The politics around immigration makes for strange bedfellows. This is a truth we nearly forgot during the first Trump administration, when opposition to Donald Trump’s almost cartoonishly vicious attacks on immigrants became a signature element of the Democratic Party’s “resistance.” But on the cusp of a second Trump administration, with the Democrats apparently replacing resistance with capitulation, immigration politics is reverting to the mean.
That is to say, capital still wants workers to enter, but under conditions that limit their ability to demand better wages or working conditions. This conflicts with a nativist movement that does not want any immigration at all. Meanwhile, the Left struggles to find a position within the debate that defends the basic human rights of immigrants without alienating workers who might see immigrants as a threat to their already precarious livelihoods.
The specific debate this month is centered around the H-1B visa, America’s guest-worker program for skilled workers. It may sound a little different from more recent immigration debates, which have focused on asylum seekers and undocumented workers, but the parameters are essentially the same. The hard right of the MAGA movement has positioned itself as the defender of American workers, arguing against the visa with a racialized discourse that confuses workers’ interests with an ugly nationalism. Opposing this are billionaire tech executives like Elon Musk, who, while attacking the nativists for their racism, defend the program because it produces exactly the kind of immigration capitalists prefer.
The H-1B, after all, provides for the entry of workers, but under conditions that give employers extraordinary power to grant or revoke the…
Auteur: Suzy Lee
