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FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE IMMIGRANTS  
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Max Elbaum
January 30, 2024
Convergence
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_ Today’s hatemongering reflects a deeply rooted problem: a global
“crisis of the right to stay home” due largely to Washington’s
role in structuring the world’s economics and politics. _

Farmworkers brought to the US in the H-2A visa program harvest melons
early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in California’s San
Joaquin Valley, (Photo © David Bacon)

 

Demonizing immigrants and attacking their rights is at the forefront
of today’s MAGA assault on the international, multiracial working
class, democracy, and basic human decency.

Top Republican strategists have decided once again that fearmongering
about immigrant “invaders” pouring over US borders is the best
formula for winning the 2024 election and implementing their white
Christian Nationalist agenda.

This is why Republican governors have been dramatizing the movement
of people by busing them to “blue” cities
[[link removed]];
why Texas Republicans are attempting to nullify federal authority
and take control of immigration enforcement
[[link removed]] at
“their” borders; why Trump doubles down on saying that immigrants
are “poisoning the blood of our country.
[[link removed]]”
This is why Republicans demand that harsh “border security”
measures be the price of approving the already terrible legislation
funding military aid to Ukraine and Israel.

And the Democratic leadership? Having long embraced the framework that
“undocumented immigrants are a problem,” they are incapable of
offering more than a token defense against MAGA demagogy. Rather, in
hopes of taking the issue of immigration off the 2024 electoral table
Dems have agreed to numerous Republican demands
[[link removed]] in
the negotiations over the combined immigration/military aid funding
bill. Apparently only complete acceptance of what Trump plans to do if
he wins in 2024 is good enough for the MAGA faithful, so according to
House Speaker Mike Johnson the deal is “dead on arrival
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in the House.

The progressive movement has its heart in the right place and a host
of groups are fighting back
[[link removed]]. But even if the most
draconian of MAGA’s current proposals are blocked —and even if
MAGA is kept out of power in 2024—it will take a leap in the
priority we give this battlefront and unity around an action strategy
to begin turning things around.

Crisis of “the right to stay home”

The first step in charting an effective course is gaining an accurate
understanding of the problem we face—the root causes for the
movement of people.

Yes, a large number of migrants are trying to reach the US via
crossing the US-Mexico border. But this is not at root a “border
crisis.” The underlying problem is that tens of millions of people
across the globe face a crisis of their right to stay at home.
Migration has been a basic part of the human experience throughout
history, and the right to migrate should be defended. But what the
world faces today is _forced migration_
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where millions who would prefer to stay in their homelands safely
cannot do so:

“The movement of people from country to country, displaced by war,
insecurity, and neoliberal economic policies, is enormous and
growing… Nothing can stop this global movement, short of a radical
reordering of the world’s economy and politics.” —David
Bacon, Dignity or Exploitation: What Future for Farmworker Families
in the United States
[[link removed]],
The Oakland Institute, 2021

As of 2020, the number of international migrants—people living
outside their home country—was 281 million
[[link removed].].
This is 3.5% of the global population, compared to 2.8% in 2000 and
2.3% in 1980. And US policies are a big part of the reason for this
steady increase: “neoliberal strictures, [US] support for oligarchs,
and the War on Drugs
[[link removed]] have
impoverished millions and destabilized Latin America.” Additionally,
US militarism and failure to deal decisively with climate change
[[link removed]] are
major contributors to forced migration globally.

Immigration policy in whose interests?

The mainstream debate over US immigration policy does not include much
discussion of the root causes of global migration, much less the role
of US policies in creating those conditions. Rather, the focus is how
to manage the resulting displacement of human beings.

That management—according to the MAGA-controlled GOP and the
pro-corporate elements in the Democratic Party—is to be done in the
interest of those who want to earn a profit off human labor.

Their favored policies include “guest worker” programs, which
create a pool of workers who can be brutally exploited because they
lack political, labor or union organizing rights. And these guest
worker programs simultaneously undermine the economic and political
power of the workers’ movement as a whole. So does the persistent
denial of a path to protected legal status and citizenship for
migrants who are undocumented but have lived and worked in the US for
many years. That denial also undermines democracy, as it legitimizes a
two-tier system of political rights, even though both tiers are made
up of people who work and contribute to society.

And for the bigots of MAGA, maintaining a constant “threat” of
darker-skinned people “invading” the country is an ideal fit for
their scapegoat —the “other.” It’s a perfect way of harnessing
mass discontent and aiming it at a target other than the corporate
class and their political representatives. It gins up their core base
around the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, in which
globalist elites and/or Jews are plotting to replace whites with
people of color. And legitimizing the demonization of immigrants and
the use of force against them without due process paves the way for
extending dehumanization and repression to all peoples of color, all
workers, and all political opponents of white Christian nationalism.

A progressive approach, by contrast, takes the side of those who work
and those who are vulnerable. Our task is to build a global movement
powerful enough to give every human being on the planet the option of
living and thriving in their homeland, or having their rights
protected should they decide to or be forced to migrate. On the way to
that long-range goal, we must fight to protect the human rights of
migrants specified in international law
[[link removed]] and
win immigration policies that maximize the power and rights of the
exploited and the vulnerable.

A basic set of demands flows from this perspective: legal status for
all residents, an end to contract labor and guest worker programs,
human rights for all including equal social, labor, and political
rights. Simply put, we must demand full enfranchisement for all
migrants.

Tough fights ahead

In the immediate period ahead, this translates mostly into waging a
host of tough defensive fights while doing everything we can to
introduce positive reforms into the national conversation.

An immediate priority is mobilizing opposition to the harsh
anti-immigrant measures in the legislation under discussion in
Washington 
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case that seemingly dead “compromise” comes back around.
The proposed legislation
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restricting humanitarian parole
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that give asylum seekers temporary protection; expanding “expedited
removals
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that allow deportation with very little due process; capping asylum
grants; mass mandatory detention, increased enforcement and other
repressive measures. Every provision in this bill should remain a
focus of battle whether or not this measure becomes law.

Other important defensive fights include:

* Ending mass detention and deportation altogether and closing
detention centers completely
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* Allotting funding to end the backlog
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processing asylum requests instead of repressive “security”
enforcement, and allocating the resources to end the backlog in the
processing of millions of family reunification applications

* Opposing the expansion of H-2A
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other contract labor programs

* Maintaining Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
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for immigrants from all 16 countries
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current list

And key to all of these demands is to prevent the ascent to the
presidency of a man who has promised to make immigrants first on his
hit list of “vermin
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to be expelled from the body politic. Trump has pledged to round up,
put in detention camps, and then deport
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undocumented immigrants on his first day in office. To accept the
framing of immigration as mainly a border security issue, as the Biden
administration and top congressional Democrats currently do, is not
just bad policy and bad politics in an important election. It cedes
the ideological initiative to MAGA, makes it more difficult to turn
out pro-immigrant voters, and weakens the capacity to persuade those
open to persuasion that MAGA’s anti-immigrant crusade will not
address the real sources of their hardships and discontent.

And even if Trump loses in 2024, the fight for immigrant rights will
be far from easy. Progressives and the Democratic leadership have
their sharpest differences on immigration policy and on the Biden
administration’s support for Israeli genocide
[[link removed]] (and
foreign policy in general). Those differences may change form, but
they aren’t going to disappear on January 21, 2025, no matter who
controls the White House and Congress.

On the positive reform side, a key task is to build support for
the legislation
[[link removed]] introduced
by Alex Padilla in the Senate and Zoe Lofgren in the House that would
expand the number of long-term residents in the US who could apply for
permanent resident legal status. This “Registry Bill
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updates previous legislation to state that people of good moral
character who have lived continuously in the US for seven years could
apply to legalize their status. As things stand now, people would have
had to live in the US continuously since 1972. Passage of this bill
could lead to a pathway to citizenship for up to eight million people.

A task for all progressives

Every one of these fights will be difficult. For decades now, the
mainstream opposition to anti-immigrant fearmongering has been limited
to arguing for “trade-offs”—tough enforcement measures are
traded for limited numbers of immigrants eligible for temporary
residency or legalization. (The last fully progressive immigration
legislation was passed in 1965
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ending racist immigration quotas and making family reunification a top
priority.)

This pattern, combined with the barrage of MAGA anti-immigrant
fearmongering, and an especially large number of migrants trying to
reach the US, has taken a toll on public opinion. Current polling
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almost 75% agreeing that “illegal immigration is a major problem.”
A majority of voters say they trust Trump more than Biden
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tackle immigration issues; this includes substantial numbers of voters
of color as well as significant majorities  among whites.

At the same time, a majority of voters support a path for undocumented
people here to legalize their status. There is a deep reservoir of
pro-immigrant sentiment out there, and many years of work by immigrant
rights advocates has persuaded a substantial section of the population
that we have to look at the roots of migration to understand why
people are coming to the US in such numbers. An in-depth assessment
of opinion polling
[[link removed]] on
this issue released in 2020 by the National Immigration Forum showed
majorities of 60 – 75% of the population saying immigration was a
good thing for the country; majority support for paths to
legalization, and majority opposition to mass detention of
undocumented people. (It also showed the partisan divide on
immigration policy widening, with Republicans growing more negative
about immigrants and Democrats more positive.)

Still, it will take years of mass action, electoral campaigns, and
political education to turn broad public sympathy for immigrants into
a political force that targets the underlying roots of forced
migration and is strong enough to bring about true immigration reform.

A vibrant if still under-resourced and fragmented immigrant rights
movement is in the forefront of those fights today. And it also offers
analytic and strategic frameworks for long range work. See for
example:

* The work of #WelcomeWithDignity
[[link removed]] campaign and the seven-point
welcome demands presented in “‘Migrant Buses’: The Crudest Face
of a System Built to Exclude
[[link removed]],”
by Rev. Deborah Lee.
* The Vision and Values Statement
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by the Immigrant Movement Visioning Process in 2019.
* The International Migrant Rights and Global Justice
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of the program of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee
Rights [[link removed]].
* The “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration
(GCM)
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Office of the High Commissioner for Human Right (OHCHR), United
Nations
* The report “Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized: Fighting for
the Rights of Migrants in the United States
[[link removed]],” written
for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation by David Bacon.

The groups mentioned here and other immigrant rights organizations and
campaigns should not have to carry this fight alone. It is up to all
of us in the growing progressive current and resurgent labor movement
in the US embrace this issue and join in this fight.

_Thanks to Rev. Deborah Lee of the __Interfaith Movement for Human
Integrity_ [[link removed]]_, Xiomara Corpeño,
David Bacon, and Lillian Galedo for providing analysis and resources
enabling me to write this column, and thanks even more for all your
work tackling this issue over so many years._

_Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board
and the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to
Lenin, Mao and Che 
[[link removed]](Verso
Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New
Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is
also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power
Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections 
[[link removed]](OR Books, 2022)._

_Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We produce articles,
videos, and podcasts to sharpen our collective practice, lift up
stories about organizing, and engage in strategic debate — all with
the goal of winning multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic
economy._

* immigrant labor
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* immigrant rights
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* MAGA
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