Trump’s Blood Poisoning and Blood Bath
Channeling the “one-drop rule”
The long history of hatred directed against immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa has been a key mechanism for the creation and preservation of white advantage.
Hating immigrants makes them easier to exploit. It serves as justification for paying them low wages to do the most onerous work and to neglect their health and housing needs. Focusing attention on the purportedly deficient character of immigrants hides the workings of global capitalism, especially the ways in which the United States is a bounded nation that has become dependent on boundless sources of raw materials, markets, and labor. Immigrants come to the United States from sites that have been totally transformed by U.S. investments and imperial intrusions.
Consolidation of agricultural landholdings, military intervention, and the promotion of austerity policies in the global south dispossess and displace millions of people who seek to survive as migrant laborers. Anti-immigrant discourses, laws, labor policies hide these structures and the ways in which investors and owners in the United States profit from them. They present the United States as the innocent victim of migrant illegality rather than as the beneficiary of migrant desperation.
