Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
The role of the immigrant worker in the United States today is that of the lowest laboring class. The hardest jobs are the jobs that require sweating in 100-degree heat on a roof in Georgia, or baking in the California sun picking oranges, or driving tractors through the night at harvest, or getting up at 5:00 AM to gas up the mowers for a day of cutting grass. Almost always paid under the going rate — or the legal rate — the immigrant worker struggles and sweats everywhere there is work the settler class would rather not do themselves.
Donald Trump is promising deportation on a mass scale not seen since the Eisenhower administration. Right on cue, liberals have opened their tired old playbook and started to bleat on about “the xenophobia of Trump,” failing to understand that the current hostility being shown to undocumented immigrants is neither unique to this president nor to this particular time in U.S. history. The ruling class provoking animosity toward a group defined as “other” dates back even further than the founding of the republic itself, and serves a vital purpose in maintaining unity among the oppressor classes.
The Settler and the Indigenous
Since the arrival of the first Europeans to what is now the United States, settler colonists have used any and every excuse to expand their territory and to pillage and plunder, either by direct military conquest, lying, cheating, or a terrible combination of all three. In search of land and riches, colonists invaded the North American continent and found seemingly endless land that, if put to European methods of cultivation, could yield enormous profits. The settlers expanded out from original landing sites like a virus, squatting on “claims” (sometimes) made in the name of the king and paying no heed to those who lived there. The violent pushback visited upon the settlers by Indigenous groups was given by the settlers as justificatory evidence not only for increased settler war against native populations (and subsequent settler expansion), but for the categorization of the native by settlers as a racially subaltern group. A Declaration of the state of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia categorizes Indigenous people of the region as “beasts,” “treacherous,” and, crucially, “wicked Infidels,” among other epithets. Englishmen of the Virginia Company saw the Indigenous as people in need of a Protestant salvation, people who lacked the moral character necessary to obtain the individual prosperity so coveted by the settler, and thus in need of “civilizing” — which in practice meant subservience and a tranquil acceptance of expulsion and extermination. The never-ending thirst for land led to even more ousting of the Indigenous — the “other” — clearing the way for more expansion, exploitation and murder by the settlers.
Bacon’s Rebellion is an early example of European unity against the Indigenous “threat” — a threat wholly instigated by settlers appropriating Indigenous territory. Nathaniel Bacon — a white landowner — instigated the rebellion as a response to his exclusion from the inner circle of the Virginia plantocracy. He leaned on both the settlers’ desire to expand their holdings and their fear of the Indigenous people fighting against the occupation of their land to whip the disenfranchised among them into a frenzy. The rebel mob was a multiracial coalition, and Bacon promised instant freedom to any enslaved or indentured laborer that joined his cause. While Bacon and his ragtag regiments managed to take Jamestown and burn it to the ground, the arrival of 1,000 English soldiers under the command of Herbert Jeffreys pushed the rebels to a hasty acquiescence. In an attempt to smooth things over, Jeffreys pardoned the insurrectionists and agreed to a treaty with the local Indigenous peoples.
But the plantocracy was not so quick to forget their close call with revolution. Watching enslaved Black laborers march side-by-side with poor whites shook the planters to their very core, and as a result Virginia society underwent a significant restructuring. In 1705 the Virginia government passed an act reinstating the headright system first enacted in the Great Charter. Each free white settler was now guaranteed 50 acres of land to be exploited for their own use, and as the planter class refused to subdivide their own enormous holdings, the land was thus expropriated from Indigenous people. Tribes were relocated again and again to make room for the crushing hordes of white hopefuls desperate to get their grubby hands in the tobacco business. The burgeoning mob of settlers slashed, burned, scarred and destroyed land that for millennia had been carefully managed to provide everything necessary for survival and happiness. Blind greed for hogsheads full of stinking green narcotic profit pushed the Indigenous farther and farther away from the places they had called home as far back as they could remember, as the land itself was bent to suit the will of colonial capitalism.
The Settler and the Enslaved
To kidnap someone — to take them to a ship in chains, manacle them naked below decks for almost the entirety of a three-month voyage and, upon arrival to port, to sell them at auction to the highest bidder — requires a most severe differentiation between oneself and those forced into enslavement. To purchase said human beings at auction — to transport them to one’s home or place of work, incorporate them into a building crew, set them to toil as a domestic servant or install them in any other position as may exist in the settler’s business concerns, and work them until they die — likewise requires an extraordinary rationalization. Thus Africans, captured, sold and sent — many to remote concentration camps isolated from most of society — and given a life sentence of work without having committed a crime, had to be considered not only as property, as cargo, as a price, as a means to wealth, but to be somehow deserving of said treatment.
But the settlers’ collective Christian conscience — so worked upon by Calvin, Locke, and eventually by the brothers Wesley — pricked them yet, and the consequences of their sins could not help but be made clear to them. The Stono Revolt, the Maroon Wars in Jamaica, the panics in New York City in the 1740’s all fired a (well-founded) fear both in slave-owning and non-slave-owning settler whites of a mass slave revolt. Dread hung in the air of every colonial port, town and plantation, and while settlers were able to make the connection (obvious as it was) between slave revolts and the whippings, rapes, and genocide that scarred the life and conditions of enslaved Africans in the British Atlantic colonies, others were unwilling or unable to do so. Just as settlers blamed the consequences of their violent expansion into native territory on the Indigenous themselves, so also they put the consequences brought about by their countless abuses, their innumerable crimes against both their fellow man and the God they claimed to follow, upon the Africans themselves.
The wages of their sins having been made manifest, the Christian slaveholders launched a desperate attempt to postpone their payment. The settlers convinced themselves that the victims of their violent enterprise were in fact the instigators of their own misfortune, thus blaming the enslaved for the deeds of the enslavers. In the settler’s mind, the African was born to follow orders from the white man, and failure to do so constituted a break with the natural order, characterized as “insolence” from an “inferior” race. So slave codes were tightened, punishments became more severe, and even free Africans fell under suspicion from terrified settlers. As the crackdowns continued, so too did slave revolts, which augmented panic among whites to a hysterical pitch. The latter reached a crescendo in 1775 with Lord Dunmore’s famous proclamation that all slaves in the colony of Virginia that aided the Crown during the colonial rebellion would be liberated. The settlers howled, wailed, and eventually won their war with the help of France and Spain. But the colonists — now “free men,” citizens of a country of their own making, did not see fit to resolve the issue that provoked so much fear throughout the former colonies.
The vaunted founding fathers wrote screeds about freedom and man’s right to seek his own happiness, but when it came to the men and women they enslaved, the great men dithered, hemmed and hawed, and excreted the most pitiful, paltry excuses imaginable. They stammered about inconceivably abstract futures, far, far removed from their own time, when the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery would be banned or would have disappeared of its own right. Jefferson and Madison and all the rest of the hypocritical lot spoke of liberty while raping and whipping the enslaved on their own plantations; they pontificated on supposedly universal human rights but couldn’t see their way to sacrificing even a fraction of their own material comfort that others might have the “freedom” about which they blathered on so incessantly. So Stono gave way to Gabriel’s Rebellion, and Nat Turner’s Revolt, and eventually a bloody civil war, all while settlers still considered the enslaved Africans “insolent” and lazy. In the settlers’ minds the Africans still embodied all the faults and vices of the settlers themselves.
The Settler and the Undocumented Immigrant
The turn of the 20th century marked the so-called “closing” of the frontier, as settlers proclaimed a supposed “end” to the centuries-long extermination campaign visited upon the Indigenous peoples. As the domestic frontier closed, the international frontier opened, and U.S. soldiers were shipped to foreign lands, to oppress and exploit, to force other peoples, societies, and economies to bend the knee to the interests of U.S. capital. Sons of white Southern sharecroppers mingled with the sons of white Northern shopkeepers, and they were led by officers hailing from families of industrial capitalists, factory supervisors, and monied planter families. American troops, united in their racial identity, plundered the vaults of Port-au-Prince, toppled the government in Santo Domingo, and partook in atrocities that were hauntingly familiar to those their forebears committed upon enslaved Africans and the Indigenous. Massacres, wanton executions, violations and an extravagance of bloodshed followed in the wake of the U.S. military wherever it went. Wholesale looting ensured that factories back home, kept churning by a never-ending flow of cheap immigrant labor from Asia and Europe, never ran out of raw material. International plunder ensured astronomically high profit rates for an all-American oligarchic capitalist class.
This brutal, rabid expansion continued throughout the 20th century, picking up steam in the 1950s with the advent of the Cold War. A restructured world in the process of jettisoning the old boots-on-the-ground European colonialist template provided a wealth of new opportunities for the capitalist kingpin country. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Angola, Burkina Faso, Yemen, Indonesia, and both sides of the Korean peninsula are only some of the most notable manifestations of the United States’ unquenchable thirst for accumulation.
But reckless growth across the globe has come with a price. The constant upheaval and instability that follows in the wake of imperial capitalist expansion has resulted in a tsunami of people shut out of any hope of achieving prosperity in their home countries by whatever flavor of capitalist brutality is local to them. The tentacles of American hegemony are long and deeply rooted, so migrants have flooded northward — a frenzy of dreamers hungering for the life that was plundered from them to feed the American labor aristocracy and their oligarchic overlords. At first, the lords of American capital were all too willing to manipulate the new immigrants to their own advantage — using the immigrants’ unstable legal situation to drive salaries to pitiable lows. However, a justification was required to explain the blatantly unfair treatment received by the undocumented worker. Thus, in the same way that enslaved Africans were said to have deserved their subservience to the ruling slaveholding class, as Indigenous peoples were said to have deserved their genocide and expulsion at the hands of the ravaging settlers, the ruling class and its flunkeys assert that the immigrant that finds work due to settler unwillingness is in fact stealing jobs, that asylum seekers fleeing political instability in their home countries are in fact the cause of said instability, that those who have seen their homelands corrupted and defiled, those who have seen their hopes, dreams, loves and lives ground into the mud by the jackboot of capitalism are in fact the true corruptors and defilers of the pure American settler state. In short, the immigrant is abused and exploited simply because, to their abusers and exploiters, they are inherently inferior, and thus deserve inferior wages. When the immigrants have fulfilled their duty to the capitalist overlords, they can then be discarded, as the whole world can see now.
However, it is here that a break with the past becomes evident. The tactic used by the ruling class when faced with a crisis of their own making — blame the oppressed for the faults of capital — has always been accompanied by a tangible benefit for a certain subset of the petit- bourgeois population (usually an exclusively white coalition). Designated members of this “in-group” could then be counted on as loyal foot soldiers in the expansion of oppression. The settler invasion of Indigenous land was not only fought to bestow more land upon the plantocracy; lower-class white settlers were also able to stake their “claim” to the newly-emptied lands, thus ensuring lebensraum for the planters themselves. African slavery resulted in a phasing-out of white indentured servitude and a host of economic and social benefits opening up to members of a newly-named “white” class. U.S. economic and hegemonic expansion has likewise resulted in a glut of well-paying job opportunities for the American settler petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy both at home and throughout the world.
However, this most recent push to deport immigrants is missing any sort of increase in the economic position of the settler labor aristocracy or petit-bourgeoisie. While chauvinist social consciences will be eased, the capitalist or small business owner who formerly employed undocumented workers will find themselves with the same amount of work to be done, but a much smaller (and less-pliable) workforce. The reserve army of labor will shrink substantially. Another point: the current increase in profits for capitalists is being driven in large part by a mass pirating of middle class wealth within the imperial core by capitalists. Prices are skyrocketing, salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, and the smooth promises of the big bourgeoisie are evaporating like morning dew on a hot day. Even the exalted “American Dream” no longer fulfills its propagandic function, but has been reduced to a talking point for those who use it as a yardstick by which to compare all supposed economic, social, and moral failings of American settler society. In the face of capital’s imperative to grow at all costs, the strategy to manage, package, and sell that growth to the lower imperial social classes has fallen apart.
The deportations are a feeble attempt by the settler bourgeoisie to bargain with the lower settler classes, to postpone the day of reckoning for the consequences of capital’s rapacious thirst for blood and land, its insatiable need to squeeze human beings like rags and wring out every drop of work and wealth. Eventually the bill comes due, and the more intelligent members of the capitalist class understand this. They hope to buy a little more time to increase military strength, in the hope that brute force can replace mass subornation of the white settler class as the primary impulsor for order. Heaping blame for current social ills upon undocumented immigrants and deporting them in a twisted attempt to sell the idea that the sins of capitalism are being deported along with the migrants might buy U.S. capital hegemony a little more time, but the days of glory for the majority of white American settlers are long gone, the last great capitalist plundering is on, and rifles and tanks are coming to replace the hideous amalgamation of sin-eater ritual and race-class bribery fundamental to the American settler project.
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