by As the dispiriting and closely contested 2024 election draws closer, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have continued to whip up anti-immigrant fervor to galvanize their voter base. Their latest target is Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and their rhetoric has taken on a particularly ominous tone. While Trump disseminates lies about immigrants, Kamala Harris, who is nominally running on defending democracy and dignity, has moved sharply to the right on the issue of immigration, embracing many of the policies that Trump ran on in 2020.
This is an extremely dangerous situation for the working class. Trump’s disgusting rhetoric and nativist policies and Harris’ failure to fully oppose him shows the growing consensus between the two parties behind anti-immigrant politics. This situation has already placed the people of Springfield in immediate danger, as local schools have been targeted with bomb threats on the basis of anti-Haitian rhetoric. Even more perilous is the reality that these attacks are only one example of larger scale global developments that threatens all workers.
These attacks draw from the same well of violent right wing nationalism that inspired riots in the United Kingdom and far right movements across Europe. They are part of the same attacks on subject populations that have played out in the genocide in Gaza. The right plans to meet the global crisis of climate change with lynch mobs, pogroms, border walls, and apartheid. The increase in immigration restrictions means an increase in militarized policing, attacks on free speech, violations of privacy, and mass incarceration. More dire still is the fact that many workers are supportive of anti-immigrant rhetoric, which divides workers against each other, weakening our class and leaving us vulnerable to further exploitation. We face significant challenges as a socialist movement in confronting conservative shifts on immigration and uniting workers behind a positive program.
The Material Roots of Immigration Politics
The crises produced by capitalism, including imperialist wars, rising costs of living, and environmental destruction and climate change, have set the stage for the mass migration of workers in the global south who are leaving their homes to seek economic opportunities, safety, and a better life for themselves and their families. In the wake of the War on Terror and the Global Financial Crisis, global migration has rapidly increased, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only further accelerated this trend. Over the coming decades, tens of millions more will be forced by climate change to migrate. These material conditions provide an opportunity for the capitalist class to leverage nativism and racism to divide workers along ethnic and national lines, and to undermine the development of a united working class opposition to capitalism.
Workers in the US have far more in common with workers fleeing imperialist warfare and climate catastrophe than we do with our domestic ruling class.
The liberal-capitalist approach taken by the Harris campaign and the mainstream of the Democratic Party is a capitulation to right wing politics on immigration, not a means to confront or overcome the right wing. Without a positive socialist program that proclaims capitalism as what is to blame for these attacks on immigrants and the crises that working people are facing globally, many workers in the U.S. are at risk of being set against immigration by right-wing framings that pit them against their fellow workers. DSA’s Workers Deserve More program, which commits us to agitating on freedom of movement, is an important start to developing this sort of program. But our movement will need to develop a more comprehensive and specific platform for immigration, and advance it through a coordinated nationwide strategy.
The Challenges our Movement Faces
Any sound socialist approach to immigration must hold a basic principle at its core; the interests of the working class are international. Workers in the US have far more in common with workers fleeing imperialist warfare and climate catastrophe than we do with our domestic ruling class. A socialist approach does not make short sighted concessions to the anti-immigrant consciousness that many workers currently have by supporting immigration restrictions or waffling on our politics. Instead, it is imperative that we fully analyze the roots that anti-immigrant consciousness has in the real economic crises caused by capitalism and the failure of liberal politics to address these crises, and organize to overcome it. Even still, appeals to the collective interests of workers will face enormous resistance from the majority of people who currently hold right wing views on this issue. Socialists cannot ignore how dire the state of dominant opinion is on immigration, and what forces underlie this dynamic. We will face the difficult task of regrouping a left edge of the immigrants rights movement, labor movement, and social movements. We will have to patiently speak to, educate, and agitate among workers.
We can either have an economy that protects everyone, or narrowing borders and an ever-shrinking list of those whose lives “count,” drawn tighter and tighter, until only the very rich have privileges and protections.
As a consequence of the instability of global capitalism and the limited economic horizons that it affords workers, increases in immigration place a strain on domestic economic resources. Domestic workers do experience this phenomenon, and are left vulnerable to right wing attempts to distort who is to blame for it, attempts that shift responsibility away from capitalism and onto immigrants, scapegoating them and stoking hatred. However, this does not mean that socialists should support immigration restrictions. In fact, our positive program should go much further, fully supporting the rights of all immigrants to come to the US, easily receive all services and programs available to domestic workers, and swiftly receive citizenship if desired. To accomplish this, the scale of these programs must be radically expanded, paid for by taxing the rich, a demand that could appeal to both domestic and migrant workers, uniting them in struggle. We need a massive program of investments in housing, jobs, education and public services.
The Necessity of a Campaigning Approach
Only an organized movement of the international working class can offer a real alternative to the nativist status quo. In DSA, we have and should continue to proudly fight for freedom of movement, and put forward our own, strong, positive vision for the mass economic change required to support migrating workers. Imperialism and climate change present us with a stark choice. We can either have an economy that protects everyone, or narrowing borders and an ever-shrinking list of those whose lives “count,” drawn tighter and tighter, until only the very rich have privileges and protections.
The socialist program for freedom of movement must be a program for green jobs, massive investments in public housing, powerful unions for all workers and an end to imperialist aggression and endless war. But our program must be more than a declaration of principles. It is a guiding light for our practical work. The defense of immigrants requires a strong confrontation with the right, brought forward through protests, electoral campaigns and ballot initiatives, and labor organizing around resolutions at meetings and on the shop floor.
We must fight for a workers movement that advocates not just for workers in a particular union, or just for workers in the United States, but for all workers around the world. Most importantly, we must fight for political independence, and a movement which can break from the Democrats’ nativist turn and win the support of the working class to an independent socialist party.
DSA can begin this process at a national level by helping chapters organize for immigrant rights, facilitating forums and town halls to discuss our approach to freedom of movement, bringing forward proposals and resolutions in unions defending the rights of immigrants, and organizing simultaneous protests across the country on day one of the new administration, regardless of who wins. By placing the rights of immigrants at the heart of our organizing, we highlight an urgent need of the class struggle, and distinguish ourselves from the liberal wing of the capitalist class. Coordinated campaigning on immigration allows us to take bold steps forward in our movement by planting the seeds for an internationalist proletarian consciousness in the United States.
Spencer Mann
Spencer Mann, she/they, is a queer and non-binary socialist organizer, a member of Portland DSA, and a Steering Committee Member of DSA’s Reform & Revolution caucus.
Sarah Milner
Sarah Milner, she/her, is a rank and file union organizer and member of Portland DSA and Portland State University YDSA. She co-chairs the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign. She has previously been the co-chair of PSU YDSA and of Portland DSA’s Electoral Working Group. She spent two terms on the chapter Steering Committee. She is a member of the Steering Committee of Reform & Revolution caucus.
