As capitalism continues its violent march towards continuous expansion- wetting the Earth with the blood, sweat, and tears of the laboring masses- workers of the world are forcibly shoved en masse to the borders of foreign nations in search of reprieve. 120 Million people have been displaced from their homes in recent years, due to violent conflicts and crises that inevitably arise from capitalism- whether it be from internal market crisis or imperialist pressure; with little to no other choice they find themselves uprooted and on the path towards the developed countries in the dominant imperial blocs where they face new problems.

The Immigration Industry

Companies like CoreCivic (formally known as Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group, the largest for-profit prison operators and overseers of many ICE detention centers, lobby millions towards the Republican Party through various PACs in a bid to expand their enterprises; GEO donated $500,000 dollars to the “Make America Great Again” super PAC continuing their tradition of using the bourgeois immigration and crime policies to continuously fill their forced labor centers to generate profit: GEO group made $2.41 Billion in total revenue in 2023 while CCA made $1.9 Billion.

What the GEO group has referred to as “voluntary work programs” are nothing short of slave labor, where detained immigrants are forced into doing work under the threat of the withholding of basic needs and facing harsh punishment like solitary confinement should they decline. The National Labor Relations Board recently accused GEO Group of retaliating against workers for resisting this compulsory labor, finding that detainees were forcibly removed or isolated in solitary confinement for organizing hunger strikes and slowdowns in protest of their horrible wages and conditions. GEO says that because the programs are “voluntary”, the workers cannot be considered “employees” and therefore they are incapable of being charged with committing labor violations. They claim the workers cannot “strike” if they are not “legally” workers.

Lawsuits have been filed against GEO Group for subverting the minimum wage laws and paying these workers $1 a day for cleaning, sanitizing, repairing, and working the very detention centers they are held in. However, the 4th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with GEO’s business practice, saying that because the laborers have all their “basic needs met”, they are not protected under the Fair Labor Standards Act’s Minimum Wage mandate; they do not participate in “the free labor market”.

The lucrative use of forced labor in the immigration detention industry and the repression by militarized ICE thugs, who terrorize and round up a fresh steady supply of immigrants to exploit at the detention centers, call to mind the path taken by the enterprising Southern slavocracy of the past.

After the Civil War, the black slave was“free” to now sell their labor-power instead of having it taken once and for all by the slave owner; the bourgeois needed to justify a return of the old social relation that was once so profitable to him. In the belly of the Reconstruction grew the Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws that prolonged the indentured servitude of the new black proletariat by finding ways to criminalize their freed existence, reincorporating them back into the private prison system that rescued slavery for the bourgeoisie in the effort to rebuild the productive forces in the South coming out of the war.

Today, over 800,000 prisoners are forced to work in American prisons, with black Americans being disproportionately incarcerated as a continuation of this legacy of slavery. Conditions, like those of the immigrant detainees, are miserable. A majority of American prisoners say they can’t afford basic needs with the penny-wages they are given (if they are given) and fear for their safety while being forced to work with inadequate job training.

The bourgeois augury and vitriol that paint migrant workers as being harbingers of crime become the new political justification for throwing massive swaths of capital into private prisons, immigration detention centers, and law enforcement sectors. Every year, the federal government awards private companies billions of dollars to invent newer and more depraved weapons of border repression and control. Many of these companies are the regular go-tos for US military weapon contracts: like Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc. Since 1990, the amount of government funding spent on arming and fortifying the southern border has increased nearly 20 times over- from $400 million to $7.3 Billion.

The United States is the largest weapons dealer in the world by a colossal margin, accounting for 40% of all weapon sales between 2019 and 2023, and the amount of capital concentrated in these top private weapon manufacturers is mostly thanks to the deep pockets of the US government’s military budget in funding their wars, but the “immigration problem” has also become an advantageous way to expand a local market for what is typically reserved as an export of American imperialism. Private defense contractors also lobby heavily to the capitalist parties – favoring, this time, the Republicans – in a bid to get more contracts and grow their business, not too dissimilar to the private detention centers, revealing the symbiotic relationship between the capitalist parties and their base.

A common alarm raised by the bourgeoisie is that “criminals are pouring over the border” even though the rate of violent crime by foreign-born workers is less than half that of native-born citizens. A similar excuse is given for the increase in the militarization of the local police forces to combat the rising “violent crime” in inner cities, despite crime rates steadily declining since the 1990s. Police spending – both State and Federal – has steadily increased by over 187% since 1971. In both instances, the ultimate goal is to be able to simultaneously strengthen the internal police forces to repress the workers, throwing them into the forced-labor circuit, while also funneling money into the pockets of the bourgeoisie that have some stake in these detention industries.

“Fentanyl and opioid mules” carrying drugs over the border are frequently pointed to as proof of the credible link between immigration and crime, but it’s been well known that illegal drugs mostly enter through legal points of entry and sometimes even with the assistance of the border agents themselves.

It should also be noted, as we covered in TICP 61, how the amnesic bourgeoisie conveniently forget their own hand in the making of the opioid markets and rise of the powerful drug cartels and how those factors are themselves causes of displacement.

After an intense campaign by private American pharmaceutical companies like Perdue Pharma to create a mass of addicted OxyContin consumers and the subsequent dampening of the legal supply in response to the impact of the first wave of the opioid crisis, the Mexican cartels were able to build up their productive forces and pick up where the Sacklers left off, supplying cheap heroin to the booming American demand for opiates. In the struggle for a monopoly in the illicit drug trade, the cartels have unleashed immense levels of violence and economic coercion onto the Mexican proletariat causing many to flee in search for safety and better economic conditions. Migrations from regions in Mexico with the highest rates of violent crime were 15 times higher than regions with lower rates of crime, reflecting the urgency of these workers to escape their conditions.

These desperate fleeing workers who are forced to leave everything behind in search to offload the one commodity they are compelled to sell, their labor power, are then forced instead to give it for free in the cruel form of slave labor, shipped away when they aren’t immediately useful for the bourgeoisie’s labor market, or are left to the disposal of the increasing internal private military apparatus.

A Controlled Supply

Modern immigration policy in the Americas has its origins in the 1942 Bracero Program, which were a series of agreements made between the aspiring Mexican bourgeoisie, and the now dominating American bourgeoisie that was emerging out of the war economy created to participate in the second great imperialist war. An expansion in the American agricultural and railroad industries and the prevailing “labor shortage” caused by the mass of American proletarians being sent to die in the imperialist war, created a high demand for cheap labor to be exploited, and the Mexican bourgeoisie was glad to oblige under the condition that the US increased border militarization in order to control the amount of workers exiting Mexico, believing that a trained Mexican workforce would return home to help boost the Mexican national economy and keeping them from losing their own labor reserve.

The Bracero Program was loose in its direction and had extreme shifts in how it was implemented and controlled- a few years of relaxed control, then sudden crack downs and “repatriations” of “illegal” workers back to Mexico. The Mexican proletariat was tossed between the two nations, always in economic precarity, and subjected to the favorability of the labor market and the fickle, anarchistic demands of the bourgeoisie. Many Braceros, as they were called, began to defensively organize themselves to strike against their abuses on the job site and the low wages they were being paid instead of what the program promised. The Braceros even organized strikes in solidarity with Japanese- Americans working in labor programs while being held in concentration camps during the war with Japan in a show of international solidarity among mutually oppressed proletarians.

The Mexican government conditionally did not want to extend the labor-exchange program to the state of Texas due to various contract violations and discriminations towards Mexican workers, but the Texan growers continued their practice of hiring “illegal” workers and violating numerous mandates such as as the requirement to provide workers’ transportation costs from and to Mexico, fair and lawful wages, housing, and health services.

This eventually pushed Mexico to halt their export of workers into the US. In 1951, the US Government on behalf of the powerful bourgeois growers, in turn allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to cross into the country and distributed them to various farms as an act of retaliation, violating immigration laws and diplomatic agreements with Mexico.

The relations between the Mexican and American bourgeoisies with the Bracero Program finally completely fell apart; it wasn’t long until the embedded contradictions from the anarchistic importing of cheap labor by the bourgeois powers began to intensify.

The beaten and traumatized American proletariat that had survived the second great imperialist war had now been home for long enough to really feel the pains of being in the reserve labor army. Due to the weakened state of the international proletariat from the decades of counter-revolution, the most advanced class-conscious portions of the American proletariat could not intervene in the growing nationalist resentment towards the influx of undocumented laborers in America, which had increased by 6000% between 1944 and 1954.

In 1952, the US decidedly launched a large scale military-style deportation operation with the racist name “Operation Wetback”, to forcibly capture and release immigrant workers deep into Mexico in an effort to reverse the decades of importing cheap labor and to reorganize their labor markets to pull from the national labor reserve instead of from Mexico.

The labor of the Mexican workers became superfluous to the bourgeoisie once their imperialist adventure in the second world war came to an end and the Mexican proletariat was left to permanently hang in the balance between the looming threat of deportation and the absolute need to work, even if that meant hyper-exploitation. On the topic of immigration, our party wrote,

“But the worker can also seek work in the twilight world of the ‘illegal immigrant’ and try and avoid the lengthy, soul-destroying and often hopeless attempts at obtaining citizenship in the "host country"...

Such measures result in a super-exploited section of the proletariat that lives out an illegal existence receiving minuscule wages and under constant threat of being shopped to the authorities, (the domestic servants kept as virtual slaves in the houses of the wealthy in Britain is a well-known example); this category of workers avoid claiming housing or welfare help, avoids application forms which ask for searching details and will hardly ever become unionized.”(Race and Class. Accompanying article to Auschwitz, the Big Alibi.)

Although the Republican Party today platforms a staunch anti-immigration position and a tough-on-crime policy, both capitalist parties equally extend their share of brutality on the border and utilize the militarized immigration apparatus for deportations. Under the Biden administration, the ICE detention centers continued their expansion to a considerable degree: 90.8% of immigrants currently detained are held in a private detention center compared to 81% under Trump’s previous term.

Further, despite vigorous campaigning against migrant work and the immigrant workers “stealing American jobs” rhetoric, the bourgeoisie under Trump’s leadership has taken a publicly friendly stance on H1B Visas for “highly skilled labor”, showing the bourgeoisie’s desire to further expand the quality and range of labor that can be imported at a lower price and thusly exploited, contradicting his ostensible concerns for “national security” and defense of “American labor”. When this labor stops being “good for business”, then deportation will again become the natural solution. The bourgeoisie headed by the Obama administration deported 2.9 Million people in his first term following the economic crisis of the late 2010s, which is twice the number of deportations that happened under Trump in his first term, demonstrating the ultimate submission of the bourgeois’ handling of the immigrant question to the demands of capital and not to the personal ideological whims of the individual bourgeois.

So it is really no surprise that the private immigration, military, and prison industries naturally intersect in interests, use of weaponry, and tactics, as they are all merely varying expressions of bourgeois oppression towards various sections of the international proletariat; and their ability to turn this oppression of workers into markets in themselves reflects the true essence of the state as the organizing repressive body of the ruling capitalist class and their united motivation of increasing their respective share in the total social capital while delaying the coming of power of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

A Hyper-Exploited Labor Force

In 2023, it was reported that immigrant labor accounted for 18.6% of the labor force and focused mostly in service, construction, material moving, and transportation industries. The economic gains from the hyper-exploited immigrant labor has become undeniable; immigrant labor is predicted to add $7 Trillion over the next ten years to the national economy. It is increasingly evident that there is a portion of immigrant labor currently employed that is necessary for the simple reproduction of the national economy.

The current “labor shortage” is reminiscent of the economic conditions leading to the creation of the Bracero Program and the bourgeois desire to prey on the precarity of “illegal” labor to wield their waiting productive forces. The cheaper labor-power employed by immigrant labor satisfies the bourgeoisie’s need for the variable capital needed for wages to constantly decrease in their operations in order to rescue his falling rate of profit, while simultaneously providing a constant mass of workers able to wield the expanding productive forces that otherwise would sit idle and depreciate in value- making the hyper-exploited labor force a necessary element under current market conditions. Many industries, from nursing, construction, and agriculture, would actually face catastrophic shortages without immigrant labor. In certain states like California and Texas, immigrant workers made up over 40% of the construction force.

Among the laboring adult immigrants is also the use of undocumented child labor in factories, construction, and numerous other physically intensive industries, where many of these children and adolescents are subjected to horrifying injuries and are routinely killed. It is estimated that there are 200,000 immigrant children currently employed in “extremely dangerous and hazardous” workplaces” in the US like construction roofing; in one recent incident, a 15 year old boy on his first day on the job fell 50 feet and eventually died from his injuries, which only resulted in a fine to the company that illegally employed him.

The children work up to 12 hour shifts, sometimes overnight, receiving pitiful wages under the table so that they can pay off family expenses and then attend school during the day. They constitute yet another more depraved fraction of the hyper-exploited immigrant labor force employed in America and reminds us why Marx once claimed that the complete abolition of child labor under capitalism was simply a “pious wish”.

Immigrant workers are by and large paid even more miserable wages than the American proletariat, with immigrant laborers on average pulling 12% less in wages than native-born workers (drastically lower in certain industries). Not to mention the portion of their wages that are taken out in taxes towards benefits that they are ineligible for, which the bourgeois state happily appropriates. In 2022, it was reported that $96.7 Billion was paid in taxes by undocumented immigrants in the US.

Even compared to the meager percentage (11.2%) of American workers that are in unions, undocumented workers are even less likely to be unionized compared to native- born workers due to their natural aversion to being “discovered” by the state, as well as being essentially held hostage by their employer that could threaten to notify ICE at a moment’s notice. However, immigrant laborers have organized before and in equally distressing circumstances.

When the Bracero Program had finally come to a complete end in 1964, the United Farm Workers (UFW) union emerged, out of a series of strikes by Mexican-American and Filipino farm workers in 1965 for higher wages and formally associated with the AFL the following year. From the beginning, the UFW was faced by threats from both the bosses and the business unionism of unions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) who, instead of standing in solidarity with the UFW workers, tried to out-contract them with the growers.

In the era of the infamous “Operation Wetback” ushered in under Eisenhower in the 50s, the Teamsters had adopted racist slogans and an anti-immigrant position in a supposed “defense” of American labor and national interest. A Teamster article title of the time read “Over 100 Communists A Day Invade U.S By Wetback Route”, reflecting the ultra-conservative and McCarthyist attitude of the union leadership under then IBT General President Dave Beck.

In addition to business union attacks, the UFW also had to deal with the “illegal” immigrants that were shipped in as strikebreakers by the bosses. Understanding that these workers were also being exploited and not their enemy, the UFW was able to organize with the strikebreakers to join in their strikes for better wages. Ultimately, the farm workers were able to get a 40% increase in pay with their contracts from the strikes.

The UFW today is trying to revitalize its efforts in organizing since its decline in membership in the 80s, but farm workers are not federally protected by the FLSA and therefore are left to the mercy of state law for bargaining rights. Workers will need to organize beyond the scope of legality, not bowing to the “rules” set by the capitalists who “legally” exploit and abuse them daily. 42% of farm workers are undocumented workers, so they will need the support of a strong militant class union and solidarity from native-born workers to defeat the bosses.

Early labor organizations rooted along class union principals, like the Industrial Workers of the World, have a long history of organizing immigrant workers in various industries. Despite doubts and abandonment from the conservative AFL unions, the IWW proved that immigrant workers could in fact organize themselves in a combative way and hold large successful strikes like the 25,000 textile worker Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 which united workers of over 50 different nationalities and won their collective demands for better wages.

One Proletariat

It is not simply a factor of “policy” or a “conflict of ideas” between the bourgeois parties that bring starving workers to national borders: it is the inevitable result of imperialism. The bourgeois politicians spin the desperation of our international class comrades into fictitious threats of imported crime, the drug trade, and the diminishing of our wages. All of which are conditioned, not on the moral degeneracy of a minority of migrants, but on the prevailing circumstances of the international and national markets and the rat-king of capitalist enterprises that oppress the proletariat abroad.

The miserable conditions for immigrant workers in the US have only been barely touched on above but their struggle represents the heart of the international proletariat. It is with the most exploited workers that we see in the clearest way, the violent antagonism that exists between the two warring classes and reaffirms the need for communism to erase the borders of the national ruling classes to protect the working masses. These very borders that keep workers from freely moving and fraternizing amongst ourselves will again become the frontlines where proletariats are slaughtered to defend in imperialist wars; it is why in the manifesto of our party we promptly declare: “Working men have no country”.

The bourgeoisie will continue to attempt to turn workers against workers and propagate fantastic stories to agitate the petty bourgeoisie, as well as the reactionary workers who have yet to identify with the international proletariat movement, against the proletariat, but rest assured they cannot deliver on their promises of “solving” the mass immigration crisis. As desperation increases for the bourgeoisie to reverse the falling rate of profit, the heightening of the contradictions inherent in capitalism will also intensify, producing further crisis and war and more workers will consequently be displaced globally.

Workers! – the only way forward is to join the international proletariat and continue building towards the Class Union. Immigrant workers face a tremendous struggle and will need to organize beyond the narrow field of “legality” that the business union leaders ultimately must comply with as the peacekeepers for the bourgeoisie.

It will require the strength and combativity of the rank and file workers to join together and stand in solidarity with our working class comrades and not only return to the strikes of yesterday but to build towards the great general strikes of tomorrow.

In an 1867 address written by an appointed committee of the First International Workingmen’s Association for an upcoming Congress in Lausanne, they highlighted the practical need to elevate the independent national struggle of workers into an international struggle to combat the bourgeois tactics of either exporting industry out to foreign workers to be exploited, or by importing cheap labor to exploit domestically, underlining how internationalism is required for the success of the movement:

“...in order to oppose their workers, the employers either bring in workers from abroad or else transfer manufacture to countries where there is a cheap labour force. Given this state of affairs, if the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success, the national organisations must become international”.

The Communist Party already holds the international program for our liberation, and in combination with our strength across all nations, we shall defeat the capitalists and eliminate their invisible lines of bourgeois influence and proletarian massacres.