The Associated Press called both the House and the Senate for the Democrats after the midterms. You already know what some Republicans are afraid of. The Democrats are going to open the border. So here comes the same fight again. Open it. Close it. Deport more people. How many times can politicians have this argument without asking why so many people feel they have to leave home in the first place?
I want to start there. Why do people leave the place they grew up, sometimes leaving their families behind, to go to the United States or Europe? And why do some of them end up working in the very countries whose companies made money off the places they left?
Who made it harder to stay?
Think about a family that used to live off its land. A foreign company takes control of that land and starts growing crops for export. The company has a business. The family has lost the means to feed itself. And if the only work nearby is on that same land, now the family has to accept whatever wage the new owner is offering or go somewhere else to find work. The company gets the land and a supply of cheap labor. What does the family get?
That’s one way capitalism makes one part of the world richer while making it harder to live in another. Companies that control the land, the factories and the contracts get to decide what gets produced and where the money goes. The people doing the work get told they should be grateful there’s a job at all.
And then there’s war. When powerful countries use military force to protect their grip on resources and markets, that’s imperialism. The people who stand to profit can be an ocean away. It’s regular working-class families whose homes get destroyed. Some people leave because they can’t feed their families. Others are running for their lives. By the time either reaches a border, somebody else has already made decisions about whether they can afford to stay home or whether there’s even a home left to stay in.
The boss gets paid again
Some people say Democrats in America and liberals in Europe want to let more people in because it’s the compassionate thing to do. But have you ever thought about who else wants those workers to come? The corporations. The business owners. They want cheap labor. When a politician talks about compassion, I want to know what happens to that worker after they get hired.
Say two people work the same line at a meatpacking plant. The boss tells both to stay late. One can say no and risk losing the job. The other has to think about whether the boss might report them to immigration authorities. Now imagine asking for a raise under those conditions. Or asking for your own damn paycheck when the boss shorted you. The boss knows that one of those workers has more to lose. That gives the boss room to pay less, demand more, or get away with things another worker could fight.
That’s how capital gets paid twice. It makes money off the land, resources and labor back home, even as it helps take away people’s reasons or means to stay. Then it makes money off some of those same people after they move, when they’re in a worse position to say no. The company that took the land and the company that hires the worker can have completely different owners. Capital finds a way to make money at both ends.
What politicians want you to fight over
The right tells the worker who’s angry about low wages to look at the immigrant on the next shift. Look at the person who sets your wage. Who gets to threaten one worker with a replacement and the other with immigration enforcement? Who comes out ahead when those two workers spend their time fighting over which one belongs in the country?
Opening a safe route can save somebody’s life. Closing it can send them back into danger. And after all the shouting about the border, the family still doesn’t have its land back, the home destroyed by war still has to be rebuilt, and the boss still gets to set the terms at work.
This is why I’m talking about capitalism and imperialism when politicians want to talk about open borders, closed borders and deportations. As long as the whole fight is about who gets to cross, the people who made money pushing families off their land and the people making money off their labor now can both go right back to business.
At the end of the day, capital wins.
