Search
Close this search box.

For Collective Liberation

Anticapitalism in the Migrant Justice Movement

May 16, 2025

WITH THE STATE’S growing attention to border security and immigration enforcement from the 1980s, migrant justice struggles have become a bedrock of resistance in the US. This includes uprisings in the early 1990s against Proposition 187 in California, which sought to exclude undocumented migrants from public services such as education and healthcare.

Just over a decade later, in 2006, anti-Proposition 187 uprisings repeated at the national level: proposed anti-immigrant legislation sparked a wave of massive protests across the country, with more than five million protesters participating. This protest wave showcased anticapitalist potential. Not only did socialist organizations help to organize the revolt, but a boycott of schools and businesses on May 1, 2006, effectively amounted to a nationwide general strike.1Socialist organizations included, among others, the International Socialist Organization, Socialist Workers’ Party, Freedom Socialist Party, and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER); the latter was closely tied to the Party of Socialism and Liberation and the Workers’ World Party. Jesse Diaz, “Organizing the Brown Tide: La Gran Epoca Primavera 2006, an Insider’s Story,” PhD Thesis, University of California, Riverside, 2010.

This resistance helped to prevent draconian anti-immigrant legislation, though it did not stop the assault on migrants. In response, over the past decade, we have witnessed civil disobedience against deportations and against attacks on DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program).2Kevin Escudero,Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Political Activism under the Law (New York: NYU Press, 2020); Walter Nicholls, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

Current migrant justice struggles are ideologically diverse. As in many movements, anticapitalists collaborate with those who favor gentler forms of capitalism, perhaps with more progressive forms of taxation or progressive regulation. For the most part, however, anticapitalist politics have been relegated to the margins of the mainstream immigrant rights movement, which tends to prioritize equal inclusion into capitalism rather than its overthrow.3Marcel Paret, Sofya Aptekar and Shannon Gleeson, “Capitalism and the Immigrant Rights Movement in the United States,” Socialism and Democracy 34, no. 1 (2020): 180–205.

To a certain extent, this reflects the broader malaise of the US left. The Bernie Sanders campaigns for “democratic socialism,” for example, came and went. They exerted only a limited impact on the Biden administration and Democratic Party, and indeed, the party shifted to the right during the 2024 Harris campaign.

Within the Black Lives Matter movement, radical currents opposed to racial capitalism and state violence articulated a demand to “defund” the police that did gain some traction. But they were overwhelmed by narrower demands for equality and civil rights which, while important, could also be easily coopted into rather limited electoral projects.4Siddhant Issar, “Listening to Black Lives Matter: Racial Capitalism and the Critique of Neoliberalism,” Contemporary Political Theory 20, no. 1 (2021): 48–71. There are many reasons for the historical weakness of the US left, among them state surveillance, cooptation, and repression.

In short, the marginality of anticapitalist perspectives within the immigrant rights movement is not necessarily surprising. Despite this rather bleak state of left affairs, however, there is cause for hope in the favorable attitudes towards socialism among young adults.5Pew Research Center, “Modest Declines in Positive Views of ‘Socialism’ and ‘Capitalism’ in US,” September 19, 2022. And to the extent that this sentiment translates into actual organizing, migrant justice struggles represent a crucial strategic site for waging and developing anticapitalist challenges.

At least three reasons stand out. First, we might expect migrants to be well positioned for embracing and promoting alternatives to capitalism, given their disproportionate location among the most precarious layers of the working class. One might argue that anticapitalist challenges are most likely to emerge from the working class, and it is the working class that animates and propels migrant justice struggles.

Second, the differential political status of migrants, which underpins their particular vulnerability as labor, also underpins the exploitation of all workers by driving down wages and working conditions. In this sense, fighting against anti-immigrant policies and practices takes us to the heart of the capitalist system, while also challenging the scapegoating narratives of the Right that pull in the opposite direction.

Third, migrants help to build connections across national borders. This includes family and community networks, economic dependencies, and the sharing of political ideologies, among other transnational linkages. It follows that migrant justice struggles have the potential to incubate an international perspective, which is necessary for countering an increasingly global capitalism.

What are some of the obstacles standing in the way of anticapitalist politics within the migrant justice movement?

Taken together, these points suggest that migrant justice represents a strategic chokepoint, or a strategic point of intervention, for anticapitalist struggle. What are some of the obstacles standing in the way of anticapitalist politics within the migrant justice movement? And what might an anticapitalist, migrant justice politics look like today? We hope to provide a small window into these questions by exploring some of the experiences of anticapitalist activists who are currently organizing around migrant issues.

Between 2020 and 2023, we interviewed twenty people who identified both as activists or organizers within the migrant justice movement and as individuals with an explicitly anticapitalist orientation. Rounding out our list through referrals as we went along, we spoke to experienced organizers across a wide spectrum of activities that fall under the umbrella of immigrant rights and migrant justice.

This included campaigns to close detention centers, provide direct aid or services like legal assistance and healthcare, and to build rapid response networks, sanctuary campaigns, labor solidarity, and local and national policy campaigns. Some of the people we interviewed were members of organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, while others located their political homes outside of parties. They were organizing in the US–Mexico borderlands, in urban centers across the US, and in rural communities.

The goal of the interviews was to understand the challenges anticapitalists confront in pursuing radical goals within the migrant justice movement. We also sought to learn what they believe it would take to forge an anticapitalist path. Our window into these dynamics is necessarily limited because we are drawing on the perspectives of a small group of organizers.

Yet, while not a representative or exhaustive set of interviews, the voices of these organizers provide what we feel are critical perspectives on what an anticapitalist approach to migrant justice organizing might require. In what follows, we begin by outlining some of the obstacles that stand in the way of anticapitalist visions and strategies.

The obstacles organizers described to us were both practical and political. Many, for instance, described what they characterized as a state of permanent emergency that defines the lives of many migrants and makes it difficult to sustain longer-term anticapitalist work. Many also stressed questions of organizational form, in particular the donor-funded organizing models that can foster outright hostility to the work they would like to do.6Alfonso Gonzales, Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

We then turn to the transformative organizing approaches that organizers understood as central to developing an anticapitalist politics. They called for breaking with the hegemonic approach of mainstream nonprofits, forging deeper ties within migrant communities, and redoubling political education efforts to foster an awareness of the connection between capitalism and migration—as well as why a socialist approach stands the best chance of alleviating the interlocking crises that circumscribe the lives of migrants and nonmigrants alike.

Obstacles to Anticapitalist Approaches

Organizers we spoke to described how efforts to advance a capitalist critique within the immigrant rights movement have been hampered by a number of obstacles. Social movements become defined by longstanding approaches and narratives that can become institutionalized and drive how campaigns operate. Existing “inside the belt” approaches, oriented towards national policymakers, have dominated efforts at immigration reform.7Gonzales, Reform Without Justice.

This takes energy away from advancing more radical goals and strategies and has done little to counter the punitive emphasis of US immigration policy. And it is also intentional. As a longtime organizer with the Central American left pointed out, the Democratic Party apparatus has invested in mainstream immigrant rights organizations precisely to stifle leftist critiques and organizing, and thus to limit the very imagination of what is possible to change in the current migration system.

Organizers focused especially on two sets of challenges. The first stems from the everyday crises associated with migrant life—from precarious jobs to an enforcement-oriented immigration system—whose pressing urgency dominates day-to-day work while exhausting time, resources, and energy that might otherwise be put towards activism and political education.

Be they the largescale raids that were popular during the Bush administration or the incredibly effective bureaucratic audit mechanisms perfected by the Obama administration, the detention and removal of immigrants have been a looming specter for at least the last two decades.8Muzaffar Chishti, Sarah Pierce and Jessica Bolter, “The Obama Record on Deportations: Deporter in Chief or Not?” Policy Beat, Washington, D.C.: Migration Policy Institute, 2017. The creation of “employer sanctions” in the late 1980s (making it illegal for employers to hire undocumented migrants, reinforcing the vulnerability of undocumented workers), the increased criminalization of immigrants during the 1996 Clinton-era reforms, and post–9/11 national security measures have all impacted a wide range of immigrants.9Marcel Paret, “Legality and Exploitation: Immigration Enforcement and the US Migrant Labor System,” Latino Studies 12, no. 4 (2014): 515–8; Leisy Abrego et al., “Making Immigrants into Criminals: Legal Processes of Criminalization in the Post-IIRIRA Era,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 5, no. 3 (2017): 694–715; Ming Hsu Chen, Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

Together, these attacks have thrust migrants and organizers alike into a state of permanent emergency. As one rural organizer working with farmworkers explained, fellow immigrant rights advocates are so “exhausted by the never-ending set of material needs that it’s hard to make time for political work or political consciousness work or political study.” Ultimately, efforts to document, litigate, and legislate a way out of an immigration system focused on criminalization and removal has drained the time and energy required for activities such as grassroots organizing and political education.

Efforts to document, litigate, and legislate have drained the time and energy required for grassroots organizing and political education.

Taken as a whole, this first set of challenges is structural in nature, rooted in dominant economic and political structures of exploitation and exclusion. At the broadest level, the gradual, decades-long decline in working-class power writ large has had difficult effects on migrants and organizers alike. The long hours, exhaustion, and stress involved in meeting myriad crises of social reproduction on an individualized basis affect not only workers’ pocketbooks, but the character of their movements.

And punitive immigration enforcement works hand-in-glove with efforts to quash worker organizing that could address the affordability crisis. An organizer who was part of a unionizing effort in a factory setting recounted how the level of support for the union among workers plummeted from 90 to 35 percent when bosses used immigration-specific union busting tactics:

In addition to the whole litany of union busting strategies that employers use, the one that was most salient to a lot of my coworkers was that they threatened that ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] would be notified if they voted to organize and that at the end of the vote, only 35 percent of people voted for the union. So, it was just like a huge loss. It was really devastating, really sort of forced me to start engaging in a deeper analysis of the ways in which having this underclass of workers that’s based on citizenship and immigration status undermines the movement for working-class power as a whole.

Such threats and fear of detention and deportation multiply the challenges facing organizers hoping to bring an anticapitalist orientation to their work.

Compounding these structural challenges is a second set of challenges stemming from current approaches to collective struggle. More specifically, the anticapitalist organizers we spoke to underscored the limits of donor-funded, service-oriented organizing models. Given the legal and economic vulnerabilities facing large swaths of the immigrant community, much of the immigrant rights movement has oriented towards a service model.

This model focuses on delivering much needed legal services, material support, and healthcare, but without affecting the underlying systems that produce everyday crises in the first place. Federally funded immigrant integration services for refugee resettlement and immigrant-facing services aimed at charity and economic empowerment have captured much of the philanthropic and civil society energy around immigrant rights non-profits.10Nicole Kreisberg, Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson, “Explaining Refugee Employment Declines: Structural Shortcomings in Federal Resettlement Support,” Social Problems 71, no. 1 (2024): 271–90. The service-oriented approach of many labor unions follows a similar path.11Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Donor-funded, service-oriented organizing models undermine anticapitalist challenges—not the least because the organizations themselves rely on capitalist harm. For one Texas-based organizer employed by a nonprofit, at the root is the harm of “borders [that] don’t work for a majority of people. And they’re the reason why so many people are violated, and killed, and abducted.”

Yet, it is precisely this devastation that creates the complex of nonprofit organizations. While admitting “that there are organizations that do good work towards abolition,” they argued that “for the most part, most [nonprofit organizations] would disappear if they advocated for a borderless society. They wouldn’t have jobs; they wouldn’t have money to fight for it.”

This is partly about the fact that foundations do not want to fund deeper critiques of the border, but it is also about the linkages between nonprofits and the enforcement apparatus. As the Texas organizer states, “[We need to] illustrate the idea that the borders are really fucking arbitrary, and the only thing that holds them together is enforcement and nonprofits who police the communities who want nothing more than to just cross the fucking port of entry that’s twenty feet away from them.” Indeed, they note that organizations at the border, providing goods and services such as housing, legal aid, and medical care, would not even be necessary if there were no borders.

This analysis of borders underscores the tension between structural, anticapitalist analysis on the one hand, and nonprofit organizing on the other, a tension even expressed by some organizers who were working for nonprofit organizations. This tension is emblematic of a wider critique leveled at the nonprofit industrial complex, including the critique that many criminal justice nonprofits depend on the maintenance of mass incarceration.12 Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan, “Carceral Non-Profits and the Limits of Prison Reform,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 20, no. 6 (2021): 597–617.

For service-oriented organizations, building coalitions with anticapitalist groups feels risky and can create organizational conflict that weakens a unified approach to deflecting anti-immigrant campaigns. Working with explicitly socialist groups, in the words of one New York-based organizer, can brand coalitions with a “scarlet S.”

Better funded mainstream immigrant rights organizations in major centers of immigration hesitate to partner with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, even when there is an overlap in their interests and goals. Those who seek to question the legitimacy of borders or the immigration enforcement apparatus face an uphill battle. As one Southern California immigrant rights organizer explained, questions such as “Why does the border exist?” and “Why does DHS [Department of Homeland Security] exist?” are rarely pursued in light of immediately pressing issues around basic rights and resources.

One of the problems here is that nonprofit organizations are most immediately accountable to their donors, who often want proof that their money has been spent according to their wishes. An organizer in a healthcare organization on the US–Mexico border noted, “We have to perform charity for people too…Big fundraising organizations have specific donors that they’re going to, and those donors want to hear what happened with their monies. So, it’s like this weird cycle of constantly having to placate rich people.” This need to perform charity skews the orientation of the work, often leading to an emphasis on individual stories of hardship and service.

The organizer remarked on the burden of demonstrating to donors the fundamental humanity of individual migrants—a humanity that should be taken for granted, rather than proven. This undermines deeper critiques: “We need to be thinking about the impact that the US has in terms of migration and really what is forced migration for people, period, right? Like we’re not actually addressing the underlying causes which is a very incomplete perspective on it.” Further, popular narratives that frame immigrant workers as singularly desiring opportunities to work and uniquely able to do this work predominate in much of immigrant rights advocacy.

Existing campaigns typically frame immigrants as essential hard workers who fill the jobs that Americans do not want to do.13Shannon Gleeson and Prerna Sampat, “Immigrant Resistance in the Age of Trump,” New Labor Forum 27, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 86–95. Many nonprofit organizations present such images of deserving migrants in opposition to criminalizing narratives that highlight immigrant deviance and risk of public charge. A typical message, according to one anti-detention organizer, is: “We are hardworking, and we are deserving because we are—you know, it’s very much like America is great. And we’re here to make America better in this way.”

Anticapitalist approaches ask more critical and realistic questions, whose answers complicate the notion that submitting to exploitation is a noble act undertaken out of a sense of service and obligation to the United States. Political education becomes critical, therefore, to shift these logics on the part of both immigrant workers and those advocating on their behalf.

But the resources and appetite for shifting the Overton window around the politics of migration is weak at best. In a competitive environment with limited funding for social movement work at all, support for more critical political work is difficult to secure. For those who believe that only a fundamental political and economic shift can truly address what is now called the migration “crisis,” it can feel as if there is an invisible red line between what is permitted in current frameworks and what kinds of approaches could actually stem the perpetual reproduction of the crisis.

These twin sets of challenges go hand-in-hand: the permanent emergencies of everyday migrant life help to naturalize the donor-funded, service-oriented organizing model. The task for anticapitalist organizers is to push beyond this narrow approach by situating migrant justice struggles within a broader frame.

Anticapitalist Visions and Strategies

How do migrant justice organizers engage in anticapitalist visions? How do they envision an anticapitalist approach to migrant justice organizing work? For the anticapitalist organizers we spoke to, immigrant liberation required a critique of capitalism and vice versa. Tracing their genealogies of struggle variously to antiglobalization battles, Zapatistas, and liberation struggles in Central America, the organizers we spoke to differed in the scope of their visions.

Our interviews revealed two complementary perspectives. One approach sought to embed migrant justice work within larger anticapitalist struggles, focusing specifically on the injustices that migrants experience as workers. A second approach focused on developing and advancing an anticapitalist agenda within core migrant justice campaigns around closing detention centers, providing emergency assistance, or fighting for less criminalizing policies.

While the two approaches were potentially complementary rather than contradictory, proponents of the first tended to downplay the specificity of the migrant experience, while proponents of the latter underscored the crucial significance of that specificity for both making sense of and resisting working-class precarity. Put differently, one emphasized a more universal working-class experience, whereas the other sought to build critical resistance from the particular experience of working-class migrants.

The first approach—viewing migrant justice as an integral part of the larger socialist struggle—called for seeing migrants as part of the international working class. One socialist organizer in Los Angeles even proposed avoiding the terms “immigrant” or “migrant” in favor of “worker”:

Recognizing that immigrants are workers—that means that much of the way that the immigration system is enforced is done because of the goals of continuing a permanent underclass of labor…From that analysis where we say this is an internationalist movement. This is something that we’re talking about, workers having the rights to move freely, workers not being persecuted because of their status.

Including undocumented immigrants in efforts to unionize workplaces, institute a living wage, or achieve universal healthcare coverage could also be seen as situating migrant justice within a larger anticapitalist struggle.

If capitalism thrives on the differentiation of workers, immigration status is but one dimension among many; one that may severely constrain workers and make them especially vulnerable to exploitation but that also articulates with and works alongside other forms of differentiation such as race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and so on.14Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition, rev. ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). As one organizer who was himself an immigrant and worked in New York City put it: “The right for eleven million [undocumented] people to have a union, to have a living wage, to have healthcare they want, that will mean big losses for corporations.”

Freedom of movement is something anticapitalists should want for all workers. It suggests a connection between anticapitalism and border abolition.

Thus, fighting for unions, a living wage, and healthcare for workers in general is a fight for migrant justice, while the fight for migrant justice, insofar as migrants are workers and immigration status constitutes a key lever in dividing workers from one another, is ultimately a fight for all workers. Migrant rights are a form of worker rights, and freedom of movement is something anticapitalists should want for all workers. In other words, an anticapitalist approach suggests a connection between anticapitalism and border abolition.

In the words of another New York City-based organizer and legal services provider, “Borders anywhere undermine the fight for workers’ rights everywhere. Because if there is a world without borders, there would be no outsourcing of jobs to countries in which labor standards are lower and people can be exploited without as much scrutiny.”

At the same time as positioning migrants as members of the larger working-class struggle, the anticapitalist organizers we spoke with also highlighted the anticapitalist angles of core migrant justice campaigns, such as anti-detention work. After all, a key component in fighting to close immigrant detention centers across the United States has been analysis of capitalist profiteering through immigrant detention.

Although a focus on profit alone can be limiting, some organizers saw it as an anticapitalist tool for migrant justice organizing. Similarly, in rural migrant justice work focused on farmworker conditions, organizers pointed to an essential anticapitalist component of the work that connects migrant control to the precarity of labor.

Specifically, one rural organizer explained that capital is “continuously looking for ways to make a buck. If it can make a buck by hiring cheaper labor, it’ll do that. And if that means children, it’ll advocate to do that. It’ll advocate for tremendously unethical, dehumanizing things.”

In speaking to their anticapitalist visions, migrant justice organizers we interviewed often stressed the importance of recognizing that the root causes of migration are US imperialism and capitalism. They saw this analysis as not central enough to the mainstream immigrant rights movement. “You can’t actually talk about the problems that made them come here in the first place,” lamented one organizer. “A majority of people who are here do not want to be here.”

This reflection emphasizes the lack of options that many migrants feel in the face of, as another organizer put it, “economic forces that were out of your control because of destabilization in Latin America and other parts of the world.” If such analysis and recognition is not in itself sufficient to make the movement truly anticapitalist, it is nonetheless an important step in that direction.

Relatedly, organizers stressed the role of borders in maintaining the capitalist system. For instance, a healthcare organizer who works on the US–Mexico border spoke of how militarized borders enable resource extraction and corporate profit through racialization: “[There are] all of these different aspects of why anticapitalism and the border intersect, not the least of which is the very basic valuation of one’s body and its relative relationship to race versus other.”

Here, they are pointing to the essential role of hierarchical classification in fueling capitalist extraction, including race and immigration status. A legal services provider agreed, arguing that “white supremacy has underwritten every aspect of our immigration policy since our founding.”

In a more optimistic take, this organizer went on to suggest that the close connection between borders and exploitation meant that there was also a natural affinity between socialism and migrant justice: “There’s really a natural connection between immigrant justice organizing and socialist organizing—especially because borders anywhere undermine the fight for workers’ rights everywhere—because if there were a world without borders, there would be no outsourcing of jobs to countries in which labor standards are lower and people can be exploited without as much scrutiny.” The most common refrain among our interviewees was the imperative to undertake concerted political education.

Organizers expressed a need to foster a new common sense around the causes of migration, the motivations of those who undertake these perilous journeys, and the potential points of solidarity between US-born citizens and migrants, whether documented or not. Several bemoaned what they felt were persistent misunderstandings, certainly on the political right but even on the nominal left, about the causes and character of migration.

One organizer working on immigrant detention campaigns across the United States recalled that “there was this whole period of time in the movement where we weren’t allowed to talk about root causes of migration. Because that doesn’t poll well. You’re just like, well, what are we doing then? Like what are we talking about?” Organizers called for political education as a corrective to nonprofits’ blinkered focus on post-migration conditions and streamlined stories of immigrant suffering and American dreams.

What are some potential resources and guidelines for organizing outside the framework of the nonprofit industrial complex? Several organizers stressed that they drew inspiration from movements in other times and places, often those deeply familiar with the forces displacing migrants in the first place. These include, for example, revolutionary Salvadoran political culture, the strategic and tactical orientation of the Zapatista movement, or a rank-and-file approach to organizing that reflects the principles and practices of the Communist movement during the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.

A common thread that runs through each of these traditions, and one that several organizers emphasized, is the importance of a holistic approach that grasps the living connection between aspects of life—home, workplace, and community—which can be tempting to separate, analytically and politically. One organizer, who happened to be undocumented, articulated the need to connect workplace and community organizing: “How much is your rent? What neighborhood do you live in? Is it going through gentrification? Do you live with people from your country?”

Grasping the contours of life as it is actually lived is key to winning trust and building capacities, creating new organizers instead of passive recipients of services. But this requires significant investments of time that may not be possible in a service model that does not rely on organic ties to immigrant communities.

“As an American, [if] you want to be able to organize the immigrants, you have to spend time in their daily life. Eating with them, going to the places that they go, and being part of more of their daily life,” urged this organizer. This means breaking down the separation that frequently emerges between professional, paid organizers and the “clients” that they are trying to help:

Many times you can create this separation between, “I am the organized person and you are the one who needs help,” and that makes nothing, [a] not very deep relationship…American people who want to organize have to be part of the immigrant community…to change and to encourage people, you need to know them deeply, to know what are their problems, the limits, the fears. What are the things that motivate them to fight?

Transformative organizing is not only about connecting different parts of people’s lives, but also different oppressive systems. This is where anticapitalist analysis becomes crucial for developing alternative approaches that push beyond the donor-funded service model.

One organizer working with immigrant communities in the northeast pointed out that organizing to build worker power has the potential to bring about systemic change, but there is a temptation and a structural tendency to artificially segregate struggles: “I think that sometimes it is very easy for us to start siloing ourselves by issues or by different political contingencies rather than recognizing that this is people versus capital.”

They illustrated the point by drawing connections between the policing of Black and immigrant communities, processes which converge in the heavy policing, arrest, and deportation of African and Haitian immigrants. There is a fundamental similarity across these groups:

This is about those who are basically selling their labor in order to live and those who control capital. Well, that’s the relation. Then we don’t really need to be going off of this is what a Latino is, this is what an immigrant is, this is what a model immigrant is. We really need to recognize who is being exploited and for what reasons are they being exploited. And how do they build power?

Awareness of revolutionary traditions both inside and outside the United States has the potential to broaden political imaginations, offering organizers a toolkit that might be adapted to contemporary conditions.

Such political education can foster an awareness of one’s position in a historical lineage of revolutionary struggle, a potential counter to the amnesia that accompanies the regular destruction of left organizations in the United States, and an anchor in the face of the forces of cooptation that can overwhelm young organizers. An organizer focused on fighting immigrant surveillance systems noted:

The Wobblies had a really good idea, right? Multiracial organizing at the point of production on these critical industries during wartime really pissed off the US government. And when you piss off the US government, you know that you’re getting at the heart of something. So, that’s another piece of the strategy. I would also say that it has to be a strategy that’s transnational in its understanding of power. So, one that isn’t contained by capitalism as it operates just within the United States, but also how it relates to empire and historical colonial relationships.

The strategies and techniques employed by past movements can help contribute to a political imagination unbound by the short-term exigencies of crisis management or the vagaries of the nonprofit donor cycle. Suppressed organizing traditions may offer insights into sustainable organizing in the face of complexity and trauma.

The anticapitalist organizers we interviewed ranged in age, but almost everyone traced the influence of different struggles of their youth on their political trajectories, from solidarity work with Central American leftists to IMF battles to Zapatista organizing structures. The tactics and legacies of these historical struggles, one organizer stressed, were brought to bear in significant ways on previous upsurges of migrant justice organizing, especially the movements in Southern California during the 1990s and early 2000s. Could they be reactivated by a new generation of organizers?

Anticapitalism in Trumpist America

The second Trump administration promises to amplify the obstacles to anticapitalist politics that our interviewees highlighted. On the one hand, it will likely exacerbate the permanent emergency that defines the lives of many migrants in the United States, both in terms of policies that target migrants directly and an intensified immiseration of the working class as a whole.

Immigration enforcement has been steady or increased over the past forty years, persisting across both Republican and Democratic administrations, including Biden’s. Nonetheless, we anticipate a heightened emphasis on the deportation regime, as we witnessed during the first Trump administration. On the other hand, Trump’s presidency will almost surely invigorate the centrist elements of the immigrant rights movement, which may experience a renewed sense of purpose and importance.

This will likely reinforce the reformist, service-oriented, and donor-funded approaches that currently dominate. In other words: if Trump’s second coming highlights immigration as a central issue, it is far from guaranteed that this will lead to a radicalization of the response from the institutional left. If anything, the opposite is more likely. And we can expect that the active suppression and erasure of leftist critiques will continue and intensify.

Anticapitalist organizers, such as those we talked to, will likely have to work especially hard to promote a radical message. In doing so they may confront another challenge: negotiating the tension between universalist and more targeted approaches. This is a longstanding dilemma for the Left.

Will the crises generated by Trump’s anti-immigrant onslaughts encourage solidarity or sectarianism?

Within the migrant justice movement, some anticapitalist organizers prefer to subsume migrant justice struggles within a broader socialist or working-class movement, while others believe that the strength of the latter depends on recognizing the specificity of the former. As we noted above, these positions are not necessarily irreconcilable, as each of the identities they emphasize captures a real way that migrants experience the world.

Whether they become incompatible or complementary will depend on the work that organizers do on the ground, for example through their messaging or concrete efforts of solidarity. If dogmatic approaches prevail over a sense of common humanity and a common struggle, then universalist and targeted approaches could pull activists in divergent directions.

Will the crises generated by Trump’s anti-immigrant onslaughts and the NGOism that emerges to counteract them encourage solidarity or sectarianism? One possible way forward is to embrace the kernel of truth in both positions. Chandra Talpade Mohanty hints at such an approach in her call for cross-national feminist solidarity, which emphasizes “common differences.”

This approach, she argues, “requires understanding the historical and experiential specificities and differences of women’s lives as well as the historical and experiential connections between women from different national, racial, and cultural communities.”15Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2022): 522. For the migrant justice movement, this would mean recognizing both the specific experiences of vulnerable migrants, as well as the connections between their own precarious experiences and the precarity of US-born, working-class Americans.

Such a dual approach lies at the heart of deepening anticapitalist organizing within migrant just struggles. While the increasingly chaotic character of American political life makes detailed predictions a thorny question, we can detect in the Trump administration’s recent executive orders a renewed emphasis on dividing the immigrant working class into good and bad, law-abiding and criminal, deserving and undeserving.

While this may be a mere prelude to broader assaults on migrants more generally, one challenge for migrant justice organizers with an anticapitalist orientation will be to navigate these attacks without resorting, as contemporary nonprofits are prone to do, to a mirror image that emphasizes deservingness on terms established by those who in the end care little for the welfare of migrants.

Consenting to play on the rhetorical terrain established by those who ultimately hope to keep migrants powerless sets organizers up for a losing battle—one that avoids real questions about how animus towards migrants is encouraged as part of the “wages of whiteness” offered to an increasingly precarious white working class afraid of falling further. ×

  1. Socialist organizations included, among others, the International Socialist Organization, Socialist Workers’ Party, Freedom Socialist Party, and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER); the latter was closely tied to the Party of Socialism and Liberation and the Workers’ World Party. Jesse Diaz, “Organizing the Brown Tide: La Gran Epoca Primavera 2006, an Insider’s Story,” PhD Thesis, University of California, Riverside, 2010.
  2. Kevin Escudero, Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Political Activism under the Law (New York: NYU Press, 2020); Walter Nicholls, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
  3. Marcel Paret, Sofya Aptekar and Shannon Gleeson, “Capitalism and the Immigrant Rights Movement in the United States,” Socialism and Democracy 34, no. 1 (2020): 180–205.
  4. Siddhant Issar, “Listening to Black Lives Matter: Racial Capitalism and the Critique of Neoliberalism,” Contemporary Political Theory 20, no. 1 (2021): 48–71.
  5. Pew Research Center, “Modest Declines in Positive Views of ‘Socialism’ and ‘Capitalism’ in US,” September 19, 2022.
  6. Alfonso Gonzales, Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
  7. Gonzales, Reform Without Justice.
  8. Muzaffar Chishti, Sarah Pierce and Jessica Bolter, “The Obama Record on Deportations: Deporter in Chief or Not?” Policy Beat, Washington, D.C.: Migration Policy Institute, 2017.
  9. Marcel Paret, “Legality and Exploitation: Immigration Enforcement and the US Migrant Labor System,” Latino Studies 12, no. 4 (2014): 515–8; Leisy Abrego et al., “Making Immigrants into Criminals: Legal Processes of Criminalization in the Post-IIRIRA Era,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 5, no. 3 (2017): 694–715; Ming Hsu Chen, Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).
  10. Nicole Kreisberg, Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson, “Explaining Refugee Employment Declines: Structural Shortcomings in Federal Resettlement Support,” Social Problems 71, no. 1 (2024): 271–90.
  11. Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
  12. Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan, “Carceral Non-Profits and the Limits of Prison Reform,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 20, no. 6 (2021): 597–617.
  13. Shannon Gleeson and Prerna Sampat, “Immigrant Resistance in the Age of Trump,” New Labor Forum 27, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 86–95.
  14. Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition, rev. ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018).
  15. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2022): 522.
SHARE
the marginality of anticapitalist perspectives within the immigrant rights movement is not necessarily surprising. Despite this rather bleak state of left affairs, however, there is cause for hope in the favorable attitudes towards socialism among young adults.

Please Log In

You must be a subscriber to access articles from the print issue.

Not a subscriber yet?

Create an Account

Please Log In

You must be a subscriber to access articles from the print issue.

Not a subscriber yet?

Create an Account

HELLO, COMRADE

While logged in, you may access all print issues.

If you’d like to log out, click here:

NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DETAILS?

Support our Work

Gift Subscriptions, Renewals, and More