Our Enemy Is Capitalism Not Our Fellow Workers

We are frequently reminded that the United States is a ‘nation of immigrants’ and that immigrants built the country yet much of the right wing media also claim that immigrants are responsible for crime, the economic decline and practically every other problem in the U.S.A. Nearly everyone here came from somewhere else (except the native American population), many came in chains.

A January 2013 study reported that the U.S. already spends $18 billion a year on immigration enforcement, more than on the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) combined. As a result, the U.S. has created a police state for immigrants where in a number of states such as Arizona  undocumented workers are afraid to walk down the street without being demanded to “show your papers.” Get stopped for a minor traffic violation and you could end up in a “detention center” for months and then be deported, to be even separated from your U.S.-born children.

Large numbers of migrant populations going out of a particular area or nation should be viewed  as a signal of something. The capitalism system of production requires the existence of a class of people who have no property and therefore have nothing to sell but their capacity to work. It cannot function as a system without such a class. To create this class capitalism destroyed the system of property which had existed in the feudal period converting serfs into wage laborers and then went on to industrialize agriculture and destroy the bulk of peasant agriculture, converting peasants into wage laborers. This produced migrations from the countryside to the cities and also between countries. It is estimated that there are today 200 million migrant workers worldwide; more than ever before. The number of foreign workers in North America is estimated at 12.9% or approximately 40 million. In some industries, including agriculture, construction, food preparation, accommodation and household employees, immigrants are well over 20% of the workers. In the US, in 2005, there were 7.2 million illegals, or 5% of the workforce. Workers are the dispossessed who have no alternative but to find a place to sell their labor power. Workers who travel between countries and continents to do this are simply expressing the essence of the working class, that ‘workers have no country.’ The migrations of today are not a temporary phase which will pass when global economic conditions stabilize, they are a continuation of processes which have been underway since the dawn of capitalism.

  There has been an upsurge in transnational migration as every country and region has become integrated into global capitalism. There are reasons for people to pick up and move. Mass immigration out of a country is a symptom of poor economic conditions in the originating nation. There is a reason that so many residents of Mexico want to leave: there is better opportunity for flourishing in the United States. As long as the American ‘boom’ beckons, Mexicans in search of prosperity will continue to migrate to the USA. Until the 1980s, the number of Mexicans in the U.S. was under 2 million; today there are roughly 12 million Mexican citizens living in the U.S., one-tenth of Mexico’s entire population; and when you add their children, that totals 33 million members of Mexican families in the U.S., one tenth of the U.S. population. (This is in addition to the long-established Hispanic population from Texas to California in their ancestral lands stolen from Mexico.)

 Capitalism treats workers as a source of labor power, and is interested only in the price of this labor power, not its nationality or race. Capitalism is itself continually forcing workers to move across national boundaries to sell their labor power to survive. Hundreds of millions have been displaced from the countryside and turned into  migrants, providing a vast new pool of exploitable labor for the economy as national labor markets have increasingly merged into a global labor market. The creation of immigrant labor pools is a worldwide phenomenon.

Undocumented immigrants pay taxes. They work harvesting our food, caring for our young children and elderly parents, and building our homes and schools. Despite having paychecks deducted for Social Security and Medicare taxes - with more than $1.78 billion in income taxes withheld every year on about $60 billion in reported wages - these immigrants never benefit from the very programs that their tax dollars support.

 The passage of workers from Mexico is crucial to vast swathes of the American economy, but the workers themselves, at any given moment, can be treated like criminals, refused entry or deported. 1,100 immigrants are deported every day. More than one of every five low-wage workers are undocumented immigrants. They work jobs with no opportunity for upward economic mobility, are vulnerable to abuse and retaliation at the hands of bad employers, and constantly fear deportation and separation from their families if they speak out against unfair employment practices. Legalizing low-wage immigrant workers would dismantle employer efforts to retaliate against employees by depressing wages and working conditions for all workers, including those of color. The immigration policy of the U.S. capitalist class has long been to encourage large scale immigration while relying on its state-machine to impose a system of discrimination and persecution against immigrants in order to maintain a cheap pool of labor. The capitalist class needs to lower the costs of labor power , a key aim of capitalists at all times. To this end, companies can either move production to locations with cheaper labor supplies, or they can bring cheap labor supplies to production sites. Many American businesses have chosen to import workers, who are prepared to work for near-subsistence wages under dreadful conditions, and who will not complain because of their illegal status.  Immigrant workers are less likely to be unionized, and often more controllable. New immigrants often don't speak English and are desperate for work. Employers exploit this vulnerability to the fullest--paying below-average wages, violating safety standards and workers' rights. This can result in a general lowering of wages and deteriorating conditions together with unemployment for native workers and is always likely to produce social unrest. To forestall this, the bosses keep workers divided and pretend that the source of the problem is the newly arrived migrant workers. Employers use every possible difference between workers; sex, race, sexual orientation, skill and citizenship status, to sow division in the workforce. Employers know that a divided workforce is less likely to unite to demand union representation and higher wages and benefits. They need to direct the anger of the indigenous working class towards the immigrant workers to prevent it being turned on the exploiting class and the system which produces this inhuman world. To achieve this it is necessary to appear to be trying to clamp down on the immigrants through legislation which will make them appear as criminals.

The employers, themselves, are divided on the issue of immigration. It is clear that sections of US capitalism are very happy with the existence of a large pool of illegal immigrant workers since they reduce the value of wages throughout the economy. When it comes to making profits, U.S. business sees no borders. One thing the pro- and anti-immigrant lobbies share is recognition of the need to control the flow of immigrants. The central mechanism of control over the movement of labor is the nation-state. National border controls ensure that capitalism, through its state, maintains control over labor, rather than allowing people to move at will. The purpose of immigration policy, then, is to regulate the flow of labor--to control the borders so as to control the workers themselves. Immigration laws serve capitalism in two ways. First, they ensure cheap foreign labor when the domestic economy needs it. Second, they allow for greater control of the whole workforce.

It is essential that struggles of migrant workers against efforts by the ruling class to criminalize them,  such as we have seen in the US, should be fully supported.  Most people do not want to leave their homes and migrate, but feel they have no other options because of the economic repression caused in their countries by the profit-hungry corporations. In the end, it is the international economic policies promoted by capitalism that inevitably lead to increased immigration, that imposes criminal penalties on workers in order to decrease wages by taking advantage of undocumented workers who cannot risk demanding higher wages or protesting abusive or illegal working conditions.

A real fight for immigrants’ rights must be a fight against capitalism.  It must be a fight for a socialist revolution. The only solution to the continued abuses of workers is working-class unity! For our class, workers have no borders. This is no abstract slogan but it will take a revolution to achieve it.