Immigration from Across the Spectrum
There is only one morally sound immigration policy, and it’s not the one espoused by liberals or conservatives.

In liberal circles, most arguments for relaxed immigration policies fall into two categories. The first standard argument goes as follows:
We should let in more immigrants because they help grow the economy.
The claim is used to justify taking in everyone from migrant farm workers to highly-paid H-1B visa holders. Variations on this theme can be heard everywhere: immigrants take jobs that “native-born” Americans are unwilling to perform, carry in-demand technical skills, and inject our aging labor force with younger workers. These talking points are popular with liberals, in part because they are easy arguments to put forth—who doesn’t like policy that is both good for others and fattens our own wallets?—but also in part because modern American liberalism is an ideology steeped in utilitarian thinking.
But this view of immigration has a serious moral issue: it reduces human beings to tools for advancing our own economic interests. What if we encountered a situation in which letting in another immigrant would not add value to the economy? According to this line of reasoning, should we shut the door on that applicant?
Fortunately, liberals have more humanistic arguments to present:
Immigrants often flee poverty, violence, and political repression; therefore letting in immigrants is an act of charity. Further, diversity in the U.S. population makes us more tolerant and understanding of other peoples.
The rhetoric underscores an assumption, unspoken but ever-present in our discourse, that there are only two possible positions: liberals, on the one hand, are empathetic and multicultural, while anti-immigration conservatives are racist xenophobes.
But if this is true, why don’t most liberals support open borders? Even the beloved social democrat Bernie Sanders dismisses open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal,” since it would allow a flood of foreign workers to undercut the wages of existing American workers. Meanwhile, the Nordic states—to which Sanders often points as exemplifying his vision for the United States—suffer from increasingly frequent racial violence and insurgent far-right parties feeding on anti-refugee sentiment.
Immigration and the State
How could such seemingly progressive leaders and peoples resort, in the end, to immigration-skeptic rhetoric? There are surely many reasons, but a fundamental one has to do with the liberal conception of the state. Liberals and social democrats believe in a substantial welfare apparatus, funded through taxation and other redistributive measures. Thus, new immigrants are potentially a drain on health, education, and other public services. It follows that the liberal language on immigration must always be measured; try as they might to advocate for relaxed border controls, they can’t carry this advocacy to its logical limit. This, in turn, helps explain why liberals often resort to the calculating language of “immigrants spur economic growth.”
The relationship between economic ideology and immigration becomes even clearer when we consider American libertarians. The purest brand of right-wing libertarianism offers a disarmingly simple view: immigration should be unrestricted, because freedom of movement is a basic human right. Libertarians have no problem taking this position, because they generally don’t believe in state-sponsored services; therefore, new immigrants would impose little burden on the current residents of the receiving country. But libertarians would also have you believe that once an immigrant enters the country, there is nothing wrong with whatever meager wages and working conditions the corporate employers happen to offer. In other words, the libertarian view on immigration (as in many other aspects of society) is one that advocates for a theoretical freedom, but not a freedom that can be realized by many people.
Open to Capital, Closed to People
Fortunately, there is another way to think about immigration—one that upholds the basic right of humans to move about, while opposing the rapacious exploitation of immigrants at the hands of concentrated private power. Indeed, this is the position that socialists try to advance. Although socialist positions on immigration vary, generally socialists believe in open borders. Part of the reason is the maximization of personal and collective liberty, similar to the right-libertarian stance.
But for many anti-capitalists, opposition to border controls also follows from a materialist analysis of the modern economy. Under global capitalism, money travels freely around the world, but workers can’t. Think about how multinational corporations use borders to their advantage: if workers at an American factory start demanding better compensation, the manufacturer can move, with relative ease, to another country where workers demand less. Over the past several decades, the exodus of such jobs from the U.S. to low-wage regions of Asia and South America has forced once proudly middle-class people to accept worsening conditions as they struggle to compete with workers across the planet. Unlike the multinationals, most people can’t credibly threaten to flee the country.

Even after they’ve made their profits, global businesses continue to exploit borders by stashing trillions of dollars wherever the tax rate is lowest. In 2013, Apple alone held $252 billion in Ireland nearly tax-free, and CEO Tim Cook vowed not to repatriate the profits unless the U.S. slashed its corporate tax. The threats worked: in late 2017, Republican-led tax reform legislation included a repatriation tax holiday, slashing the rate from 35% to 15.5% and gifting Apple tens of billions.
In short, capital has the unique power to set even the mightiest nations into bitter competition, and the insight of the socialist analysis is that borders are one source of that power. Borders ensnare us in a global race to the bottom, turning us against people with whom we have no natural quarrel, and whose only crime was to be born on the wrong side of an imaginary line.
The Causes of Immigration
Regardless of one’s ideological views on borders, a serious discussion about immigration policy must include an understanding of the political forces that drive immigration, and mass migrations in particular.

Indeed, if a country wanted to stoke undesired immigration, it could hardly do better than the United States, which has destabilized just about every country from which it now receives undocumented immigrants. The U.S. military outfitted a special battalion in El Salvador that massacred unarmed civilians in 1981, helped orchestrate the overthrow of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government soon after, and trained the leader of a 2009 coup against the democratically-elected president of Honduras, among dozens of other interventions.
The history of U.S. imperialism in the hemisphere reveals a basic limitation of today’s liberal language of feel-good inclusivity towards immigrants: it fails to capture American culpability. As Mark Tseng-Putterman argues,
Insisting on American values of inclusion and integration only bolsters the very myth of American exceptionalism, a narrative that has erased this nation’s imperial pursuits for over a century…accepting Central American refugees is not just a matter of morality or American benevolence. Indeed, it might be better described as a matter of reparations.
But even the language of reparations isn’t enough, as it runs the risk of ascribing all our historical wrongdoings to individual actors like Ronald Reagan, or particular zeitgeists, as in the anti-communist frenzy of decades past. This would lead us to conclude that all we have to do is apologize and promise to elect better representatives, when in fact, American meddling in Latin America has been carried out by both major political parties for over a century. What, then, motivates the U.S. to continually intervene?
A World Safe for Capitalism
While many forces conspire to push the U.S. into foreign adventures, the most persistent cause has been to advance the interests of the shareholder class. It was for this reason that the United States, which owned a large stake in coffee plantations in El Salvador, sent the Navy to help a military-led government quash an indigenous peasant rebellion in 1932. It’s also why the CIA under Eisenhower installed an authoritarian government in Guatemala in 1954, in order to stop a democratically-elected government from redistributing unused land owned by United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita) to the country’s impoverished peasants.
In more recent years, the U.S. has continued this legacy through the use of trade agreements. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, eliminated Mexican tariffs on many U.S. food items; the ensuing flood of federally-subsidized American corn put two million Mexican farmers out of work. A similar agreement, CAFTA-DR, resulted in the displacement of farmers and violence against workers in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. In 2014, the U.S. Embassy threatened to withhold $300 million in development aid unless El Salvador agreed to trade policies favoring American agriculture behemoths like Monsanto.
In short, today’s neoliberal order is remarkable not because corporations can challenge governments and win (which they do), but because they are bedfellows with the state, enjoying privileged access to its coercive capabilities—be they military, legal, or economic. The socialist analysis of borders as “open to capital, but not to labor” extends into a new and frightening age in which the state acts in service of, rather than resisting, the global regime of capital.
The Road to Liberation
If our goal is to improve the condition of immigrants and refugees and to work towards a world that permits free movement, then we unfortunately begin in a tough position.
All of us are by now familiar with Donald Trump’s plainly fascist rhetoric and his administration’s cruel separation of thousands of families in detention centers. But while liberal leaders publicly denounce Trump’s rhetoric, they are not far behind in terms of policy. Following a 2014 surge in child refugees fleeing Central America, the Obama administration turned away tens of thousands of children at the border — often to their deaths—then chided parents of asylum seekers: “Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back.” On deportations, Vox sums up Obama’s record as follows:
By pretty much any quantitative measure — arrests, deportations, the share of all deportees who had no criminal record — any year of Obama’s first term saw more aggressive immigration enforcement than Trump’s first year.

Yet the Obama years also show us what can be done; after all, it was the relentless organizing work of Dreamers and their allies that brought about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, despite Obama’s opposition to using an executive order. In the coming years, this mix of electoral work and direct action will be needed to defend our immigrant neighbors. Recent efforts to disrupt ICE raids and occupy detention centers, backed by a clear call to abolish ICE, are an encouraging start.
Further ahead, we will also need to rethink our trade deals so that they benefit ordinary people both at home and abroad. A positive example appears in a 1997 trade deal with Cambodia, in which the Clinton administration included (under pressure from labor unions) a special provision: in exchange for making it easy for garment workers to unionize, the U.S. would grant Cambodia increased textile export quota. The union contracts that resulted from this agreement dramatically improved wages and conditions for Cambodian workers.
We can also take a cue from the European Union, most of whose member states participate in both a single market and a largely border-free zone. This could conceivably be reproduced in the Western Hemisphere by designing the next major trade deal in the Americas to include elimination or de-escalation of border controls.
However, none of these ideas are panaceas. The labor provision with Cambodia was the first and last of its kind in American trade deals, and the Clinton years were otherwise disastrous for ordinary people under NAFTA. Meanwhile, the European Union’s legal and monetary institutions enforce austerity policies that have put struggling economies like Spain and Greece in a stranglehold.
If we want to get the good parts of free movement and trade while avoiding the bad, then there’s no way around it: workers in the United States and other countries will have to wrench control of their governments away from the oligarchs. If we wish to see a world that gives dignity to all people regardless of their place of birth or residence, then we must begin to recognize our common interest, and the opposing interest of global capital and its allies in governments and militaries. Only then will we reach a world in which people move out of choice, not necessity—a world without borders.

