At present, migration from Latin America is among the most significant political issues in the United States. Donald Trump, now a self‑professed nationalist, campaigned on a xenophobic platform, and has enacted a slew of anti‑immigrant measures in his nearly two years in office. Along with Muslims, the primary targets have been the aforementioned arrivals from the south. This is not a new development: George W. Bush was the first president to float the idea of a border wall, inciting protest and ridicule. Barack Obama subjected more than three million people to forceable deportation, at a rate even higher than that under Trump. Obama also established the practice of imprisoning children and entire families in detention centers. Trump created the infamous childhood concentration camps which have captured global attention.

Now this immigration issue appears to be headed for open confrontation. A migrant caravan from Honduras, now numbering about 5,000, has made its way by foot, truck, and train to the Mexico‑United States border at Tijuana. Organized by a left‑leaning group, the migrants declare their intention to seek asylum in the United States. The first among them are currently encamped in Tijuana, and have just started attempts to cross the border. Trump has taken a typically confrontational position. Declaring the caravan an “invasion” and a threat to United States sovereignty, he has dispatched 5,000 members of the army to the border.

It will be helpful, at this point, to explore this political and humanitarian crisis in the context of the bourgeois nation‑state’s basic premises. This will reveal the real nature of capital’s uneasy relationship with human migration.

The political unit of bourgeois society is the nation‑state. No action is possible unless it takes place within the nation, where the local bourgeoisie dominates the exploited classes and poisons their consciousness, or between nations, where the various bourgeois factions strategize as polities in themselves.

Within the national political sphere, the local bourgeoisie crafts citizenship in its own image. The right of this citizenship is, as Marx observed, the right to be alienated from others and from the material basis of one’s life, the right to be alone with one’s property and one’s ideology (“On the Jewish Question”). For the bourgeoisie, politics is an annoying necessity to guarantee the maintenance of a state in line with their class reality. Where the exploited classes are politically emancipated, the bourgeois state creates for them a politics based on vague movements of petty egoists, fighting for their right to the property their do not possess. Nationalism, the most unifying movement to emerge from bourgeois politics, is really the militant definition of the terms of isolation. It defines the largest unit possible in which individuals may put aside their differences in the name of shared chauvinism.

On a world scale, every nation‑state is a community of self‑aware exploiters, jetting around to the same places. Where they fight, they do so self‑consciously, imitating and one‑upping each other.

As we see, capitalism seeks contradictory ends. It atomizes people within the nation, but on the world stage it packages them into homogeneous units, each equally sovereign.

When working class people from impoverished regions decide, for their immediate survival, to move from one nation‑state to another, they begin to unravel this lie the bourgeoisie tells. It is a dispossessed humanity. They demand, out of desperation, that their most basic needs be answered, showing by that act the callousness of the ruling class that brought them to that point. Each bourgeoisie fears that these new departures and arrivals will upset the balance of terror and illusory privilege that keeps the proletariat in check within each nation. It fears that the proletariat will see in these migrants a mirror of its general exploitation, and understand the obvious: that it has no country, and that it has nothing to lose.

Communists must be unwavering internationalists. We must demand the immediate and unconditional admission of all migrants workers appearing at any national borders with the full legal rights afforded to citizens. We must also actively oppose all militarization of the borders in our own countries, and any imperialist efforts to impose such measures abroad. We must organize to interfere with any police efforts to harass, arrest, or deport any fellow foreign worker in our country.

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