The GOP’s “Immigration Crisis” Is a Lie Designed to Exploit Workers

There are few things more infuriating and demoralizing than watching American discourse around “immigration.” I say this because it is a false issue surrounded and defined by false assertions and a political consensus grounded in false agreements. There is no “border crisis.” There is no “immigration crisis.” There is only a convenient and ugly story hiding a larger reality that no one seems particularly interested in addressing.

You can be forgiven if this is shocking. After all, in a historically divided and polarized country, the idea that there exists some existential crisis at our southern border is one of the few common touchstones left. Whether you’re watching Donald Trump and the Republicans spend every moment of their lives demeaning immigrants and warning about their bloodthirsty nature or tuning into Kamala Harris promising to end the “problem” herself, you’re swimming in the same myth. If you tune into Fox News, it’s the inescapable narrative. America is changing. Immigrants are everywhere you look and they’re supposedly out to get you and your kids. Read The New York Times, pop on MSNBC, or watch a debate, and what you hear is that this isn’t just one of the major issues the electorate cares about, but a pressing concern that demands precious space and time.

What we are experiencing is a pseudo-environment in which narratives based on inherent prejudices and stereotypes meld to create a skewed reality which obscures larger truths. If you reside here, you are likely screaming at the television or taking to the internet for hours at a time and calling for leaders do something, anything, to finally address the apparent problem.

But the larger truth, and it is hard to understand in such an environment, is that no one in power is particularly interested or motivated in doing anything to curb this “crisis.” And that’s because America depends on immigration and illegal immigration for the operation of its economy.

The Republican Party, as an institution, is dedicated to delivering a public-facing expression of its donor class’s agenda. These individuals range from billionaire corporate CEOs to regional small-business owners, all of whom rely on illegal immigration for the operation of their businesses. This is one of the great untold truths of this entire mess, and to confront it would mean addressing an ugly and dangerous operation at the heart of an already unsteady and unwieldy economy.

Because the GOP depends on working and middle-class voters to supplement its base, its rhetoric and persistent worldview relies on playing to their inherent prejudices to support agendas that are contradictory to their own financial fortunes. This is a trick the Right Wing has been playing for centuries now, with a particular and noteworthy parallel roughly a century ago. While immigrants are used for cheap labor, the same individuals who employ them also capitalize on racism and xenophobia to divide the working classes, all while transferring the blame to their political rivals.

The GOP has no interest in curbing immigration, but is instead dedicated to using surrounding fear for its political gain while creating an environment in which the immigrants currently being exploited, and those who will be exploited in the future, are surrounded by the threat of violence, kept from necessary protections, and deemed unworthy of the same benefits enjoyed by a public terrified of their existence and convinced of their inhumanness.

This process has repeated over and over and over again, from enslaved Africans during the slave trade to the Italians, Irish, and Asians. Each iteration has new developments, but the story is more or less the same. “Strange” groups are “flooding” the country, bringing crime, disease, disorder, and changing “the American character.” Demagogues make careers off voicing this libel, all while working in tandem with the same individuals and corporations benefiting from the process. Along the way, there are deportations (often focusing on Leftist elements as they discover organizing and labor unions) and, when things get heated enough, discussions abound about their “genes” and the supposed necessity of curbing their proliferation beyond what the exploiters see as an ideal working number. Already we have seen Donald Trump and other Republicans use this rhetoric as we’re told they’re “poisoning the blood” of the country and proliferating their “bad genes.”

For those keeping track, this is in part what led to the Eugenics craze of the early-20th century, which helped inspire the Nazi regime in Germany that gained incredible inspiration from America’s working apartheid state and system of rigid discrimination. Also, relatedly, it is the same language and rhetoric forwarded by Americans like Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, who stoked the white supremacist anger of that period and contributed to the rise of the Third Reich.

A population decline that has followed the aging of the largest generation in history has created a need for an influx of workers to fill these gaps. A need for increased profits has meant a desire to fill some of those jobs with workers who can be paid less than minimum wage and denied required benefits. And a burgeoning cold war with China and breakdown of the hegemonic American global economy has started a reindustrialization of the United States, which will require abundant cheap labor. What we have watched happen is obvious and understanding where it will lead is as easy as noting how history has played out time and time again.

This time it could be different. If the Democratic Party would push back against this framing and stand up for the general humanity of immigrants, work with labor to bring the exploitation to an end, and generally seek a new means of moving forward, this wouldn’t be near the issue it is. Instead, they are enthusiastically backing Trump’s border bill while demonized immigrants have been left in places like Springfield, Ohio to bear the burden themselves and live a life of constant threats and harassment.

The reticence, or perhaps capitulation, stems from the Democratic Party’s present main purpose, which is the maintenance and protection of the status quo. The economy, as presently constituted, requires these immigrants for labor and makes them ripe for aggressive exploitation. To this end, the consensus around this non-issue must reflect the prejudiced perspective voiced by the GOP. As a result, it turns into a race over who will most aggressively “solve the crisis.” A back-and-forth play centered on a non-issue, or, rather, a misdirection that hides the larger issue: widespread exploitation serviced by ever-present paranoia and anger.

Instead of talking about injustice and finding solidarity with our common man, both of which would necessitate massive, widespread change, we are instead mired in a disgusting and dangerous pseudo-issue that endangers people’s lives, ensures ongoing suffering, and continues to obscure the larger issues that the political class doesn’t believe regular people could or should understand–and our media, long stuck in tabloid and soap-opera entertainment politics, probably fails to understand generally.

And who loses in this situation?

All of us. Native-born people and immigrants alike.