The roots of the problem and its solution
The immigration issue — the exploitation and mistreatment of millions of undocumented migrants and their families in the U.S. – has sparked much confusion and fear. It has also called some to protest, march, and to speak out for what is moral.
Backed by the capitalist class they represent, the Democratic and Republican parties have campaigned to label undocumented workers as criminals. This has created a deepening humanitarian crisis.
This crisis is best exemplified by the immigration policy adopted by Alabama. That state’s new immigration law has created an environment of fear and racism that has led to frightened immigrant parents keeping their children home from school, pregnant women being afraid to give birth in a hospital, and families suffering as their water is cut off.
The U.S. is not alone in this. The migration of jobless masses around the globe has created what is now a global humanitarian crisis. in almost every country, governments are putting forth policies and laws that criminalize the victim, the migrant worker.
To resolve the immigration crisis, we have to look at its roots – the imperialist era and the new conditions of globalization.
In search of maximum profits, capitalists have scavenged the world for many years. In every stage of development, capital has created and employed those political forms which most advance their profits.
For more than 100 years that form has been U.S. imperialism. Backed up by the U.S. military, companies from United Fruit to Conagra, Standard Oil to Chevron, Anaconda Copper to General Motors have raped and pillaged Latin American countries and their workers.
To maintain and uphold their “superpower” status, U.S. corporate imperialists have erected borders and prohibited the free movement of workers from labor market to labor market throughout the hemisphere. Indeed, U.S. Imperialism has been all about borders.
In the 1820s the Monroe Doctrine attempted to prohibit European nations from recolonizing the newly free countries in Latin America – protecting the independence from Spain won by Bolivar and other Latin American revolutionaries.
But by the 1890s, it had become a weapon of U.S. corporate expansion. And by the end of World War I, it became the screen behind which U.S. finance capitalists exerted their hegemonic power and controlled the Americas.
Part and parcel of the Monroe Doctrine was its gunboat diplomacy. General Smedley Butler, who had commanded U.S. Marines in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, described it clearly: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”
U.S. imperialism meant exploitation and poverty for workers in its direct colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and in its dependent semi-colonies throughout the rest of Latin America. Imperialism enabled U.S. capitalists and their companies to provide U.S. workers with a higher standard of living – a kind of bribery that bought their support.
Though rooted in the imperialist era, the current immigration crisis is emerging under the new conditions of globalization.
Today, world-class corporations are shifting their economic model away from operating within national markets to operating across the globe. For them, national borders are rapidly evaporating.
Facing them across a widening abyss is the growing global class of workers, who are united in their common poverty and common oppressors. But workers’ ability to find work is constrained by the very national boundaries that global capital has abandoned.
Migration is an outcome of globalization – the greater the globalization, the greater the migration of workers. Globalizing production necessarily globalizes the producer.
The 2006 mega-marches and their slogans – “Aqui estamos y no nos vamos y si nos deportan nos regresamos” – revealed the presence of the global worker in the United States. It also revealed the necessity of a fundamental political realignment to create laws and institutions based on the reality of global production and global workers.
Any discussion on immigration laws in 2012 must take into account the new reality — that immigration is not going to stop.
