#ShotOnFilm by Abe // Boyle Heights, California 2024

President Trump started his second term exactly where he left off in 2021, waging an everyday psychological and physical war on immigrants. Joe Biden’s Presidential term was no help because he continued Trump’s immigration policies and did not provide a pathway to citizenship as he had campaigned, abandoning an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants to their fate under the more openly fascist Trump regime. As a result, it has brought more attention to our undocumented community and our immigration policies.

The tug and pull by Democrats and Republicans of whether immigrants should have some rights to a dignified life has left us with a dysfunctional, incoherent immigration system for working-class people to understand, leaving people lost in how our system works or should work.

Consulting history reveals that our government does not work for the people; it works for the ruling class, the capitalist class. This is their system, not ours. We are conditioned to believe what politicians tell us, that we need to repeatedly vote for the next “good” candidate, which leaves us disappointed each time. In reality, we should challenge the system as a whole and its treatment of our most vulnerable community members.

Trump’s racist agenda against immigrants is nothing new. Trump is not an outsider who landed in the U.S. from Mars a few years ago and suddenly started attacking our people with hateful rhetoric and executive orders. Trump is homegrown and falls in line with all U.S. presidents before him in attacking our immigrant community. From the colonial period to the “founding” of this country to today, immigration law is rooted in racism. Therefore, Trump is following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Democrat or Republican, because the system allows him to do so.

Capitalism and Immigration

In capitalism’s eyes, immigrants are not regarded as humans but rather as a labor pool from which to extract maximum profit while also denying them basic human needs for a dignified life. This leaves migrant workers in fear, preventing them from demanding better wages or working conditions, as they live in a state of irregularity and vulnerability, facing the threat of unemployment, arrest, or worse, deportation. Undocumented workers from the Global South are essential to maximizing profits in wealthy, developed countries.

Migrant workers accept low wages and work in unhealthy, dangerous conditions, meaning that they are not free to choose where they want to work; they are pulled by capital. Therefore, the labor force exploited by the ruling class is central to creating value in the capitalist system.

Moreover, capitalism does not set a specific price on goods we need or use; instead, it aims to maximize profit from what is produced and minimize the cost of labor involved. For example, in 2022, California’s agriculture sector generated more than $59 billion in sales, and the state remains a top producer of agricultural products in the nation, ranking as the world’s fifth-largest producer, surpassing the economies of many countries.

Meanwhile, farmworkers are among the most exploited workers in the country, earning about $24,871 annually, according to the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. There are approximately 500,000 to 800,000 farmworkers in California, with seventy-five percent being undocumented. In addition, “around 30% of households with farmworkers’ income fall below the poverty line, and 73% earn less than 200% of poverty (a threshold used in many public assistance programs),” reads a report by La Cooperativa.

In Trump’s first five months, he applied intense pressure on our undocumented communities. However, the capitalist class that relies on that labor pushed back against Trump, as the same individuals that ICE is targeting are those the system exploits, working in our fields, hotels, and the service industry.

For example, on April 10th, President Trump recommended at a Cabinet meeting, “We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people.”

Industry leaders and Wall Street are well aware of the financial losses that would happen if the deportation system continues, and the U.S. economy could collapse in days if it succeeds in its plan to deport millions of undocumented workers.

“America currently faces a workforce shortage of 1.7 million people. We simply don’t have enough workers to fill the current job openings, and mass deportations could exacerbate this shortage and put further pressure on businesses,” said Sam Sanchez, owner of Third Coast Hospitality, National Restaurant Association board member, and co-chair of Comité de 100.

To clarify, what Sam is referring to regarding the 1.7 million workforce shortage is not a lack of unemployed people but rather a scarcity of individuals willing to take the low-wage jobs in the hospitality industry, where undocumented workers are often valued because industry owners can pay them low wages without providing benefits.

There are over six million documented unemployed people in the U.S., but many documented workers are unwilling to do this brutal work for low pay.

Since the founding of the U.S., immigration law has never truly reflected the needs of the people but has always served the interests of the ruling class. The labor pool of undocumented workers is like a faucet: when they are needed, entry is allowed; once the work is done, the outlet is tightened to deport them.

The Colonial Period to the Creation of the U.S.

In March, the Trump administration deported 252 people, mainly from Venezuela, to El Salvador’s torture camps, where they will be forced to work. This move resembles what previous empires did in the 18th century. In 1717, the Transportation Act enabled the British government to send convicts to its colonies, where they would be converted into indentured servants.

“Before the American Revolution, Britain transported about 50,000 convicts to the American colonies.”

Convicts, who later became indentured servants, were not the largest group of people forced into British colonies that eventually became the U.S.; instead, enslaved Africans were. Over 300,000 enslaved people were brought into North America. Slavery represented a different form of forced migration because, unlike convicts, enslaved people had no possibility of earning their freedom. Enslaved people and their descendants made up a significant portion of the population in British colonies and the U.S. since the 1600s.

© CounterPunch