in U.S. while their claim is reviewed. Moreover, Biden announced that asylum seekers must apply at an official port of entry—no longer could someone cross anywhere and claim asylum. And those screened at ports of entry are no longer asked if they have credible fear of being harmed if returned to their homelands—in clear violation of the non-refoulement clause of the Geneva Convention on Refugee Rights. Thus, Biden joined Trump in openly violating long-standing law.

None of this was unique to Biden. The same pattern of left-of-center parties deciding to embrace aspects of the anti-immigrant policies of their rightwing adversaries has been evident for years in Europe—in Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, and many other countries. In every case it has failed to quell anti-immigrant sentiment; rather, it has bolstered it.

It is not hard to see why: staking out limits on immigration legitimizes the racist opposition to immigrants espoused by the far Right, even when those doing so might be personally averse to outright racist policies (I am being generous here). Why vote for a left-of-center party that suddenly decides to call for restrictions on the right to asylum when rightist parties have been advocating that for years? If it is accepted that allowing in more immigrants constitutes a problem (let alone a crisis), why not vote for those who are defined by that very perspective?

I am not suggesting that voting patterns are reducible to attitudes toward immigration. But they do play an important role in deciding the votes of a considerable share of the electorate—and in the case of the U.S., this played enough of a role to give Trump the presidency.

Legitimizing the rightwing approach on immigration is especially pernicious in a land with as complex social dynamics as the U.S. This “country of immigrants” has a long history of former immigrants deciding it is in their interest to oppose further immigration, even from the lands they or their parents and grandparents came from. One sign of this is the Latinx vote in the U.S. election: Latino men voted for Trump over Harris by 12% in 2024, whereas they backed Biden by 23% in 2000. In Star County, Texas, which is 97% Latinx, Trump got 57% of vote; McCain got 15% in 2008. Nationally, the Latinx vote for Trump was 46%, the highest recorded for a Republican in decades. But this does not mean 46% of Latinx support Trump or restrictions on immigration, since a significant number did not vote. The question is, what did Harris offer them (as well as many others who sat out the election) in the way of a progressive agenda on immigration? Legitimizing the rightwing narrative on immigration did not win Harris the votes of Republicans, but there is plenty of evidence that it led many not to vote at all (also thanks to her defense of Israel’s genocide in Gaza).

 

What to Do Now?

I am not suggesting that Harris would have won the election had she campaigned as a vigorous champion of immigrant rights. She might have lost by a larger margin. The factors that drive anti-immigrant sentiment are too deeply rooted to be easily pushed aside, especially by Democrats with such a checkered history on the issue.

The biggest barrier is not just attitudes towards immigration per se, but towards facts, truth, and scientific objectivity. How does one get people to recognize that the logic of capital is generating conditions of displacement that generates in turn the very surge in migration that they so object to? How do we get people to realize that the number of migrants crossing international borders will vastly increase (by as much as 1.2 billion in the next generation), no matter what Trump does or does not do, thanks to climate change that is tearing rural laborers from the land? How do you convince people of the structural factors that explain their social and personal distress if they are not even interested in hearing a structural explanation, since as they see it, truth is subjective and relative? Today’s social battles must be conducted on a conceptual as well as political level, by first of all, challenging the subjectivism and relativism that defines much of leftist thought. Facts, truth, and objectivity do matter, when grounded in the reason of the oppressed.

Despite the difficult times ahead, there is much we can build from in generating resistance to the war against immigrants. Tens of millions in this country oppose the narrative that blames immigrants for today’s social ills and realize they have a responsibility to support present and future immigrants, regardless of whether they crossed a border with or without permission. A new generation that has been galvanized into political action by the movement for Black lives, by the spurt of new labor organizing, by the defense of LGBTQ rights, and by support for the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, is not going away. Immigrants are not some passive group: they have engaged in mass actions in defense of their rights in the past, and they will be joined by other workers as the deportations escalate. Moreover, Trump will no more be able to resolve the endemic economic and social problems plaguing U.S. capitalism than his predecessors: if anything, he will make them far worse, and social discontent will grow. In light of this and more, many who may not have taken an active stand in defense of immigrant rights will feel compelled to do so when they witness the violence and dehumanization so many will be subjected to.

The worst response is to conclude that the problems of U.S. society seem so intractable that this is a time to withdraw into our inner circles and focus on managing our day-to-day affairs. There are no islands of safety in a world succumbing to neo-fascism.

 

Don’t withdraw, Organize and Resist!

 

[i] See D.S. Fitzgerald, and D. Cook-Martin, Culling the masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[ii] See David Norman Smith, “Accumulation and its Discontents: Migration and Nativism in Marx’s Capital and Late Manuscripts,” in Rethinking Alternatives with Marx: Economy, Ecology, and Migration, edited by Marcello Musto (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

LEAVE A REPLY

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

1 Comment

  1. Howard Moss

    Great analysis of a sad situation being made even sadder. Excellently researched and laid out.

    Reply

FROM THE SAME AUTHOR