Mass Immigration Is Not Class Warfare — Borders Are

Last month, on Twitter, Bernie Sanders tweeted (Jan. 2): 

The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire “the best and the brightest,” but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.

The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.

This is the latest restatement of an old position by Sanders, who has long denounced “open borders” as “a right-wing position.” When he was rightly denounced for it by the Left, River Page came to his defense on the following day:

Mass immigration is class warfare, as most working people intuitively understand. Calling the last principled leftist in America a Nazi for saying so won’t change that. It will, however, be disastrous for race relations in this country. If you tell people that class consciousness and racism are the same thing for long enough, eventually they will just agree.

First of all, equating anti-immigration sentiment to “class consciousness” is begging the question. Whether it is indeed class consciousness, or whether it creates internal divisions and forms of state power that actually make the working class easier to exploit, is precisely the point at issue. Page is just regurgitating a common anti-“woke” talking point. The warning that people will “eventually agree” if you keep telling them “class consciousness” [sic] is racism is just a reiteration of “the SJWs/woke mobs made me become a Nazi by scolding me so much for being a racist.” It’s no surprise to see this talking point from Groypers and @1488 accounts. But seeing it used, in almost the same exact words, by self-described “leftists” like Freddy DeBoer and others of that ilk, is a little much.

In fact it’s immigration restrictions that are class warfare. Restrictions on immigration make undocumented migrants dependent on their employers’ protection from the authorities (with a wink and a nudge from the latter), and prevent them from organizing unions or reporting labor violations.

H-1B itself is an illustration of this. It’s not the practice of hiring foreign workers itself that undermines the bargaining power of labor. It’s the utter dependence of the foreign workers, under the H-1B program, on maintaining the favor of their employer in order to stay in the country. I’ve seen multiple accounts from people with tech backgrounds who’ve worked with foreign guest workers, to the effect that it’s virtually impossible for an H-1B worker who has a falling out with their employer to transfer to another employer, not only because of the inconvenience of the bureaucratic process but because of old-fashioned blacklisting and unwillingness to hire someone who didn’t get along with their previous employer. 

So Bernie is right, so far as it goes; it amounts in practice to a form of indentured servitude. The problem is his framing and his understanding of the structural causality. It’s indentured servitude because of foreign workers’ dependence on the employer. Their dependence on the employer results, not from their being allowed to enter the United States, not because immigration is so easy, but because legal immigration is so hard that it requires an employer’s sponsorship.

In this, Bernie misses the point as badly as Hillary Clinton did when she opposed legalizing pot because “there’s too much money in it.” There’s so much money in it because it’s illegal. If you criminalize anything, you drive up the price of it and create a black market, along with organized criminal gangs fighting to control the black market. 

Likewise, if you impose massive legal barriers to immigration and criminalize the majority of people who want to enter the country, and worse still make coming to the United States to work conditional on obtaining an employer’s sponsorship and maintaining their good will, you inevitably create a class of indentured servants who will be afraid to offend their boss or fight for their rights as workers for fear of being deported. 

On the other hand, if you eliminate the barriers to free movement of people across imaginary lines on the map, so that immigrants no longer need fear speaking up lest they offend the boss or attract attention from the authorities, they are free to leave their current job for one where they are treated better. They are free to join unions with native born workers, and act in solidarity with them by engaging in direct action on the job in defense of their rights. 

In other words, it’s not mass immigration that’s class warfare. It’s borders and the criminalization of movement across them that are class warfare. Restrictions on immigration turn migrant workers into indentured servants, turn them into weapons for driving down wages, and destroy worker solidarity by generating the kind of bigoted sentiment expressed by Page. People like Sanders and Page, by taking the side of immigration restrictions and closed borders against immigrant workers, are useful idiots for capital.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative