While I'd never consider the closed, militarized borders and xenophobia of the right-wing, the US left has its glaring problems when it comes to immigration. I'd imagine as with most official narratives there exists an establishment of mostly white business interests that massage a pro-capitalist angle that the left repeats without much self-reflection.
But before anyone gets too alarmed let me be clear that I not only believe the borders should be as open to people as they clearly are to corrosive finance and deadly military weapons, but I also think the border themselves and the nation-state that spawned them are a cancerous lesion upon humanity.
My issue is not with so-called immigrants, who in modern conversation are always Brown or Black. Interesting that we do not speak of Canadians or Europeans coming here as immigrants. Europeans coming to the Americas seems to be accepted as a naturally occurring phenomenon.
Immigration is a white problem of Black and Brown people. And this issue has been carefully managed to hide certain truths.
Post-slavery slavery. Last week, for example, I heard comedian-turned-activist, Russell Brand, defend the US allowing immigrants thus: we would no longer have access to cheap food. Brand is not the first leftist to utter such disturbing words - indeed, it has been uttered so much and for my entire adult life that this argument is taken as acceptable.
But why on the face of it is our needing cheap food a justification for a virtual slave system? Why is this an acceptable leftist or radical position? When did it become acceptable to doom castes of people to labor for a more privileged caste?
If the only way we can have access to cheap food is underpaid labor, then, like all of our minimum-wage jobs, this agricultural food system should be abolished.
Then what, you ask? Of course human beings lived for aeons growing their own food, and if returning to this system compromises other cherished phenomena, like the City, then so be it.
Our Son of a Bitch in Central America. Another lost point for the left is a critique of the countries these immigrants flee, and the social, political, and economic dynamics that create these countries of misery in the first place.
The Immigration Issue is really a refugee problem, only we call it immigration at home and label refugees people from the global South who cannot get out of the global South: when they dare to cross the Rubicon into the land of milk and honey it's an immigration issue.
Refugees are a political thing: they come from wars, natural disasters, failed states, military regimes - all of which, except maybe the nature - can usually be traced right to the capitols of the global North. A military regime is installed and armed to terrorize civil society to ensure compliance with Western demands. Disastrous terms of trade agreements demand the global South extract its wealth to enrich foreign elites while a basic domestic health system cannot be built. Et cetera.
Even natural and health disasters can often be laid at the feet of the global North because without the ability to build durable infrastructure, train technicians, poor countries are left that much more vulnerable to a tornado or a pandemic which might have less impact in the global North, except of course in poor communities.
Twenty-first Century Feudalism. And finally, the pro-immigration debate overlooks an analysis of the global Northern countries being fled to, which must include the nature of Western "democracies" as increasingly bastions of industrial feudalism and not democracies at all.
James Baldwin lamented being integrated into the burning house that is Western civilization. I am more than circumspect about the selling points of the United States of America as far as anyone goes, but especially my Black and Brown brothers and sisters in the global South. I know what really awaits them
By carefully framing immigration in these ways and relentlessly repeating its diversionary talking points, radicals avoid the key point that we not only need a revolution in the United States and abroad but also more over that these nation-states as we know them - the US, UK, France, Spain, etc, Western-designed African countries, Latin American states - as they are constituted by an elite who fundamentally worships at the altar of Wall Street, profit over people, and using various tech booms to make larger swathes of people superfluous, must die. They must be dismantled in that artful way anything obsolete or harmful to children is recalled and incinerated never to be considered again. They must perish in the spirit that the late Lakota Russell Means, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, said: for America to live Europe must die.
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