Debunking the right-wing: Immigration in the US

The history of migration to the United States goes back to the origins of the country. We have not always had significant concerns about the inflow of migration. In fact, in the early days of the Republic, the government encouraged the free flow of Europeans to buffer the genocidal war effort against Native peoples. Early naturalization laws, which were exclusive to white people, only had requirements for living in the US for a certain quantity of years and being law-abiding. There were little to no restrictions on migration aside from this. Although the migration of Irish Catholics in the mid 1800s led to a xenophobic, Nativist backlash, immigration was still not significantly restricted by law.

The first law restricting immigration was the Page Act of 1875, which mainly affected East Asian migration. It came as a reaction to the inflow of “inherently” foreign Chinese migrants. More explicitly racially exclusive was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in the wake of the racist Yellow Peril panic. The Act was not repealed until 1943. Though the Chinese were one of the few groups widely agreed upon to be ‘irredeemably foreign’, they were not the only ones considered to be racially deficient and undesirable.

Southern European and Eastern European migration in the late 19th and early 20th century both significantly grew the industrial workforce and angered the xenophobic inclinations of Anglo-Americans. In particular, the Eastern Europeans, who were largely Jews fleeing the antisemitic violence of the Russian Empire, were considered to be degenerating. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act was passed restricting these and East Asian migrants, and the 1924 Immigration Act tightened these quotas and completely banned immigration from Asia.

The Great Depression hit following the 1929 stock market crash, leading many angry, upset, and desperate Americans to search for a scapegoat. Many Americans, including the American Federation of Labor, settled on blaming migrants. Created in 1933, the Immigration and Naturalization Services began to force people out of the country, including many Chicanos who had US citizenship. Chicanos were dropped into a country they did not know, and for many, in a place which they did not speak the language of. Although a southern border did not yet exist, it was still difficult for many to afford returning home.

Due to the arrangement of racial quotas, the reach of the American Empire in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the demand for labor in the large industries of the US, the workforce in the West Coast was increasingly dominated by Mexicans and Filipinos. Mexicans were not yet significantly restricted in immigration quotas, nor was there a border wall or fence restricting them. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico was recovering from the devastation of its Revolution and civil war. Poverty was severe in rural areas, especially in states like Michoacán and Oaxaca. There were both these push factors and the pull factor of comparatively higher wages in the US.

Filipinos were not excluded in the anti-Asian laws, since they were technically US nationals (though not citizens) because the US held the Philippines as a colony. They were pushed and pulled by similar factors. Thus, the migrant labor force, especially in agriculture and domestic services, was increasingly dominated by Mexicans and Filipinos, and still is to this day due to the migration patterns set during this period.

During WWII, demand for migrant labor skyrocketed as the Euroamerican male workforce was drawn on to fight the war. In 1942, the United States and Mexico worked out a deal for the Bracero Program, which allowed a certain amount of Mexican workers to come to the US and give cheap labor for the agricultural industry in exchange for quality accommodations. In practice, Braceros were super-exploited, abused, and forced into horrific living conditions. In California, many Braceros fled south to escape their unbearable working conditions.

After WWII, the Bracero Program continued, since few Euroamericans were interested in working in the fields. In 1954, Operation Wetback was launched, forcibly deporting many Braceros back to Mexico. By the 60s, however, a racist backlash from Euroamericans who believed the Braceros were sucking up jobs led to its termination in 1964. Though the Program was over, it had hardened migrant labor patterns between Mexico and the US.

The modern day immigration system had its foundations set in the mid-1900s. But it did not become the system we recognize until around the end of the 20th century. In 1952, the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished racial quotas. And the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished nationality quotas. However, immigration enforcement continues to be implicitly racial and national in character. National discourse, media narratives, and enforcement continue to target those considered “undesirable,” such as Mexicans and Central Americans. Though the INS enforced immigration laws and deported undocumented migrants, the US did not have significant barriers on the southern border until recently. Barriers only began being constructed to a significant extent in the 1990s.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established in 2003 to replace the INS, using the excuse of the War on Terror to justify attacks on immigration. The modern discourse on migration is extremely politically important and contentious. Those who take xenophobic positions play on the same rhetoric as Nativists historically, but updated for the modern day.

The ideology pushed to justify immigration restrictions itself plays a social function, in that it regulates the price of labor. Precarious conditions make for cheap, desperate labor, and capitalists have a history of collaborating with immigration enforcement. To demystify the real mechanics of migration, we need to dispel several myths told about it:

“They steal our jobs and drive our wages down!”

This argument about immigrants is among the most common and most easily debunked. Actually, immigrants by and large work jobs which native-born laborers are not interested in, in particular, the agricultural and domestic services industries. For the most part, they are not competitors in the same labor markets. In the industries they work, they are super-exploited, squeezed for as much value as they can possibly produce. Unlike most native-born workers, they have little choice but to accept this, since they lack the stability and protections the former have. And undocumented laborers can be coerced by the threat of deportation.

Migrant laborers contribute to the economy through the value that is squeezed out of them, as well as the consumption spending they contribute to the economy. The United States economy is dependent on this super-exploitation to operate, especially in the agricultural industry, where exploitation enables the production of cheap food for American markets and abroad. Further, due to the drying up of work opportunities and an increasingly hostile society, emigration has actually become greater than immigration.

It is not immigrants who have been driving down wages. In fact, productivity has soared while wages have stagnated since the early 1970s, regardless of the rate of immigration. The ones who drive down wages are capitalists. Capitalists seek the most super-exploitable labor they can find to maximize profit margins. The system of market competition pits workers against each other. Because capital is global, it can outsource labor to where production is cheapest. Immigration restrictions do little to nothing about this. The solution to declining wages and exploitation must be broader than merely native-born workers. Instead, the defense of the rights of labor needs to include migrant laborers too, documented or not, to be effective.

“They waste taxpayer money!”

The fact of the matter is that non-naturalized immigrants are excluded from social programs. At the same time, they continue to contribute through taxes and spending. The idea of people becoming a “public charge” by using social programs is itself deeply charged. The operation and health of an economy is not disconnected from the society it is part of.

Public health is important for a stable and effective labor force, and the need for this exists whether someone is a citizen or not. To use a contemporary example, spending money to improve COVID-19 safety measures for migrant workers helps everyone by decreasing the spread of the virus.

“They’re illegals anyway, they broke the law!”

The idea of flattening a human being into a single quality — “illegal” — is deeply dehumanizing. It erases all the characteristics of a person, their needs, personalities, family lives, histories, desires. This characterization posits that the only thing that matters about them is the fact that they’re undocumented, and not why they’re in the position they are in the first place. Do we extend this argument to suburban teenagers who break the speed limit? That crime is much more of a threat to the lives of others than breaking immigration laws, and yet it has almost no social stigma attached to it.

Furthermore, immigration flows to the US are directly associated with the behavior of the US as a global empire. The traditions of Filipino and Mexican migration to the US were set by US imperial expansion westward. The United States has a long history of imperialism in Latin America, with the CIA forcing changes in sovereign states, including democratically elected ones, to ensure the safety of US investments and availability of cheap products. The US even infamously supported the military dictatorship of Guatemala as it carried out the genocide of Mayans.

How can it be the fault of the victims of imperialism that the US Empire displaces them from their homes? Why is it their fault that the empire sucks their countries dry to feed itself, and that they must come here for work?

“They commit voter fraud!”

The 2020 election saw Americans be inundated with what seemed like endless piles of disinformation. Essentially all of the claims of fraud were based on misrepresentation, distortions, and outright fabrications. Undocumented immigrants were not used by Democrats for voter fraud. Actual voter fraud cases are extremely rare, and the majorities are the result of sorting errors.

The real, documented culprits of voter fraud in 2020 were quite uniformly Republicans. In Pennsylvania, Republicans violated state law and tried to allow Trump supporters to send in absentee ballots after the deadline. A Trump supporter from the state was charged with trying to vote for Trump in his dead mother’s name. In California, they put out misleading, unofficial, fake ballot boxes in order to trick voters into throwing their votes away, something Republicans explicitly accused Democrats of doing.

Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election popular vote by 7 million votes above Donald Trump. For the vast conspiracy which conservatives imagine to have happened, Democrats would have had to be tightly coordinated and disciplined. It would be near impossible to hide the evidence of it, especially if immigrants were being bussed around to commit voter fraud as claimed. Quite simply, there was no conspiracy. And immigrants are not responsible for the real cases of voter fraud which Republicans committed.

“They’re violent, dangerous criminals! They’re bringing in drugs, weapons, and crime!”

Once again, this myth is patently false. Native-born Americans are actually far more likely to commit crimes than undocumented immigrants. Native-borns commit more crimes in terms of the rate of crime, and the absolute, total number of crimes. There is no correlation between undocumented immigrants and increases in crime rates.

The very idea that culture, or race, and propensity toward crime have any association is incorrect. In reality, crime is most strongly associated with impoverishment. The majority of crimes in the US are property crimes, supporting this idea. Even violent crimes have a correlation with impoverishment. If someone really cared about crime rates, they would support an orientation of the economy in a social direction, rather than continuing to falsely believe that punishment will solve the root causes of crime.

Another important aspect of this issue to consider is how the United States contributes to crime in countries which are stereotyped as sources of criminality. The United States is known for its lax gun laws. The ease of obtaining firearms in US markets means that there is a significant flow of arms from the US southward. The United States government has also armed cartels in Mexico, supported the cocaine-trafficking, anti-communist Contra death squads of Nicaragua, and has supported Wahhabi and Salafi extremist groups who have become al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Immigrants are actually more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crimes, in no small part because they fear to report their perpetrators. Over the past few years, racist and xenophobic hate crimes against Latinos and Asian-Americans have skyrocketed. Undocumented immigrants are also more likely to be victims of human trafficking than citizens, in spite of stereotypes that immigrants victimize native-borns in the trafficking. Immigrants do not create crime. Capitalism and imperialism do.

“We only deport the violent ones!”

In actuality, immigrants targeted by ICE for deportation under President Donald Trump were less likely to have criminal records. ICE has separated families in custody, forced immigrants into concentration camps where they have died due to poor conditions and become infected with COVID-19, and children have been deported without their families. Who is the real criminal element here? Who are the real “animals’’? There is no correlation between immigration and an increase in crime rates. Once again, it is impoverishment that drives crime. Punitive policies like deportation and imprisonment do not solve the root causes of crime. Instead, socially-oriented policies do.

Why do people believe that punishment, destruction, and terror solve the issue? Because they have been duped. Those who profit off the desperation and precariousness of migrants are the coyotes who demand people’s life savings to smuggle them across the border, the capitalists who work the immigrants until their backs break and their hands bleed, and government agencies like ICE who use immigration fears to centralize their power and grow into a modern-day Gestapo.

Immigrants are not a threat to be dehumanized and scapegoated. They are humans with needs who are trying to survive this oppressive, exploitative system of global capitalism like the rest of us. And we can’t cast off that system until we recognize that a revolutionary unity is the way to free ourselves.