Trump’s ethnonationalist immigration agenda

US immigration policy has evolved with the labor needs of capital for the past 150 years. The US revolutionary left has evolved our critique accordingly: at every stage, we have shown how this policy served labor exploitation.  But in the 21st century, a global ethnonationalist reaction to mass migration—caused by climate change, war, and economic shifts—has reared its head. Second-term Trump immigration policy thus marks a new departure, one that requires a left re-think.

Throughout the industrial age in the U.S., immigration policy facilitated profits. Effectively open borders funneled millions of East Europeans to build up industry on the East Coast and Midwest after the Civil War. Settler colonialism continued to expand the frontier westward at the expense of indigenous peoples, opening up new population centers for agriculture, mining, and trade. Modern corporations developed amidst feverish growth in national and international markets. Unions posed a sporadic threat but had little permanent presence. In this context, large employers could nurture working-class distrust across several language groups, as well as the black-white divide. Labor groups even enthusiastically took the lead in the brutal Chinese exclusion on the West Coast. Immigration policy served rapid expansion and helped control our class.

In 1924, Congress enacted the Immigration Act, creating the Border Patrol. The Act’s country-by-country immigration quotas were based on white supremacist racial hierarchy, codifying it into law and further encouraging division in the workforce on that basis. But with westward expansion complete, and waves of unionization and even revolutionary organization cresting higher, capitalism needed new means of control. Employers used the Border Patrol to break up worker organizing through deportation in the Southwest. Large regular labor flows continued both ways across the Southern border, but unlike the old Ellis Island system, this created an immigrant workforce of technically “illegal alien” status.

Growing populations along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border through the 20th and 21st centuries grew agricultural, construction, and other industries, depending heavily on immigrant labor. From the 1980s onward, Mexican and Latin American immigration became a persistent political football. 1993 saw the simultaneous enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. NAFTA’s elimination of Mexican but not US farm subsidies ruined masses of farmers, spiking northward migration as predicted by Clinton-era Border Patrol chief Doris Meissner. Gatekeeper permanently surged Border Patrol personnel, pushing migrants out of easy-to-cross areas and into remote desert and mountain terrain. Hundreds began dying annually. Traditional cross and return patterns became too dangerous, and a permanent “illegal” population of 11 million or so were forced to live in the shadow of deportation.

This was the perfection of capital’s immigration policy. As the Left pointed out regularly, the point was not to prevent mass immigration nor to expel the “illegals,” but to ensure a compliant workforce wary of organizing. These workers’ wages and working conditions could then be forced down, weakening the overall labor market and creating downward pressure on the wages of “legal” workers as well. This was especially timely as capital responded to the labor movement’s turn from nativism to solidarity. Immigrant workers became a key growth sector for several unions following the 1986 amnesty, and the AFL-CIO as a whole reversed its historic anti-immigration position in 2000.

The Democratic Party’s heart was never in its perennial calls for “comprehensive immigration reform.” The endlessly delayed “pathway to citizenship” never materialized, including during Obama’s first two years, when he enjoyed filibuster-proof Congressional majorities over both Houses. At that time, Obama claimed, “If the American people don’t feel like you can secure the borders, then it’s hard to strike a deal that would get people out of the shadows.” Therefore, he pushed for a massive increase in border enforcement to $27 billion. The “deal that would get people out of the shadows” never came. Bush, Obama, Trump 1, and Biden all relentlessly increased border militarization, ICE budgets, and wall building. Biden and Obama even set deportation records.

Trump II: This time it’s different

In building independent working-class immigrant solidarity, the left has for decades had to expose the hollowness of the Democrats’ claim to stand for immigrant rights. We were and still are right to lift the veil of media misframing to show that they squarely represent the interests of capital in the immigration pseudo-debate.

The flip side of this was, again rightly, to interrogate vote-scaring narratives about how much worse the Republicans supposedly would, in practice, be for immigrants.

But while the left has rallied impressively to militant defense of immigrants in Trump’s second term, our analyses have not kept up with changing reality in the last two years.

Trump’s immigration policy is not driven by the interests of capital. The goal is no longer labor force management to create ideal conditions for profitability. The goal is three-fold: (1) maintain a white majority by both preventing new immigration and ethnically cleansing current non-white immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, (2) make those immigrants who cannot be chased out, without disastrous labor shortages, into a permanent underclass of ethnic/racial others, (3) build up immigration enforcement as armed national guardians of the new/old white supremacist social order commanded directly by the authoritarian Presidency.

Others have noted that Trump’s drive toward a new autocratic political regime is possible because of the “Bonapartist” nature of his rule. Trump has achieved a new level of presidential autonomy (that’s what Bonapartism means). From what? From the formal and informal systems of checks and balances that have for centuries worked to keep capitalist democracy functionally stewarding the reproduction of stable conditions for profit-making. This new autonomy began when Trump took on and conquered the Republican Party, which previously worked to ensure the predictable victory of establishment political professionals. Capital thus lost its leading tool to shoehorn mass politics and elections into its preferred channels. Trump then went on to conquer conservative media, key think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and partially purge Federal bureaucracies, including the military. These collective ruling class tools for deliberation and discipline failed.

This new centralized personal power is carrying out a change of regime before our eyes. If consolidated, the U.S. will be an electoral autocracy. Will it rule against the interests of capital? Not in general. But this system will be (already is) worse for employers dependent on immigrant labor, just as it is worse for those hurt by irrational wars, erratic trade policy, and social instability fueled by fascistic provocation coming from the top. The state is ideologically even more pro-capitalist than ever, but it is dismantling a historically evolved system of capitalist rule unrivaled in its subtlety and stability. Capital will adapt and maintain its privileged position, but these changes are not in its interests.

But it gets worse. Trump is not, as is often assumed, a pure opportunist like the original Louis Bonaparte. Along with the wildly erratic and purely narcissistic traits of his rule, “Make America Great Again” contains some remarkably consistent political principles.

Purely opportunistic aspiring autocrats have no reason to take the kind of unpopular stances that Trump has taken, specifically to advance ethnonationalism. He has consistently spewed Nazi-style narratives, calling immigrants “rapists,” slandering Black-majority nations as “shithole countries,” and claiming that Haitians “are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.” He endorses material from neo-Nazi sites. He said, “Islam hates us.”

This cannot be dismissed as unfiltered ranting. When asked about whether he rejected the support of neo-Nazi David Duke, Trump implausibly claimed not to know who he was. After the Charlottesville riot, he claimed there were “many good people on both sides.” He famously refused to repudiate the Proud Boys when pushed to do so, telling them winkingly to “stand back and stand by.”  The point is that, in moments where he has chosen his words with obvious care, he has always scrupulously shielded these people. It is not necessary to assume Trump is a secret Nazi. It’s enough that they share his ethnonationalism.

So we have a “principled” ethnonationalist commanding the capitalist state, possessing Bonapartist autonomy, driving toward a change of regime from capitalist democracy to electoral autocracy. Ethnonationalist restoration is the new state ideology.

It is too easy to equate Obama and Biden’s deportation records with Trump’s immigration policy. Obama and Biden achieved their numbers through expedited removals of border crossers. ICE today of course continues doing this. But it is also attempting interior enforcement against long-settled immigrant populations. Its officials make unrealistic claims about being able to replace undocumented farm labor with US citizens because they are not rooted in rational capitalist deliberation on how to manage labor supply, as all previous Presidents have been. Two million workers have “self-deported” since 2025.

Trump’s autonomy, as an aspiring capitalist autocrat, from the capitalist class’s traditional means of collective discipline, does not make him autonomous from the direct pressures of the capitalist economy. The Trump-Miller attempt at radical demographic social engineering through immigration enforcement still runs into pressure from farmers unable to harvest. The threat of ICE occupying San Francisco was called off after tech billionaires, afraid of social instability as seen in Los Angeles a year ago, successfully lobbied the President.

But the scale of ethnic cleansing already achieved is far beyond what has been done before. The still-active scaling up of ICE means this bruising social battle will continue.

All of this means working class solidarity with immigrants must become more all-sided, and definitely not less radical. We are facing first and foremost not labor market manipulation in the interests of capital (though labor supply management is still attempted secondarily), but the building of an ethnonationalist order.

For many years our job was unmasking the labor exploitation at the heart of bipartisan immigration policy. Now we must counter the divisive ethnonationalist hate being sold to the native born working class. Immigrant solidarity no longer means addressing a single political issue. It means resisting the central plank of the new state ideology of white ethnonationalism. For this reason, advancing a class conscious politics of immigrant solidarity, aimed beyond the ranks of the existing working class left, must be the keystone of a new class consciousness. The twisted evil of ethnonationalism, which is growing today despite the ups and downs of Trump’s regime, beckons to our class with a comprehensive and emotionally salient worldview. Only a new mass working class consciousness can compete with this civilization-threatening development in the long term. Solidarity with immigrants is the necessary starting point of that consciousness wherever on Earth ethnonationalism now threatens.

Featured Image credit: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

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