Trump’s War On Immigrants Pulls from a Long U.S. History of Creating Domestic Enemies

A refrain has become common among Trump supporters online: “Trump isn’t punishing immigrants, he’s punishing criminals.” Despite the Trump administration’s explicit promise of “mass deportations” which he’s already advancing through a bombardment of executive orders, Trump’s base insists that this is no war on immigration, just a war on “criminals.”

This refrain is justifying an array of authoritarian measures to wage war on immigrants, including growing U.S. military operations at the U.S.-Mexico border, plans to detain 30,000 people at Guantanamo Bay — a facility most known for being used as a torture site at the height of the War on Terror — and a proposal from far-right president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele to imprison deportees from the United States and even U.S.-born “criminals.”

There is no way for Trump to successfully carry out mass deportations without obscene amounts of taxpayer money and authoritarian maneuvers. It is not a given that such federal spending or reorganization of the government has the full approval of Trump’s base. Significant sectors of the Right in the United States (both capitalists and workers alike) have long placed emphasis on lowering the U.S. deficit and increasing “states’ rights” to counter the power of the federal government.

All of Trump’s most egregious plans are subject to legal, logistical, and political hurdles. While the logistical and legal hurdles are just beginning to play out, it is the political challenge that perhaps best explains the Trumpist claims that this is about “crime,” not immigration. Trump knows that even as his base favors a xenophobic, anti-immigrant program, the reality of what it takes to carry out such a program is much more likely to be contested due to existing divisions within the Right over how best to re-establish U.S. imperialism.

Additionally, precarious sectors of the working class who voted for Trump out of frustration with the status quo aren’t necessarily as ideologically committed to his far-right program. Even though these sectors hold some chauvinist, anti-immigrant sentiments, they might still balk at the estimated $315 billion price tag for mass deportations or Trump’s more authoritarian proposals like normalizing the use of the military as domestic police.

Already there is resistance to Trump’s attacks. Spontaneous protests, made up of multiracial youth and independent from the Democratic Party, have emerged all over the country. Additionally there are examples of teachers organizing against the attacks.

In the face of this, Trump is relying on a time-tested method to rally support for a massive expansion of the state’s repressive powers: claiming migrants pose an existential threat to U.S. national security from within.

From the Red Scare, to the War on Drugs, to the War on Terror, Trump is pulling from previous models for expanding the state’s repressive power. These models came at times when the U.S. regime was suffering crises of legitimacy and coming up against economic limits of capitalist growth. The solution the capitalists put forward was to rally the country behind a common enemy, from communists, to crack, to terrorists. Now, the enemy is immigrants.

In order to “Make America Great Again,” and prepare for great power conflicts, Trump needs the masses to support his plans to strengthen the power of the state. But unlike the previous offensives by the state which came at times of U.S. strength, Trump is attempting to create a national consensus for repressive action at a time of U.S. imperialist decay.

Creating Domestic Threats

To normalize the massive expansion of executive power and machinery of state repressive forces that he desires, it is not enough for Trump to simply crack down on immigration. While the U.S. public has shown less support for immigration in recent years, many liberals and independents still oppose some of Trump’s intended attacks. And it’s worth reiterating: there is no guarantee everyone who voted for Trump will politically support his war on immigration. This is why Trump has to create a mainstream connotation between immigrants and crime.

It must be added that along with labeling immigrants as “criminals,” “aliens,” and “invaders,” Trump is going after trans people and pro-Palestinian youth. All of the actions attacking these groups serve to strengthen the power of the state and undermine the power of the working class (made up of immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and people who support the Palestinian struggle) to organize against these attacks. The focus on certain groups as threats keeps workers divided, preventing us from using our full power as a class to fight for our interests.

To this end we see Trump constantly claiming that there is an “invasion” of migrants bringing fentanyl across the U.S.-Mexico border. The fentanyl crisis is a real and devastating threat to many U.S. working class communities, but Trump is conveniently able to play on the real fears of communities that have seen their loved ones’ lives destroyed, despite the fact that the real perpetrators of the crisis are capitalists (major pharmaceutical companies), not immigrants.

Trump is pulling from the playbook of the war on drugs which drastically increased policing of Black communities and kickstarted a boom in spending on police and prisons, while justifying U.S. military interventions in Central America. We see this history repeating itself in Trump’s use of federal immigration enforcement agencies to terrorize Black, Brown, and working class communities in the United States, while militarizing the border as a way to strong-arm Latin American countries into caving to U.S. power throughout the Americas.

Another reason Trump needs to create a domestic enemy is because right now there is little appetite among the U.S. public for foreign enemies. Wars abroad have long been one of the most effective ways for the U.S. regime to pass legislation to gut civil liberties, from the Espionage Act during WWI to the Patriot Act during the War on Terror. But decades of foreign interventions that brought nothing to the U.S. working class have made it harder to rally the country against a foreign enemy. With this limit in mind, Trump is seeking to make immigrants appear as terrifying as possible, hence his talk of crime, drugs, and in some instances, “terrorism.” While Trump’s fear-mongering over terrorism is less common, he is clearly setting a foundation to stoke such fears with his attacks on students who support Palestine and his executive order designating cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

The War on Immigrants Is a War on All Our Rights

The U.S. capitalist class has a deep history of creating domestic threats out of nowhere when it needs to get its house in order and attack basic democratic rights to weaken dissent. Trump is pulling from this history to develop his own war on a new domestic enemy. He has to do this because the truth is that the capitalists he represents have no consensus on how to actually address the fact that the U.S. population is increasingly questioning the institutions of the state and do not see themselves represented by the two-party regime. This comes as the United States is struggling to find new motors for economic growth and competing with China for global influence and control of foreign markets.

But the idea that immigrants are harming U.S.-born workers is a complete fiction. The only crime many of these immigrants are accused of is the mere act of being in the United States. Meanwhile, the goalposts for how to legally migrate keep changing as the state sees fit. The talk of crime from those in power has nothing to do with genuine concern for the well-being of the U.S. working class, and has everything to do with rallying support for the gutting of civil liberties and massive increases in military and police funding.

What will harm U.S. workers is a reactionary campaign to normalize attacks on dissent, further militarization and policing of communities in the United States, and a concentration of power in the hands of the president, whether that president is Trump, some other Republican, or a Democrat.

The war on immigration is also a war on basic democratic rights, and anyone who finds themselves in conflict with capitalists stands to lose from these attacks. It is essential that we build a class struggle against the war on immigration and all of Trump’s authoritarian moves. We’ll have to combine the power of labor (organized formally in unions or independently), the militancy of immigrant youth taking to the streets across the country and the anti-imperialist student movement for Palestine, the historic struggle for Black liberation which showed its power in 2020, and all whose rights are under attack. Only in this way can we defeat the Far Right.