by B.W. Sculos
Vice President, Rio Grande Valley United Faculty (TFA/NEA) (personal capacity)
Edinburg, TX
The Real Crises
There is a crisis at the border, but it’s not the kind the two corporate parties are talking about. Migrants are fleeing violence, poverty, and ecological instability all of which are largely produced by the US and global capitalism. These are people fleeing oppressive governments, many of them backed by the US or are products of past US intervention. They are braving incredibly harsh conditions traveling across Central America, making their way through Mexico to the US border in Texas. El Paso, Eagle Pass, and Brownsville are major hubs for migrant workers crossing into Texas, but they are occurring across nearly the entirety of the border. It’s dangerous for these migrants – hundreds perhaps thousands die yearly. Many are never found.
While many migrants do cross the border without required documentation and not through ports of entry, many, many more try to follow the Kafkaesque immigration rules established by the US government. There is an enormous degree of arbitrariness in this process to say the least–and this is a big part of what incentivizes migrants to bypass this process entirely and enter the US wherever they can.
Most Americans have a completely distorted view of the issues at the border. It is far from the crime-ridden hellscape the corporate media and politicians often portray. We know from many years of data that documented immigrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens, and undocumented immigrants commit even fewer.
This is not to say there are no issues of crime at the border. There is drug, weapons, and human trafficking. However, the US government efforts at the border are not dedicated to solving these problems. Additionally, a lot of the trouble that comes from the masses of migrants congregating at the border comes from the bottlenecking at certain crossing spots. Imagine the chaos of having 100,000 more people living in an area barely suited to accommodate the thousands of people already living there. Housing is scarce and unaffordable. Infrastructure is overwhelmed. This is the crisis at the border.
Immigrant labor isn’t just the backbone of the south Texas economy: immigrants travel from border areas to places all around the US to work, often under extremely harrowing working conditions. Wage theft by businesses is a crime and the largest category of theft in the US–and almost never prosecuted. While wage theft is a serious problem for US citizens, it’is even more so the case for immigrant workers. These workers are often threatened with deportation if they complain about their working conditions or receiving less pay than they were promised (which itself is often well below the federal minimum wage). Existing US policy is not directed at going after the big businesses that knowingly profit off of the hyper-exploited labor of migrant workers. This immigration crisis far extends beyond the immediate geography of the border.
The Courts Won’t Fix This
On March 19, 2024, the US Supreme Court overrode a stay on Texas’s controversial, and patently unconstitutional new immigration law (“SB 4”’), which allows state law enforcement to detain–even on the flimsiest basis–anyone they suspect is not legally allowed to be in Texas. The high court’s decision to allow SB 4 to go into effect bypassed the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals administrative stay. However, the 5th Circuit issued a new injunction shortly after the Supreme Court muted the previous one, thus preventing the Texas law from being implemented for more than a few hours. The law is still under review by the 5th Circuit, and whatever is decided, the case is very likely to end up at the US Supreme Court for final decision. Five out of nine unelected justices will be able to decide for Texas, the people of the United States, and people from around the world whether Texas state police can jail people simply for practicing their otherwise guaranteed rights to asylum under US federal and international law.
However, Supreme Courts often overturn precedent, as members of the current court did in both the Dobbs and Janus decisions, overturning a 50-year and 100-year precedent respectively. Courts rarely make rulings in line with working-class interests unless it’s under pressure from mass protest movements, the labor movement, etc., but the courts always do so undemocratically–and more often than not, they don’t make the right call at all. It is noteworthy that in terms of race and gender, this is the most diverse Supreme Court in US history–and it is the one that limited the voting rights act, abolished the federal protection for minimal reproductive rights, and limited affirmative action.
While most experts believe the courts will decide that this Texas law is a violation of the Supremacy clause as it pertains to the federal government’s naturalization authority, we shouldn’t be surprised if things go the other way. And even if the courts do what most people expect, this still leaves immigration policy in the woefully incapable and oppressive hands of the US federal government.
The Democrats Won’t Fix This Either
When Joe Biden became President, he overturned many of Donald Trump’s executive actions within the first 100 days. However, one of the largest categories of executive orders that Biden left untouched were Trump’s immigration policies. Biden even reopened a previously closed migrant concentration camp, renaming it as an “overflow facility” despite previously harshly criticizing the Trump administration for using the same facility for the same purpose.The Biden administration claimed to improve the quality of the treatment and care people experienced in these camps. But a slightly less inhumane prison is still an inhumane prison, whatever we call it.
Biden and the Democrats have gone so far as to continue to build Trump’s border wall. Congress passed legislation in 2020, supported by both Republicans and some Democrats, to specifically fund further border wall construction. President Biden claimed he had no choice but to implement this law, but this isn’t entirely or even mostly accurate. The Biden administration had to also waive twenty-six federal laws to allow the construction in the new areas. Most of these laws were related to environmental conservation. Biden did not have to waive these laws and thus had a ready-made “excuse” to not utilize the border wall funding allocated by Congress. Revealing the Democrats actual views on the border, Biden voluntarily waived these important ecological protections to build Trump’s wall–and working people are paying for it. So not only is Biden continuing Trump’s immigration policies in many ways, he is also prioritizing them over environmental policies, which many Democratic Party voters care about.
More recently, in response to what is supposedly a wave of migrant crime across the country, the Biden administration negotiated what would have been one of the most conservative, authoritarian, immigration plans in US history–and that is saying something! However, Biden was “saved” by the former president. Trump let it be known to his fellow Republicans that he wanted the issue to remain unsolved for his upcoming presidential run, and the GOP scuttled the deal (again, despite it giving the Republicans basically everything they asked for and containing very few if any liberal concessions–no permanent DACA status, no pathway to citizenship, etc.). The attack on immigrants is truly a bipartisan affair.
How to Solve the Crises
Most people in the world would prefer to continue to live near or around where they currently live if staying in their communities and homes would be a viable option for regular work, decent living standards, and a hopeful future for their families.The economic exploitation and political manipulations of multinational corporations and US imperialist foreign policy ensures that working and living conditions are rapidly deteriorating in many Latin American countries.
Migration becomes the only alternative for many working people, no matter the risks or costs. Organizing against capitalist and imperialist intervention by the US might not have a large, immediate impact, but it’s crucial to building political pressure against US corporate and governmental policies and its surrogate regimes in Central and South America. This is vital to mitigate future mass migrations and the difficulties for those involved.
What can be done immediately is abolishing the system of criminalization and mass incarceration of migrants and their children which the past four US presidents have created around the border (though there are also migrant concentration camps in other parts of the US). While processing asylum seeker requests and migrant workers crossing the border, the US government should enact a large increase in spending on humanitarian aid for immigrants, including programs to assist immigrant workers with housing, health care, and child care. Like all social benefits, these could be paid for in a variety of ways but two options wouldn’t cost the average working class American anything at all. First, increase the prosecution of employers who knowingly exploit migrant workers. The fines collected in doing this could easily pay for many programs that would actually benefit migrant workers. Second, the US government should also simply reallocate the money currently being spent on the enormously wasteful border wall and border security, including abolishing Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
There are crises at the border–but they didn’t start at the border and they never stay there either. These crises are largely products of the US government’s policies. For decades, the Democratic and Republican Parties have been engaged in a heinous bipartisan effort to produce a deeply chaotic set of policies that make so-called “legal immigration” a ridiculously complicated process, turning people in the most desperate conditions into perpetual victims: whether it is victims of the corrupt governments created by US foreign policy or the cartels and traffickers who thrive in the shadows of these governments, whether they become victims of the underfunded social welfare system that all Americans deal with on a daily basis or victims of a police state with a system of hellish concentration camps, or, in what is sometimes the best case scenario for many migrants, victims of an employer who mistreats and underpays them.
Organizing migrant workers has always been a difficult task, but this is precisely the task of socialists and working-class activists today who strive to organize all workers together regardless of legal status, borders, and migration. We need a mass socialist movement working towards an independent political party of and for the working class that includes migrant workers of all kinds. The solution won’t come from courts or capitalist political parties. It will come from the organized efforts of the working class, of which migrants are a crucial part.
A real answer to the crises at the border requires a socialist approach.It requires a united international struggle of workers with the aim of ending poverty and the lack of employment or secure well-paying jobs that the capitalist class uses to pit working people against one another.
Capitalism is a global system divided into nation-states in a way that enhances the transnational capitalist class’s ability to hyper-exploit the workers of all countries. The working class in the US, Latin America, and around the world are facing the same attacks from the capitalist class but are told that other working-class people are “stealing” our jobs. In reality, there is more than enough wealth and resources to meet the needs of working-class people in or traveling to the US.
The conditions of workers on both sides of the border could be immediately improved by slashing the bloated military budget of US imperialism which exploits and displaces so many around the world, as well as massively increasing taxes on the rich and the corporations to fund universal healthcare; mass public housing, jobs, infrastructure, education, and other public service programs; and a Socialist Green New Deal. By taking the major sections of the economy under democratic workers’ control, the working class can start the socialist transformation of society based on global economic planning and cooperation, raise living standards everywhere, and begin to lay the basis for free travel and migration around the world.
Working-class people in the US need:
- Our own party to oppose the anti-immigrant, imperialist, corporate Democratic and Republican parties and organize solidarity with workers worldwide.
- Close the camps! End US interventionism that displaces millions worldwide.
- Humanitarian aid to end the deaths at the border
- Price controls on essential goods and services
- High quality public housing, transit, jobs, and healthcare programs paid for by taxing the rich
- Union jobs, a living wage, and a shorter workweek to fight unemployment
Image: U.S. Border Patrol agents at El Paso Station intercept a group of approximately 127 migrants. CBP Photographer Jaime Rodriguez Sr. (July 2019)
Independent Socialist Group 