“The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average activity, weighs down the active labor-army; during the period of overproduction and paroxysm, it holds in check their pretensions. Relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the supply and demand of labor does its work”. — Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 25, Section 4

The current attacks on immigrant workers has little to do with the fascistic sentiments of individual politicians and instead is rooted in the labor demands of the crisis ridden capitalist system for which they are merely its pawns. Regardless of the nationalist mythologies of the liberal bourgeois of the United States as a “country of immigrants” the immigration policy has always been set by the labor demands of capital. Regardless of the millions of devastated proletarian lives it leaves in its wake, both left and right bourgeois politicians do their jobs to ensure the ruthless exploitation of these most vulnerable workers and to regulate and ensure the maintenance of the capital’s reserve army of labor.

The reserve army of labor is the surplus population of unemployed, underemployed, and often immigrant workers that exists within all capitalist societies. Marx explains that the reserve army of labor is necessary to capitalism because it allows capital to regulate wages, discipline employed workers, and ensure a constant, flexible supply of labor that can be expanded or contracted according to the needs of accumulation, without this reserve army capital cannot function. Yet the reserve army of labor serves a contradictory role in capitalism. While it disciplines employed workers by threatening them with replacement, it also expands consistently due to productivity gains which cast the newly unemployed into the reserve army, and can take great leaps during capitalist crises due to mass unemployment which in turn creates mass immiseration, and shared conditions of poverty in the face of splendor for the ruling class, that lay the basis for proletarian revolt, and at a certain stage revolution led by its class political party. Marx showed that the very surplus population used to stabilize capital’s domination can, when made desperate enough, become the force that confronts it. So for the capitalist class, the proper regulation of its reserve army is not just a matter of economic necessity but in the last act it becomes a balancing game and a tightrope they must walk between life and death.

Marx divided the reserve army of labor into four main layers: the floating population consists of recently unemployed workers who cycle in and out of jobs based on business needs, often including skilled industrial workers displaced by technological changes or shifting demand. The latent population which includes rural and marginalized groups not yet fully proletarianized but available for exploitation as capital expands. The stagnant reserve comprises underemployed, precarious, and super-exploited workers stuck in irregular, low-wage work most typically including immigrants. The pauperized strata form the most destitute group, often completely outside regular employment, homeless populations, disabled workers unable to find steady work or criminals surviving through illicit means. Together, these layers allow capital to regulate wages, discipline the workforce, and maintain a flexible surplus labor pool for its shifting needs.

However, the costs to the capitalist of maintaining a domestic reserve army are not non-existent as it requires all four layers to some degree and not all can be constantly employed in conditions of hyper-exploitation. Engels elaborates on this in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), “The support of the surplus population, the cost of maintaining the unemployed, is naturally shifted onto the working class itself or the public, that is, the capitalist class as a whole... [which pays] as little as possible, and that only when compelled by unrest or fear of rebellion”.. For capital it is caught in a contradiction, it needs the surplus population, its reserve army, to put a downward pressure on wages and discipline labor allowing for conditions of increased and hyper-exploitation, while at once it must pay out of its own revenues to sustain this surplus population in some minimal way or face the potential for their revolt. Likewise, the extension of the reserve army and their pauperization continues to risk for capital that the blame for social crisis will be correctly identified with the mode of production itself and not superfluous explanations. Thus for capital, financing a properly disciplined reserve army in appropriate proportion to the employed mass of workers is essential but ultimately futile as the overproduction crisis develops and this surplus population grows while its ability to fund social programs declines.

These underlying realities are behind the fictitious dance between the two bourgeois parties who mask the immigration issue as a joust between the defenders of either altruistic multiculturalism or national security. In the end, it is always the labor needs of capital which prevail in policy, serving as a critical weapon to attack the working class and maintain its discipline in times of splendor and crisis. Capital will thus increase immigration to undercut domestic organized labor and decrease it in times of economic slowdown, in order to avoid further stagnation and revolt when capitalist production faces increasing pressure to meet the real subsistence needs of the masses. It is a policy that will not be changed or combatted via legislative action, and ineffectual street protests, but only through the combined organization of all workers regardless of national origins or industry into collective strike action and the organization of the future international class union, to defend their respective working and living standards, with a focus on the most exploited layers of workers.

The Immigrant Reserve Army Through History

We only need to look at history to see the recurring pattern. In the early to mid-19th century, U.S. capital encouraged German & Irish immigration to supply cheap labor for its expanding canals, railroads, textiles, and manufacturing. These workers were recruited to undercut the rising demands of native-born artisans and mechanics, many of whom were organizing early trade unions and strikes for higher wages. Following the Panic of 1857, national unemployment is estimated to have reached 8-10%, being as high as 25% in some cities. Subsequently, a rise in anti-Irish pauper laws and anti-German political repression emerged in cities across the country to reduce immigration alongside the nativist Know-Nothing movement.

At the close of the Civil War booming Westward railroad construction, mining, and agricultural development led to growing demand for labor and enlarging union activity across the country. Subsequently came the mass recruitment of Chinese laborers by railroad companies under restrictive contracts to undercut domestic unions. With the onset of the financial Panic of 1873, unemployment grew to 14-18%, class antagonisms sharpened, and the Chinese immigrant labor force served as a racialized buffer, used by capital during the boom to cheapen wages, and then demonized during the bust to deflect class anger, culminating in the first federal legislation restricting immigration the Page Act in 1875.

During industrial expansion in the late 19th century, the federal government encouraged mass immigration of Southern Europeans to fuel factory growth; between 1880 and 1920, over 23 million immigrants arrived, supplying cheap labor to rapidly expanding industries. Yet the economic slump that followed the First World War led to a sharp recession in 1920–1921, with Industrial output falling by nearly 23%, unemployment soaring to 11.7% in 1921. Immigration was thus sharply restricted through measures like the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924.

Between 1900 and 1930, railroad, mining, and agricultural corporations in the Southwest began intensively recruiting Mexican workers, leading to over 1 million Mexicans moving to the country. They became the primary source of low-wage labor in the Southwest, dominating sugar beet farms, citrus fields, and rail lines. During the Depression when unemployment soared to between 15-25% and demand for labor sharply declined and between 500,000 and 1 million Mexicans were deported, an estimated 40-60% were U.S. citizens, primarily children born to Mexican immigrant parents.

Yet, once World War 2 began and military enlistments grew, the capital once again found itself starved for Mexican labor. Thus with the Bracero Program from 1942-64, the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico to import temporary agricultural workers. Over 4.6 million contracts were issued, mainly in California and the Southwest. The program also enabled farmers to suppress wages and resist unionization through a rotating supply of temporary Mexican labor. In 1953–54 a recession was triggered by a drop in defense spending after the Korean War, unemployment rose to the highest since the great depression to 6.1%, thus “Operation Wetback”, a militarized deportation campaign was organized, which removed over 1 million Mexican workers, especially those outside the Bracero Program. Yet following the economic recovery many of those who were deported were immediately re-recruited under Bracero contracts, showing the cyclical nature between mass deportations and expansion of immigration contingent on the labor needs of U.S. capital.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, U.S. immigration rates steadily increased as capital relied on Mexican and other foreign labor to fill low-wage jobs. However, following the 1970s economic crisis, marked by rising unemployment, falling profits, and inflation, immigrants were recast as dangerous “illegal aliens” milking the system for social services and stealing jobs, deportations surged, with deportations rising from 345,000 in 1970 to over 1 million by 1979. Yet by the mid to late 1980’s the economic interests of capital had shifted again.

In the decades leading up to the 2008 financial crash, U.S. immigration rates, especially of undocumented and low-wage workers, rose significantly, closely mirroring the speculative growth of sectors like construction, hospitality, and low-end services that relied heavily on cheap immigrant labor. According to the Pew Research Center, the unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. grew from 3.5 million in 1990 to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007, just before the crash. Once the financial crisis erupted and unemployment spiked, immigration policy underwent a sharp reversal corresponding with the capital’s diminished demand for immigrant labor. Under President Obama, the U.S. government launched a massive deportation campaign to reduce the reserve army. Between 2009 and 2016, over 3 million people were deported, with Obama earning the title “Deporter-in-Chief” from immigrant workers groups.

The Immigrant Reserve Army Today

In the wake of the 2020 financial crisis and the inflationary spiral that followed, finance capital moved beginning in 2022, to raise interest rates, not merely to stabilize markets or “correct” imbalances, but in the words of Federal Reserve Jerome Powell himself, to put downward pressure on workers wage demands. Thus larger firms are forcing the disposed workers “back to work” in worse conditions, disciplining the American proletariat by expanding the reserve army of labor. These maneuvers came with a complement of changes in immigration policy.

According to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, immigration levels that had remained relatively stable since 2010 peaking at around 1.2 million in 2016, and then slightly declined every year until a huge drop occurred in 2020-21 as the 2020 financial crisis led to 14.6% unemployment, the need and demand by capitalists for new immigrant labor was no longer there, with new immigration dropped to a historic low of 376,000. However, after the subsequent stimulus check induced economic boom, an explosion in demand for immigrant workers occurred. Immigration levels increased sharply from less than half a million in 2020 to over one million in 2022 continuing to grow until between 2023 to 24 when it had reached an astronomical 2.8 million. The Kansas City Federal Reserve in one article from 2024 commented how “The influx of immigrant workers appears to have helped alleviate the severe staffing shortages in certain industries that were pervasive during the pandemic’s volatile period…The same influx of immigrant workers that helped fill job openings also dampened wage pressures across the affected industries and states. At the industry level, sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (specifically, average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023…Overall, this analysis underscores how the recent increase in immigration has helped stabilize the labor market over the past two years. In industries and states that have struggled to fill positions, the arrival of immigrant workers has eased labor shortages and moderated wage growth”..

So from the mouths of the big managers of finance capital we see how the bulking of immigrant laborers helped them retain profit rates and keep wages down in the manufactured boom that followed the 2020 crisis. Yet today, the boom in immigrant labor for the capitalist class is now going bust as new job opening growth is decelerating. Throughout 2026 the overall U.S. labor force participation rate is projected to decrease, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median forecast for the unemployment rate in 2026 is expected to rise to 4.7%, potentially peaking at that rate in the first quarter. According to a recent study by Staffing Industry Analysts on projected job growth “They predict average monthly gains of 87,000 this year, down from the forecast of 117,000 in NABE’s pre-April 2 report. After posting a monthly average of 133,000 in the first quarter of 2025, the panel’s median forecast calls for job growth to fall to 25,000 in the fourth quarter of 2025. The average monthly nonfarm payroll gain is expected to improve to 97,000 in 2026, but that is lower than the 127,000 forecasted in the pre-April 2 survey”.

As the forecast for demand for new immigrant wage labor has declined we have also seen more talk and policies from the White House regarding the costs of immigrant workers to the bourgeois state. In his 2025 executive actions Trump aimed to stop “taxpayer subsidization of open borders” and prevent illegal aliens from receiving Social Security Act benefits. House GOP Republicans have on numerous occasions put forward data claim that the costs of the government to sustain the current undocumented immigrant population at anywhere from $181 billion to $400 billion vs. the $31 billion estimated they pay in taxes, while also estimating the costs to deport 1 million a year to be only $88 billion. Trump has also parroted such numbers starting In his 2019 Oval Office address that “the cost of illegal immigration to taxpayers is hundreds of billions of dollars each year”. During his 2020 campaign, Trump stated that “illegal immigration costs our country more than 200 billion dollars a year.

For the bourgeoisie they must maintain a reserve army to ensure labor discipline. They use it to push native workers wages as far down as possible while also creating a layer of hyper exploited within its stagnant reserve. Yet if the number of reserve army outpace predicted demands more are pushed into the pauperized and lumpenized layer of the reserve which can come at a greater cost to capital to maintain while risking greater social and political instability when crisis hits. Thus the bourgeois have an interest in ensuring the reserve army does not grow larger than they can manage or is necessary. We can see that in recent times these labor market demands are fluctuating with ever greater intensity corresponding to the ever greater economic volatility within the putrefying speculation driven capitalism of today. Thus this system increasingly must turn to repressive means of ensuring labor discipline and to maintain the flexibility of its reserve army.

The situation is bound to drive up more explosive revolts and episodes of militarized repression. Only through the organization of the international proletariat into class unions that fight for all workers focusing on common economic demands with a focus on the most exploited segment can workers defend themselves from the onslaught; however, it is a class struggle that can only be truly led to victory when it moves from a defensive fight to a revolutionary offensive for the conquest of power, led in both phases by the leadership of the proletarian vanguard attached to its international communist party.