Maria Mendoza, 52, who was born in Mexico, arrives for work as a
housekeeper at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, July 10,
2016. US capitalists
have used Latin American immigrants as a means to exert downward
pressures on wages and working conditions, with the usual
anti-immigrant results. (Photo:
Ivan Kashinsky / The New York Times)
Maria Mendoza, 52, who was born in Mexico, arrives for work as a
housekeeper at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, July 10,
2016. US capitalists
have used Latin American immigrants as a means to exert downward
pressures on wages and working conditions, with the usual
anti-immigrant results. (Photo:
Ivan Kashinsky / The New York Times)
Capitalism has a long, ugly history of scapegoating immigrants. The
pattern has been repeated often. For example, British capitalism's
drive to empire
helped force the Irish, as colonial subjects, to emigrate. Miserable
colonial conditions, including horrific famines, drove many Irish to
labor for capitalists
in England at wages lower than English workers had won. English
workers raged against and clashed with the Irish immigrants more than
they struggled against
the colonial system that had brought them.
British capitalists recognized a useful side effect of importing
lower-wage workers. It differentiated employees by national origin,
religion and sometimes
also ethnicity. Some English workers resented downward pressures on
wages and working conditions, overcrowded housing and neighborhoods,
and overused and
inadequate public services. They often overlooked capitalists'
profit-driven organization of immigration, and instead blamed
immigrants themselves. British
politicians reinforced such ways of thinking as they sought financing
from those capitalists and votes from English workers. Likewise,
profit-driven media
companies, the journalists they hired, and compliant academics often
promoted notions that immigrants represented net economic costs and
difficult social
adjustments imposed on the existing population. Such notions deflected
workers' resentments about their economic situations onto scapegoating
immigration
and immigrants. In short, immigration made a divide-and-rule strategy
of capital against labor all the easier to pursue.
Adding insult to injury, some British leaders scolded English workers
for their "intolerance" or "prejudice" against the Irish. Such
scolding lofted them
"above" the fray of mutual recriminations among competing English and
Irish workers. Portions of the upper classes enjoyed celebrating
themselves as more
"tolerant" and less "biased." The British replicated their Irish
history with others among their "colonial subjects" in Asia, Africa
and South America.
The same applies to various French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German
and Italian colonial exploits. A parallel history characterizes the
US's long experience
with immigration, as well as chattel slavery, to cope with
capitalism's recurrent labor shortages.
After formal (officially recognized) colonialisms had been overthrown
in the 20th century, post-colonial economic realities there changed
slowly, if at
all. Profound poverty plus economic backwardness, inequality and
continued subordination to former colonial masters kept emigration on
many people's agendas.
Those who left to become immigrants found in their new homes the same
old divisions, hostilities and scapegoating.
Modern times offer more examples. The US repeatedly undermined basic
living conditions in its de facto colony, Puerto Rico, driving
millions to move to
the US mainland. There, they repeatedly encountered all manner of
discriminations, abuse and scapegoating. The US economic dominance of
Mexico and Central
America as informal colonies -- intensified by the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) -- produced the same result, but on a much
larger scale.
US capitalists used Latin American immigrants as means to exert
downward pressures on wages and working conditions, with the usual
anti-immigrant results.
Following the European colonial pattern, some in the corporate and
governing US elite congratulate themselves for denouncing
scapegoating, intolerance,
etc. and castigating those with such attitudes as "deplorables."
Since the 1970s, the remarkable relocation of capital from its old
centers in Western Europe, North America and Japan to the new centers
in China, India,
Brazil and beyond has provoked new migrations. The industrialization
of the new centers and associated political and military conflicts
have traumatically
and quickly (in historical time) transformed the lives of millions and
stimulated huge labor migrations -- interregional and international.
Emigration traumatizes most of those driven from their homes, jobs,
families and communities. Extreme conditions push emigrants to leave,
especially for
foreign places they usually know little about. The uneven development
of capitalism, coupled with its drive toward colonialism, has
consistently produced
the extreme conditions and extreme inequalities that sustain
successive waves of migration.
A real "cure" for the horrific processes of migration lies in a real
confrontation of capitalism's uneven development. For example,
investment could be
directed not to where private profit rates are highest, but rather to
areas that need that investment most. The rationale would be that
poverty and marginalization
pose a threat to peace (and thus to economic development as well),
which outweighs private capitalist profitability in terms of social
well-being. For
another example, full employment -- by state authorities wherever
private employment is insufficient -- could become a funded priority
everywhere in part
as a major counter to emigration.
For yet another example, taxing extreme wealth could provide
significant additional resources for investment in poorer areas. At
the same time, progressive
taxation can likewise prevent the resources flowing to poorer regions
from reproducing there the gross inequalities that historically
accompanied capitalist
development. To get an inkling of the magnitudes involved, consider the
2016 Oxfam report
which showed that the combined wealth of the world's 62 richest
individuals exceeded the combined wealth of the poorer half of the
world's population
(3.5 billion people). We could seriously address migration by
redistributing that wealth. If redistribution were combined with
either a reorganized and
regulated capitalism -- or, finally, transition to a non-capitalist
system less beset by inequality -- still more could be accomplished.
Capitalism always entailed migrations of capital and labor.
Capitalism always entailed migrations of capital and labor. It also
entailed -- as Marx's, Piketty's and others' work have argued -- a
continual tendency
toward wealth and income inequality, coupled with recurring cycles of
recession and depression. The masses of people hurt by the cycles and
inequalities
have occasionally mobilized political coalitions to moderate or even
temporarily to reverse them. For example, the Great Depression of the
1930s enabled
a powerful mobilization from below by a coalition of labor unions,
socialist and communist parties. That coalition forced the New Deal
policies onto President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress. From the 1930s to the 1970s,
capitalism's tendency toward wealth and income inequalities was
temporarily reversed
and cycles moderated.
President Ronald Reagan marked the re-emergence and return to
dominance of private capitalism in place of the state interventionist
capitalism from the
1930s to the 1970s. This was accomplished by "deregulation and
privatization" -- the rollback of the New Deal policies. The
government-led post-World War
II destruction of the Communist Party, then the socialist parties, and
then the slower destruction of the labor unions secured the political
and ideological
conditions for rolling back the New Deal. Private capitalism renewed
its classic tendencies toward wealth and income inequalities, cycles,
and the resulting
migrations of capital and labor.
The stale but pernicious "debate" over immigration resumes because the
underlying economic system reproduces the problem.
Contemporary struggles over immigration replay an old pattern whose
horrific consequences should long ago have spurred us to turn toward
the sorts of solutions
mentioned above. Instead, we see and hear yet again about building
walls, expelling undocumented migrants, denouncing intolerant
"deplorables" and so on.
The stale but pernicious "debate" over immigration resumes because the
underlying economic system reproduces the problem.
That system's leaders and supporters hope that the latest immigrants
will eventually be absorbed by profit-driven economic growth. They
likewise hope that
neither immigrants nor non-immigrants will blame the system for all
their sufferings and losses during such absorption. They have become
accustomed to
expecting that this generation's immigrants, once absorbed, will blame
the next generation of immigrants. When tabulating the social costs of
capitalism,
the repeated damage done by the migrations it has provoked looms large.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without
permission.
RICHARD D. WOLFF
Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to
2008. He is currently
a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs
of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes
regularly at
the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at Yale
University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University
of New York (1969-1973).
In 1994, he was a visiting professor of economics at the University of
Paris (France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at
rdwolff.com
and at
democracyatwork.info.
