Both major parties push racist immigration policies

The Democrats think they’ve come up with a way to fend off Republican attacks that they are “soft” on “border security:” embracing restrictionist Republican policies as their own. They don’t say that, of course, but that is essentially what they did when the Democratic-led U.S. Senate negotiated a “bipartisan” border bill that gave the restrictionists just about everything they wanted.

The Trump-entralled GOP couldn’t take “yes” for an answer. And so, in February, when the House leadership announced it wouldn’t even consider the bill if it passed the Senate, the GOP abandoned the effort before it even came to a vote. This handed the Democrats a talking point that they have used since: The Democrats want to “solve” the crisis at the border, while the Republicans just want “chaos”. In fact, the Democrats think so highly of the deal that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced that he wants to revive it. The liberal Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) obliged Schumer and reintroduced the bill.

It was fortunate that the GOP shot down the bill in February. It’s a terrible bill that supporters of a just immigration system should reject. It greatly expanded the funds spent on the border security complex, including increasing capacity at detention centers and the number of deportation flights. It subjected asylum seekers to “security vetting” and requirements to document their asylum claims that most asylum seekers won’t be able to fulfill. It gave the Department of Homeland Security the authority to “close the border” to asylum seekers if 8,500 “inadmissible” (i.e., people who failed the checks outlined above) migrants arrived in a day.

The aim of these changes is to speed up the process of determining eligibility for asylum and to deport migrants as quickly as possible. This is what the Democrats mean when they talk about “solving” the migrant crisis. The bill did not address the status of DREAMERs, migrants who came to the U.S. as children—many of whom are now adults. An Obama-era policy has protected them from deportation, and allowed them to attend school and to work, but without providing them citizenship. Moreover, it left in limbo the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the US—the population that Trump and his acolytes promise to round up and deport should Trump enter the White House in 2025.

It’s clear that the politics of immigration, which have always oscillated between the demands of U.S. capitalism for labor and deep currents of white supremacy and xenophobia, are shifting to the right in the current climate. Opposition to immigration and a “browner” U.S. has been one of the—if not the main—motivating factors on the contemporary right since at least the “Tea Party” agitation in the early 2010s. Trump regularly injects Hitlerian rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. into his rambling rally speeches.

Republicans have pushed the envelope on racist immigration policies—everything from the symbolic impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the very real anti-migrant policies emanating from right-wing governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott. Abbott, with the assistance of 25 other Republican state attorneys general, has led the charge in challenging the authority of the federal government to enforce immigration policy. In so doing, they are advancing a neo-Confederate viewpoint that says the U.S. government is a “compact” between sovereign states that those states can opt out if they want.

So far, the Supreme Court has refused to fully endorse Abbott’s attempts to assert that Texas law banning “illegal” entry into the state takes precedence over the federal responsibility to maintain external relations with Mexico. But the right will keep advancing its agenda, and the Supreme Court will probably give it more “wins” than losses in the future.

Besides making migrants’ lives miserable in their states, Abbott and DeSantis have had much greater success in forcing their “red-state” views into the political discourse of supposedly more immigrant-friendly “blue” states. Taking a page from civil-rights era Southern segregationists, they have bussed or flown in more than 100,000 migrants to cities like Denver, New York and Chicago since 2021. Those cities’ responses—at times inadequate and other times, bumbling—have played into the hands of the right. Even in these urban centers where a large percentage of the Democratic Party base are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the migrant crisis has touched off a zero-sum politics of resentment against migrants. In that climate, only the right benefits.

For the first three months of 2024, the Gallup survey has found that “immigration” is the top problem Americans report going into this year’s presidential election. That certainly made Democrats take notice and accelerated their attempts to claim a “bipartisan” immigration deal. But a closer look at the trends in these data over the years show that Republicans drive most of the national concern on immigration, with a more recent uptick among independents. But this also emphasizes how much the immigration issue dominates the Republican/conservative part of the electorate, while the majority has many other competing concerns.

But for cowardly politicians who are worried that any one issue could prove to be the one that sinks them, migrants—who, it should be noted, are following the U.S.’s immigration laws—are a burden who can be tossed aside in the name of political expediency. As with so many other issues, Biden and the Democrats are shifting right under the implicit assumption that immigrant rights supporters can be cowed into backing them in November when they consider the truly heinous things that Trump is proposing.

And yet, as the logic of lesser evilism presides, immigration politics and policy continue a race to the bottom. President Biden maintained several Trump-era immigration policies, and last year, he announced that his administration would continue building Trump’s wall on the southern border. This pandering hit its lowest point at the State of Union speech in March, when Biden, responding to heckling from far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, used the word “illegal” to describe an undocumented migrant accused of murdering a Georgia nursing student.

If we look at the migrant crisis from outside the realm of grubby electoral politics, we see that the current crisis is the product of decades of U.S. imperialism and domestic political dysfunction. Decades of neoliberal economic “reform” have helped to destroy whole sectors of the Central American economies. U.S.-backed “drug wars” in Central America and Colombia have also contributed to flows of migrants fleeing paramilitaries. The U.S. and other imperialist powers have meddled in Haitian affairs for centuries. And U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have made life unsustainable for millions in those countries.

These are some of the forces pushing people to risk life and limb to seek asylum at the southern U.S. border. They are willing to take the chance of spending years to have their asylum claim adjudicated —most of which the government rejects—rather than spend decades to become U.S. citizens through other means. The fact that the current system makes established immigrants wait for years to receive work permits also fuels anti-migrant sentiment against recent arrivals.

The paradox of all of this is that while the U.S.’s capitalist parties keep up their race to the bottom, their paymasters in the U.S. capitalist class are finding that immigrants are sustaining their post-pandemic profits and growth. As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts wrote,

The influx of immigrants to work and to study is helping the US economy – it’s keeping a high supply of labour available for employers particularly in the areas of heavy demand for labour: healthcare, retail and leisure, also sectors of relatively low pay.

Net immigration is becoming vital to US capitalism. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. labour force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, thanks mainly to net immigration and the economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influx of immigrants.

If capitalist “rationality” gave way to political pressure, it wouldn’t be the first time. And in an environment where both major parties are competing to portray themselves as “tough on the border,” we can expect more of this in the future.