{"id":14978,"date":"2026-07-31T23:25:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T03:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14978"},"modified":"2026-08-06T20:16:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T00:16:57","slug":"trumps-ethnonationalist-immigration-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test01\/2026\/07\/trumps-ethnonationalist-immigration-agenda\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s ethnonationalist immigration agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"

U<\/span>S 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.\u00a0 But in the 21st century, a global ethnonationalist reaction to mass migration\u2014caused by climate change, war, and economic shifts\u2014has reared its head. Second-term Trump immigration policy thus marks a new departure, one that requires a left re-think.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In 1924, Congress enacted the Immigration Act, creating the Border Patrol. The Act\u2019s 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 \u201cillegal alien\u201d status.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Operation Gatekeeper. NAFTA\u2019s 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 \u201cillegal\u201d population of 11 million or so were forced to live in the shadow of deportation.<\/p>\n

This was the perfection of capital\u2019s immigration policy. As the Left pointed out regularly, the point was not to prevent mass immigration nor to expel the \u201cillegals,\u201d but to ensure a compliant workforce wary of organizing. These workers\u2019 wages and working conditions could then be forced down, weakening the overall labor market and creating downward pressure on the wages of \u201clegal\u201d workers as well. This was especially timely as capital responded to the labor movement\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party\u2019s heart was never in its perennial calls for \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform.\u201d The endlessly delayed \u201cpathway to citizenship\u201d never materialized, including during Obama\u2019s first two years, when he enjoyed filibuster-proof Congressional majorities over both Houses. At that time, Obama claimed, \u201cIf the American people don\u2019t feel like you can secure the borders, then it\u2019s hard to strike a deal that would get people out of the shadows.\u201d Therefore, he pushed for a massive increase in border enforcement to $27 billion. The \u201cdeal that would get people out of the shadows\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Trump II: This time it\u2019s different<\/h4>\n

In building independent working-class immigrant solidarity, the left has for decades had to expose the hollowness of the Democrats\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But while the left has rallied impressively to militant defense of immigrants in Trump\u2019s second term, our analyses<\/a> have not kept up with changing reality in the last two years.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Others have noted that Trump\u2019s drive toward a new autocratic political regime is possible because of the \u201cBonapartist\u201d nature of his rule. Trump has achieved a new level of presidential autonomy (that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d contains some remarkably consistent political principles.<\/p>\n

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 \u201crapists,\u201d slandering Black-majority nations as \u201cshithole countries,\u201d and claiming that Haitians \u201care eating the dogs, they\u2019re eating the cats.\u201d He endorses material from neo-Nazi sites. He said, \u201cIslam hates us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmany good people on both sides.\u201d He famously refused to repudiate the Proud Boys when pushed to do so, telling them winkingly to \u201cstand back and stand by.\u201d\u00a0 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\u2019s enough that they share his ethnonationalism.<\/p>\n

So we have a \u201cprincipled\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It is too easy to equate Obama and Biden\u2019s deportation records with Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cself-deported\u201d since 2025.<\/p>\n