Harris jumps on the anti-immigrant bandwagon

To liberal pundits and Democratic Party aligned commentators, Vice President Kamala Harris speech in Douglas, Ariz., following her trip to the southern border September 27, was a brilliant piece of political jujitsu.

“The Vice President visited the US-Mexico border yesterday and gave a forceful speech about the border and immigration. I know many of you have weighed in how important you think it is that the VP lean into these issues, and she sure did last night,” long-time Democrat Simon Rosenberg wrote to the readers of his newsletter Hopium Chronicles.

“Voters want to hear about solutions on the border — all voters, white voters, Latino voters, Black voters,” Democratic-aligned pollster Matt A. Barreto, who specializes in polling Latinos, told the New York Times. “Voters want to hear, What are elected officials going to actually do to address the broken immigration system? And there was very high support for the bipartisan border security bill.”

One group of people who are most like NOT cheering the Democrats’ “pragmatism” on immigration are Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, and other towns across the U.S. These people—who are legal immigrants to the U.S.—have been the target of a campaign of calumny verging on “blood libel,” that the Trump/Vance campaign has orchestrated.

The outlandish—and widely debunked—Internet lies that Haitian migrants in Springfield were capturing and eating pets emanated from neo-Nazi political agitation. But the Republican candidates for president and vice president deliberately elevated them to the center of the political debate. Trump has since worked in this vile racist nativism into each of his rally speeches, merely changing the group of migrants he attacks according to the location of the rally.

As the election season careens into its last month, Trump is amping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric. As the Wall Street Journal noted:

The Republican presidential nominee and former president has long held sealing the southern border as his signature issue, but he is now drawing a direct line from immigration to more of society’s ills than ever, casting himself as the only one who can fix it. Trump and Vance, his running mate and the junior senator from Ohio, have alleged migrants are to blame for unaffordable home prices, high unemployment, infectious diseases, rising car insurance, unsafe elections and, perhaps most infamously, missing house pets.

So, Trump’s strategy is clear. But so is Harris’s. Harris is operating on the Democrats’ tried and tested modus operandi: move to the “center” (aka, the right), and assume that the liberal Democratic base and its organizations will follow along because “they have nowhere else to go.”

The actions of the immigrant rights group United We Dream captured the cul-de-sac in which Democrat-aligned interest groups have found themselves. Last month, United We Dream led a coalition of 83 immigrant rights and human rights groups in issuing a letter pledging to oppose the bill that Harris has promised to revive.

“It is shameful that instead of investing in welcoming the most vulnerable people who seek safety and a better life, and who make our country better by every measure, we’d suggest wasting our resources in ineffectual, inefficient deterrence policies that harm and kill these same people,” the letter read, in part.

Yet only days after issuing this letter, United We Dream endorsed Harris for president, pledging to “go all in” to elect her. It was a perfect illustration of the logic of lesser evilism that is dominant in liberal circles today.

The Democrats think they’ve arrived at 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 what they did when the Democratic-led U.S. Senate negotiated a “bipartisan” border bill that gave the restrictionists about everything they wanted. Praise for this bill was on full display at the Democratic National Convention in August.

The Trump-enthralled 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 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—whom an Obama-era policy has protected 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.

Harris has distinguished herself from Biden, and not in a positive way. In her September 27 speech, she announced that any immigrant apprehended along the border, but not at a recognized border crossing, will be immediately deported and prevented from immigrating to the U.S. for five years.

It’s clear that the politics of immigration, which has 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 DeSantis and Texas’ 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 of if they want.

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 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.

Biden/Harris has not only capitulated to this sentiment, by, for example, continuing Trump’s wall boondoggle at the border. Its policies have helped to contribute to the zero-sum political environment. In a recent interview, Springfield, Ohio Haitian community leader Viles Dorsainvil noted that agitation and hatred against Haitians increased after the Biden administration cut COVID-era social assistance programs in 2021-2022. Winding down these programs was central to Biden’s claim that the administration “led us to the other side” of the pandemic.

For the first three months of 2024, the Gallup survey found that “immigration” was 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.

In fact, even in polls that ostensibly show shocking levels of support for Trump policies like mass deportation, there remains widespread support for a “pathway to citizenship” for immigrants, opposition to deportation of undocumented people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, and support for “legal” immigration across the board. But liberal and Democrat capitulation to Trump—whether defended as “savvy” or “safe” in this election year—simply amplifies Trumpism. As the liberal New Republic writer Felipe de la Hoz put it: “So yes, if voters are on the one hand bombarded with a simplistic and all-encompassing vision of a country beset by the perils of masses of faceless immigrants and, on the other, hear crickets or a sort of tepid agreement with the promise that Democrats will actually be better at handling it, of course their opinions are going to trend in a restrictionist direction.”

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. has 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 resolved —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,” the only direction this debate will go is down…into the sewer.