It's Billionaires, Not the Border

We need to stop blaming migrants for problems they play no part in

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash

My grandma was one of those who got caught up. She watched a whole lot of TV, was glued to the news every day. Turns out that some of that news wasn’t news at all. I remember when she first started saying how Lou Dobbs was on CNN talking about a ‘war on the middle class.’ I was young, but I can still recall my two-fold reaction. The first half consisted of the thought, well yeah that makes sense, there is an assault on the middle class. The second half came when I learned that Dobbs was saying that immigration was the real problem, the real war. My reaction to that was: that’s bullshit Grandma.

Lou Dobbs died a month and a half ago, but not before becoming a vigorous Trump supporter and doing everything in his power to shift a segment of this country towards a hatred of migrants searching for a better life. Unfortunately my Grandma was one of many, a lifelong Democrat who trusted her news anchors and largely came to believe the lie she was fed, namely that immigrants somehow share the blame for the declining standard of living of the middle class. What Dobbs did, and what makes it unsurprising that he became a Trump fan, is rail about neoliberalism and class war against the middle class and big corporations, but then pivot to blaming immigrants for things that are squarely the fault of the ruling class. He even went as far as supporting vigilantes at the border who attack and harass migrants.

I wish this nasty work didn’t need to be studied, but it does. The shift in public opinion, particularly over the last four years, is enough to give you whiplash. In 2020 just 28% of Americans thought that the number of migrants arriving in this country should go down. A short four years later that number stands at 55% today, according to Gallup. 

Democratic voters have jumped 10% since just last year when it comes to thinking the number of immigrants needs to decrease. Just one year ago Democrats were 40-18, with far more thinking migration numbers should increase than decrease. Now those numbers have shifted to 26-28 in the Gallup polling.

I don’t write to reach the right, as you most likely know if you find yourself here. But I do want to reach a wide range of leftists, progressives, and liberals. Even more so I want you to be able to reach a wide range of people in your life. And right now a lot of us need to be having conversations about immigration and about the dangerous rightward lurch we’re seeing from the Democratic Party and too many of its voters.

Much like my Grandma trusted Lou Dobbs, a lot of the liberal base trusts the Democrats and adjusts their opinions to align more with what the party is saying. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is. As we’ve seen top Democrats legitimize and run with the conservative fervor whipped up over a vastly exaggerated border crisis, voters have shifted their views. Namely, over the past year or so Democrats in Congress have worked harder than ever to position themselves as being tougher on immigration than their GOP counterparts.

This past spring Democrats negotiated a bipartisan bill which aimed to reduce migration at the US-Mexico border. The legislation would have made it harder for migrants to qualify for asylum and would have increased deportations of asylum seekers who didn’t meet these new standards. The bill also aimed to “give the president power to shut down the border if migration levels exceed certain thresholds.” It’s readily apparent that agreeing to and pushing this legislation marked a radical rightward swing on immigration for the party, which not long ago was speaking out daily about family separations, protecting asylum seekers, helping undocumented migrants and more.

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When the bill failed, or more specifically when Republicans tanked it, Democrats didn’t back away. Instead, they doubled down and tried to outflank the GOP on immigration. In other words, Democrats are trying to paint themselves as the ‘tough on immigration’ party, much like they’re currently trying to do with crime. Chris Murphy, a Democratic Senator from Connecticut and one of the most vocal proponents of the border bill, encapsulated the effort to use this border bill to paint Republicans as weak on immigration in a press release: “Senate Republicans defeated the bill because it would be effective. And that doesn't make sense. Right? Why would that be? Why would Senate Republicans vote against a bipartisan border security bill that would have been effective at bringing order to the southwest border?”

This is what trying to move to the right of Republicans on immigration looks like. It of course ignores that Trump and the GOP have continued to move right on immigration, with Trump saying as recently as yesterday that “Kamala Harris is the Weakest Presidential Candidate in History on Crime. She’s allowed millions of people to pour through our Borders, many from prisons, mental institutions and, indeed, terrorists, coming in at levels never seen before.” It is not possible to outflank the conservatives so easily on the issue they themselves drummed up. This approach also cedes the framing to the right, and has a record of legitimizing conservatives in the eyes of voters rather than winning them over to the center or left.

But Democrats want to blame Republicans for the perceived chaos at the border, refusing to actually engage with the work of changing that perception, or the way people think about immigration. In her first formal interview as a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris took this approach as well, saying that she would renew a push for comprehensive border legislation that would tighten migration into the United States, and vowing to "enforce our laws" against border crossings.

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Border laws are already being enforced, of course. The Biden administration is on pace to match Trump’s deportation numbers. And our border laws are also being viciously abused. The Border Patrol regularly steals from migrants, sexually assaults people, and hurts or even kills people seeking asylum. The question of how we ought to think about migration into the United States isn’t really "Should we close the border?" it’s "Why do people blame migrants for problems they haven’t caused?"

The most prominent issue, by far, is the belief that immigration is what’s causing our economic woes. We should be clear, here, that the facts roundly contradict this. Immigrants account for 17% of the U.S. GDP, or $3.3 trillion added to our economy. And, despite what many think, most undocumented migrants pay taxes, unlike a lot of billionaires and giant corporations. In fact, recent research shows that millions and billionaires owe at least $150 billion in taxes. And that doesn’t even count the way corporations exploit loopholes to dodge taxes. Amazon alone, for example, avoids $5 billion or more in taxes every year.

Unfortunately the facts are rarely as important as we’d like in these political battles. After years and years of Lou Dobbs and Fox News and Donald Trump and countless sources raving about migrant caravans and immigrants taking your jobs and Mexican gangs far too many people have simply accepted these far-right narratives as truth. But not only is the idea that migrants are dangerous, in terms of crime or economic impact, fundamentally false, the very people pushing that narrative are the people we need to be uniting against. The people who pose a real danger to us are the right-wing billionaires who are endlessly profiting off of us, taking the fruits of our labor. These are the people who want to scrap any semblance of democracy, destroy the wins workers have fought for, and institute all-out fascism. These are the people Democrats should be railing against, not asylum seekers and precarious migrants.

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash

Voters want Democrats to take on corporate interests, poll after poll makes that clear. Yet even that would be just a beginning. The left needs to take the lead on ushering in an underlying shift in our understanding of who our allies are, who our enemies are, and what should be done about it. It’s on us to bring people into a movement that not only opposes the super-rich but teaches people that the hoarding of billionaires, the tax evasion of corporations, and the trillions in off-shore accounts are why you might feel economically vulnerable, not the people arriving here with so little in search of a better life. Oligarchs who buy off politicians and tell them to defund social programs, to spend a trillion on war and cut education funding, to arm a genocide while spending nothing on public transportation – those people are our enemies. And they desperately don’t want us to think that.

The ruling class wants us to think there’s not enough to go around – not because of their hoarding but because this world inherently doesn't have enough for everyone. They want us to not only fight over scraps, but to think that the nature of society is and has always been the masses of people fighting over these scraps while a few people live lavishly. But that is not the natural order of things — this reality is not inevitable. There’s more than enough to go around when 10% of people aren’t hoarding 90% of the resources. There’s more than enough to go around when the economic system is set up to be equitable and fair instead of oppressive and unbalanced. We know that, and it’s our duty to help others see it.

Billionaires obviously don’t want us to know this truth, but even more than that they don’t want us to use it. They don’t want us all to consider what can happen when we link arms and fight back. In her book No Shortcuts Jane McAlevey talks about the largest pork processing plant on earth in Tar Heel, North Carolina. The bosses in the plant were well versed in dividing workers along racial lines, putting undocumented workers against Black workers, exploiting divisions between white workers and Native American workers, and so on. Then, to the shock of the bosses, an especially powerful union drive (which came after multiple defeats and vicious union-busting) overcame these divisions. One incredible moment arrived when the bosses called ICE on undocumented workers. First, over 1,000 migrant workers walked out on strike. Then, union organizers got hundreds and hundreds of bottles of water and 100 pizzas to these striking workers. Then several non-Latinos also walked out in solidarity. Ultimately, a broad multi-racial coalition of workers unionized the facility. Now 5,000 workers have a union contract in a plant that many thought could never be organized.

This is just one example, but it’s a powerful one. The bosses want us divided so that we don’t have the power to effectively demand what we’re owed. Leaning into rhetoric and narratives that further the divisions between working people is the exact opposite of what we need in this moment. We have to know that there’s enough to go around, in fact there’s more than enough. The people who seek safety and a decent life for themselves in this country aren’t to blame for our struggles. We must know that, and we must teach it. Then, we must organize against those who seek to divide us. We have a world to win, and it can only be won together.