Democrats follow Trump into the sewer on immigration
Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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To liberal pundits and Democratic Party-aligned commentators, Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech in Douglas, Arizona, following a trip to the southern border in late September, was a brilliant piece of political jujitsu.
“The Vice President visited the US-Mexico border yesterday and gave a forceful speech about the border and immigration. I know many of you have weighed in how important you think it is that the VP lean into these issues, and she sure did last night”, long-time Democrat Simon Rosenberg wrote to the readers of his newsletter Hopium Chronicles.
“Voters want to hear about solutions on the border—all voters, white voters, Latino voters, Black voters”, Democratic-aligned pollster Matt A. Barreto, who specialises in polling Latinos, told the New York Times. “Voters want to hear, What are elected officials going to actually do to address the broken immigration system? And there was very high support for the bipartisan border security bill.”
One group of people who are most likely not cheering the Democrats’ “pragmatism” on immigration are Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, and other towns across the US. These people have been the target of a campaign of calumny verging on “blood libel”, which the Trump/Vance campaign has orchestrated.
The outlandish internet lies that Haitian migrants in Springfield were capturing and eating pets emanated from neo-Nazi political agitation. The Republican candidates for president and vice president deliberately elevated them to the centre of the political debate. Trump has since worked this vile racist nativism into each of his rally speeches, merely changing the group of migrants he attacks according to the location of the rally.
As the election season careens into its last month, Trump is amping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric. As Natalie Andrews and Michelle Hackman note in the Wall Street Journal:
“The Republican presidential nominee and former president has long held sealing the southern border as his signature issue, but he is now drawing a direct line from immigration to more of society’s ills than ever, casting himself as the only one who can fix it. Trump and Vance, his running mate and the junior senator from Ohio, have alleged migrants are to blame for unaffordable home prices, high unemployment, infectious diseases, rising car insurance, unsafe elections and, perhaps most infamously, missing house pets.”
Trump’s strategy is clear, but so is Harris’. She is applying the Democrats’ tried-and-tested modus operandi: move to the “centre” (aka, the right) and assume that the liberal Democratic base and its organisations will follow along because “they have nowhere else to go”.
The actions of the immigrant rights group United We Dream illustrate the cul-de-sac in which Democratic-aligned interest groups have found themselves. Last month, a coalition of 83 rights groups led by United We Dream issued a letter pledging to oppose the bipartisan “border security” bill that Harris has promised to revive.
“It is shameful that instead of investing in welcoming the most vulnerable people who seek safety and a better life, and who make our country better by every measure, we’d suggest wasting our resources in ineffectual, inefficient deterrence policies that harm and kill these same people”, the letter read, in part.
Yet only days after issuing the letter, United We Dream endorsed Harris for president, pledging to “go all in” to elect her. This perfectly illustrates the logic of lesser evilism, which is dominant in liberal circles.
The Democrats think they’ve found a way to parry Republican accusations about them being “soft” on “border security”: embracing Republican policies as their own. They don’t say so, of course, but that is what they did when the Democratic-led Senate negotiated the bipartisan border bill that gave the political right almost everything it wanted. Praise for the bill was on full display at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Yet the Trump-enthralled GOP couldn’t take “yes” for an answer. And so, in February, when the House leadership announced it wouldn’t even consider the bill if it passed the Senate, the Republicans abandoned the effort before it came to a vote. This handed the Democrats a talking point that they have used since: Democrats want to “solve” the border “crisis”, while Republicans want “chaos”. In fact, the Democrats think so highly of the deal that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced that he wants to revive it now. The liberal Senator Chris Murphy obliged Schumer and reintroduced the bill.
It was fortunate that the GOP shot down the bill in February. It’s a terrible bill that supporters of a just immigration system should reject. It would have increased funding for the border security complex, including increasing capacity at detention centres and the number of deportation flights. It would have subjected asylum seekers to “security vetting” and included documentary requirements that most asylum seekers couldn’t fulfil. It would have given the Department of Homeland Security the authority to “close the border” to asylum seekers if 8,500 “inadmissible” migrants (i.e., people who failed the checks outlined above) arrived in a day.
If implemented, the changes would increase the deportation rate. This is what the Democrats mean when they talk about “solving” the migrant crisis. The bill did not address the status of “dreamers”—migrants who came to the US as children—who have been protected from deportation and allowed to attend school and to work, but who lack a path to citizenship. Moreover, it left in limbo the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the US—the population that Trump and his acolytes promise to round up and deport should Trump enter the White House in 2025.
Harris has distinguished herself from Biden, and not in a positive way. In the September speech, she announced that any immigrant apprehended at places other than an officially recognised border crossing will be deported and prevented from immigrating to the US for five years.
It’s clear that the politics of immigration, which has always oscillated between the demands of US capitalism for labour and deep currents of white supremacy and xenophobia, are shifting to the right in the current climate. Opposition to immigration and a “browner” US has been one of the—if not the main—motivating factors on the contemporary right since at least the Tea Party agitation in the early 2010s. Trump regularly injects Hitlerian rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation into his rambling rally speeches.
Republicans have pushed the envelope on racist immigration policies—everything from the symbolic impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the anti-migrant policies emanating from right-wing governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott. Abbott, with the assistance of 25 other Republican state attorneys general, has led a challenge to the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration policy. In so doing, they are advancing a neo-Confederate viewpoint that the US government is a “compact” between sovereign states and that those states can opt out.
Besides making migrants’ lives miserable in their states, Abbott and DeSantis have had much greater success in forcing their “red state” views into the political discourse of supposedly more immigrant-friendly “blue” states. Taking a page from civil-rights era southern segregationists, they have bused or flown more than 100,000 immigrants to cities such as Denver, New York and Chicago since 2021.
Those cities’ responses—at times inadequate and other times bumbling—have played into the hands of the right. Even in these urban centres where a large percentage of the Democratic Party base are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the migrant crisis has touched off a zero-sum politics of resentment against migrants. In that climate, only the right benefits.
The Biden/Harris administration has not only capitulated to this sentiment (by, for example, continuing Trump’s wall boondoggle at the border). Its policies have contributed to the zero-sum political environment. In a recent interview, Springfield, Ohio, Haitian community leader Viles Dorsainvil noted that agitation and hatred against Haitians increased after the Biden administration cut COVID-era social assistance programs in 2021-22. Winding down these programs was central to Biden’s claim that the administration “led us to the other side” of the pandemic.
For the first three months of 2024, the Gallup survey found immigration to be the top “problem” Americans reported going into the presidential election. That certainly made Democrats take notice and accelerated their attempts to claim a “bipartisan” immigration deal. But a closer look at the polling trends shows that Republicans drive most of the national concern on immigration, with a more recent up-tick among independents. But this also emphasises how much the immigration issue dominates the Republican/conservative part of the electorate, while the majority has many other competing concerns.
In fact, even in polls that ostensibly show shocking levels of support for Trump policies like mass deportation, there remains widespread support for a “pathway to citizenship” for immigrants, opposition to the deportation of undocumented people who have lived in the US for decades and support for “legal” immigration across the board. But liberal and Democrat capitulation to Trump—whether defended as “savvy” or “safe” in this election year—simply amplifies Trumpism. As the liberal New Republic writer Felipe de la Hoz put it:
“So yes, if voters are on the one hand bombarded with a simplistic and all-encompassing vision of a country beset by the perils of masses of faceless immigrants and, on the other, hear crickets or a sort of tepid agreement with the promise that Democrats will actually be better at handling it, of course their opinions are going to trend in a restrictionist direction.”
Viewed from outside the realm of grubby electoral politics, the recent surges in migration are the product of decades of US imperialism and domestic political dysfunction across the Americas. Decades of neoliberal economic “reform” have helped to destroy whole sectors of the Central American economies. US-backed “drug wars” in Central America and Colombia have also contributed to flows of migrants fleeing paramilitaries. The US has meddled in Haitian affairs for centuries. And US economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have made life unsustainable for millions in those countries.
These are some of the forces pushing people to risk life and limb to seek asylum at the southern US border. They are willing to take their chances now via “unofficial channels” rather than spend decades trying to become US citizens through official pathways. That established immigrants are made to wait years to receive work permits also fuels anti-migrant sentiment against recent arrivals.
The paradox of all this is that while the US’s capitalist parties keep racing to the bottom, their paymasters in the US capitalist class need immigrants of all stripes to sustain their post-pandemic profits and growth. As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts wrote:
“The influx of immigrants to work and to study is helping the US economy—it’s keeping a high supply of labour available for employers particularly in the areas of heavy demand for labour: healthcare, retail and leisure, also sectors of relatively low pay.
“Net immigration is becoming vital to US capitalism. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the US labour force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, thanks mainly to net immigration and the economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants.”
If capitalist “rationality” gives way to political pressure, it won’t be the first time. But in an environment where both major parties are competing to portray themselves as “tough on the border”, the only direction this debate will go is down ... into the sewer.
