This is not an attempt to analyze the short-term impact of immgration on the dynamics of the lob market, which are undoubtedly complex and subject to conflicting well-reasoned analyses. Rather it is an attempt to understand the issue in terms of the intersection of economic AND political consequences of different policies and the political processes by which they come into being. We are accustomed to treating market forces as if they operated according to iron laws rather than being human created institutional arrangements that are the product of political struggles and that in turn impact on the potential for future political activity.
1. Immigration controls are primarily a form of labor control. They divide the world into zones where the same work commands different wages and they create different classes or legal categories of workers: citizens, legal residents, and undocumented "aliens" who are paid different rates for the same work.
2. While immigration controls may benefit certain classes of workers by reducing competition, they primarily benefit capitalist employers. These benefits take two forms: economic and political.
3. The chief economic benefit is the creation of classes of workers who can be exploited at a higher rate because they live in the wrong zone or belong to the wrong legal category.
4. The chief political benefit is to create structural divisions among workers and thereby obstruct their organization into labor unions or political organizations. The weak link in all efforts to build working class unity is always the most privileged sectors of workers who have the most to lose with the end of the segregated or otherwise stratified job market.
5. In a world increasingly characterized by the free flows of trade and investment capital, restrictions on the free movements of labor function as a form of global economic apartheid that derives its political strength to a significant degree from the fear of the most privileged workers that they will lose the privileges that distinguish them from the rest of worlds working class.
6. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the present, calls for restrictive and repressive legislation against immigration, legal or not, have consistently reinforced the most reactionary tendencies of the U.S. white working class. They have fanned the flames of xenophobia, promoted disunity and driven white workers into the arms of right-wing demagogues. They encourage white U.S. workers to think narrowly within the confines of the U.S. state rather than in terms of the actual global economy in which they must forge unity with workers around the world if they hope to turn back the steady erosion of their historical gains. Such laws must not be judged simply on their economic effects, but also on their political effects.
7. The resort to calls for repressive legislation is a sign of weakness and disunity within the U.S. working class. They are an attempt to substitute appeals to the corporate-dominated state for a failure to build sufficiently strong working class organization. But precisely because they pit some workers against others they have the effect of further sabotaging efforts to build such organization.
8. The mass movement of immigrant workers, documented and undocumented, demanding legalization and equal rights is a forward looking assault on the system of global economic apartheid and deserves the energetic support of all progressive people.
