That “Damned” Immigration and the New “Alligator Alcatraz”
What kind of person can deserve such extreme cruelty without provoking sympathy from the rest of society?
By Jesus Arboleya (Progreso Weekly)
HAVANA TIMES – Not even Adolf Hitler had the bad taste to celebrate the opening of a prison publicly. Such a practice has become increasingly fashionable in contemporary politics. Nayib Bukele did it in El Salvador, and Donald Trump has just done so in South Florida.
The description of the prison is chilling. The “Alligator Alcatraz,” as it’s called, is made up of a cluster of large tents set under a blazing sun, in the heart of a vast swamp teeming with alligators, mosquitoes, and cobras, which are supposed to “cooperate” with the prisoners’ guards.
What kind of person can deserve such extreme cruelty without provoking sympathy from the rest of society? The answer is even more shocking: these are immigrants, caught in the twisted logic that has shaped the social development of the United States.
No factor has contributed more to the development of that country than the human capital brought by immigrants. Nothing would have been possible without the efforts of those who came from all over, trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to become “Americans,” as people from the United States call themselves, ignoring the rest of the continent.
Barely 1.5% of the current North American population is descended from indigenous groups. Nearly one hundred million people have arrived in various waves of immigrants, the largest in human history, forming a very diverse mix of nationalities and cultures, including Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans, in this case, brought to the country forcibly as slaves.
Approximately 13.5% of the current population, or roughly 300 million people, were born outside the country. However, North American society has not been known for supporting the inclusion of foreigners, and its immigration history is marked by rejection and abuse, where the cycle of turning the discriminated against into the discriminators has played a significant role.
The reasons for this behavior must be rooted in the economy. Although immigration has supplied the labor force needed for the country’s agriculture, industry, and services, contributed to the demographic balance, and enriched the national culture in many ways, the capitalist economy requires that this occur under the worst conditions for immigrants, because this is how it most effectively lowers labor costs.
By lowering wages, immigration boosts entrepreneurs’ profit margins, which is the main goal of employers. However, raised in a culture that celebrates capitalism, everyday Americans tend to direct their frustration not at the employer, but at the immigrant, who is seen as the weakest link in the chain.
This happens especially in certain sectors of the economy, where immigrants compete with the established workforce because high qualifications are not needed for a particular job. The competition is unfair, since the immigrant often comes from very unstable circumstances and is so desperate that he or she agrees to work in conditions that most workers in the country would find unacceptable.
It is false, as some claim, that immigrants do not harm established workers because they take jobs that the latter refuse to do. It’s not a matter of “taste”; what actually happens is that we are dealing with different values of labor power—namely, the satisfaction of the basic needs of workers and their families. For natives, this requires higher compensation and better working conditions to “reproduce as a class,” as Karl Marx stated.
When immigrants succeed in establishing themselves in the country on equal footing with other workers, as has gradually happened throughout American history, the value of their labor increases, as does their capacity to defend themselves against employer abuses. They also become a “political force” to the extent that they gain the right to vote and participate in the American “democracy.”
That’s why there is so much resistance to streamlining the legalization process for undocumented immigrants, improving the status of those who enter the country legally, and providing facilities for their social integration. What’s in the best interest of capital is for them to be “screwed,” and the fewer rights they are granted, the better it is for business owners.
The limit of this game is the volume of immigration relative to the job market structure. Nor can the American economy accept an indiscriminate rise in immigrants without upsetting the social fabric, especially as changes in job opportunities are driven by capitalist globalization itself.
What Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade reveals is the decline of the American economy and its failure to accept new immigrants without harming the living standards of the so-called white middle class, the social backbone of the political system.
As disturbing as it may be, Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have broad support across American society and are being enforced through all branches of power, including Congress and the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court.
You don’t have to be a bad person, a “white fascist,” or a racist xenophobe to, under these conditions, perceive immigrants as intruders coming to steal jobs, enemies of workers, individuals without dignity or decorum, exponents of all the vices attributed to them, and deserving of the worst treatment.
This even happens among people whose immigration experience, or that of their families, is very recent and who have managed to improve their legal status in the country. It should come as no surprise, then, that many Latinos voted for Donald Trump. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: “It’s the nature of the system, stupid.”
These are ILLEGAL ALIENS who are being sent there. They are NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS!