The hypocrisy of immigration laws in the United States has been made strikingly obvious as Ukrainian refugees are welcomed at the US/Mexico border while those escaping violence in Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Syria, and other countries devastated by US imperialism are turned away, criminalized, and abused.
The Associated Press reported on April 8 that the US government “has sharply increased the number of Ukrainians admitted to the country at the Mexican border,” expediting their entry while thousands of migrants and refugees are held in overcrowded detention centers.
Meanwhile, thousands more asylum-seekers cannot cross into the United States because of a Donald Trump administration-era policy known as Title 42.
From March 2020 to February 2022, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported that more than 1.7 million expulsions of asylum-seekers were processed. Of those, 21,300 were children.
Since 2019, the US government has deported 9,900 children, while granting asylum to just 136 (0.6%).
This violence has continued under President Joe Biden. Human Rights First reported 9,886 attacks, including torture, kidnappings, and rape, targeting migrants who were denied or deported to Mexico due to the Title 42 rule in the first 14 months of the Biden administration.
The United States has sharply increased the number of Ukrainians admitted to the country at the Mexican border as even more refugees fleeing the Russian invasion follow the same circuitous route.https://t.co/50axfWuRDa
— KNX News 97.1 FM (@knxnews) April 8, 2022
Title 42 has subjected more than 20,000 children to the risk of serious harm. According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) data filed by US immigration courts, children make up about 30% of asylum-seekers. The vast majority – four out of five – of these minors have had no attorney.
This policy exposes the failures of the immigration court system, which is experiencing its most extensive backlog in history, in addition to a notorious lack of transparency, limited protections, and barriers to legal representation.
Title 42 is set to expire on May 23, after countless demonstrations and mounting pressure from the US public.

Immigrant families held in cages in an overcrowded US Border Patrol facility in Texas in June 2019 (Photo credit: DHS Office of Inspector General)
Imperialist wars in any part of the world do not help anyone, except Wall Street and arms contractors. Wars have long-lasting physical and mental health impacts that continue decades after the conflict.
Working-class communities suffer the most from these imperialist wars, enduring physical harm, disruption of the economy, erosion of health-care services, and destruction of infrastructure.
Anyone seeking asylum should be treated with dignity, no matter what country they are fleeing.
But immigration laws, like all laws, function as instruments of class power. And those laws often change to benefit the ruling class of a society.
US corporations are allowed to exploit the workforce of any country freely, but workers escaping brutal US wars and interventions are faced with severe repression from law enforcement.
This reflects capitalism’s internal process of institutional racism, which helps provide corporations with cheap, precarious labor.
In the United States, this racist exploitation is bipartisan. Under Trump, it got much more media attention. But it has continued under Biden, albeit with much less scrutiny.

Immigrant families detained in an overcrowded US Border Patrol facility in Texas in June 2019 (Photo credit: DHS Office of Inspector General)
New administration, same anti-immigrant policy
Kamala Harris visited Guatemala in June 2021. It was her first foreign trip as vice president of the United States, and she brought a clear message: “Do not come.”
In the first year of the Biden-Harris administration, US deportations of migrant children increased by 30%. At least 19,793 minors were deported to Mexico, 15,488 (78%) not accompanied by adults.
But by early 2022, the United States would be welcoming thousands of Ukrainians with open arms as they crossed the US-Mexico border.
This was certainly not the first time that the White House prioritized immigrants with “blue eyes and blond hair” over Central Americans, Mexicans, Asians, Arabs, and Africans.
Western corporate media coverage of Ukraine has gone full-on white nationalist, calling Ukrainians “civilized” white European Christians while whitewashing the US war on Iraq, bombing of Yemen, and Israeli attacks on Syrians & Palestinians
Read more here: https://t.co/YZCBzv4wXy pic.twitter.com/f4HZPOcaLz
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 28, 2022
In 2017, then-president Donald Trump signed an executive order banning people from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, and he suspended entry for all Syrian refugees indefinitely.
Then in 2018, Trump helped spark a national uprising against racism when he referred to El Salvador, Haiti, and African nations as “shithole countries.”
The former president also targeted 20 countries with visa overstays, all of which were non-white. Trump did this while openly saying he preferred immigrants from places like Norway.
These overtly racist policies recalled the US government’s past, when European immigrants entered Ellis Island and were treated significantly better than Mexican and Asian immigrants.
This racist legacy lives on in US immigration policy today, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
From essential workers to failed immigration promises
The Covid-19 pandemic had a particularly devastating impact on immigrants in the United States.
The virus has taken the lives of approximately 1 million people in the US, and the victims have disproportionately come from communities of color.
Immigrants who didn’t lose their lives in the pandemic have often been exploited as precarious workers.
Laborers in important industries including agriculture, food services, health, transit, retail, and the gig economy were labeled essential workers. These individuals are often paid poorly, and yet they risked their lives to keep the economy moving, so people could receive vital services and food to survive.
A report by the Center for American Progress highlights the significant contributions of the estimated 10.4 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, including 7 million undocumented workers, 5 million of whom are essential workers who kept the country afloat during this public health crisis.
These undocumented workers were on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic response, as home health professionals, personal care aides, custodial staff, farm workers, or construction laborers, among other critical jobs.
About 5 million undocumented immigrants form part of the essential workforce. Read more: https://t.co/dpWfWX9Q5Z
— CHIRLA (@CHIRLA) February 16, 2022
The US Department of Homeland Security has likewise stated that three in four undocumented workers are essential, totaling nearly 5 million.
Furthermore, 1.7 million of these undocumented immigrants work in the US food supply chain, with 358,000 food processors and farm workers and another 154,000 convenience store and grocery store workers.
Beyond what they do to keep this country moving, undocumented workers make significant contributions to the economy through taxes.
The American Immigration Council reported that, in 2016, undocumented workers paid $7 billion in sales taxes, $1.1 billion in income taxes, and $3.6 billion in property taxes.
Undocumented immigrants also own 1.6 million homes across the United States, paying banks $20.6 billion for their mortgages every year. This is in addition to those who pay $49.1 billion in rent annually to a landlord.
These undocumented families hold an estimated $314.9 billion in spending power. Yet, immigrants face daily harassment from law enforcement and the government, on top of all of this work.
Joe Biden promised a “fair, orderly, and humane immigration system” on the presidential campaign trail.
Biden vowed to stop all deportations in his first 100 days. But a federal judge blocked a moratorium because it violated INA section 1231(a)(1)(A), which states that illegal “aliens” “shall” be removed within 90 days. This allowed the deportation machine to continue.
In 2018, Trump ended the Central American Minors (CAM) program, which helps immigrant parents in the US request refugee status for their children in their home countries. Biden restarted CAM, but did not make it available to more families.
Biden pledged to end for-profit prisons, but is instead expanding the Folkston ICE Processing Center in Georgia, making it the nation’s largest facility by adding 1,800 beds.
Before Biden took office, data showed a 20-year low with 14,000 people detained by ICE. Today, approximately 22,000 people are in detention.
Biden’s budget request is also boosting funding for ICE, giving the infamously abusive agency $8 billion, $312 million higher than the Trump-era average.
Joe Biden’s budget proposal increases funding for ICE:https://t.co/6o8gVPo67C pic.twitter.com/zXUb91gtR4
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) June 1, 2021
Ukrainians are embraced, victims of US imperialism are demonized and ignored
While immigrants in the United States are abused and criminalized, and people trying to seek asylum in the country are turned away, the war in Ukraine receives wall-to-wall media coverage.
This imperial hypocrisy over Ukraine is staggering in comparison to the media’s relative silence over ongoing wars backed by the US government, such as the Saudi bombing campaign that has targeted the people of Yemen since March 2015.
At least 377,000 Yemenis have died in this US-backed war. Up to 19 million people in Yemen are food insecure, according to the World Food Program. 20.7 million need humanitarian assistance. 3.5 million are pregnant or breastfeeding women or children under the age of 5 suffering from acute malnutrition.
While there is mass suffering in Yemen, US weapons contractors bring in record profits.
We do not see the same wall-to-wall media coverage of Afghanistan either, where 13,000 newborns have died from malnutrition since January 2022. The United States seized Afghanistan’s central bank reserves, unleashing an economic crisis that threatens mass famine.
Whose lives the corporate media values above others reflects the political priorities of the US government.
The United Nations reports that there are 26.4 million refugees worldwide, and 82.4 million people have been forcibly displaced. Many of these originate from countries that the United States has illegally tried to destabilize and overthrow.
The largest group of refugees, at 6.7 million (27%), come from Syria. Since 2011, the US has waged a dirty war on Syria, spending billions of dollars arming and training extremist militants aimed at violently toppling its government. Still today, US troops illegally occupy one-third of Syrian sovereign territory, in the area that happens to have much of the country’s oil and wheat.
The second-biggest group of refugees, at 4 million (16%), come from Venezuela, where the US has failed in many coup attempts to overthrow the democratically elected leftist government. Washington’s deadly and illegal sanctions caused the deaths of at least 40,000 Venezuelan civilians from 2017 to 2018, and unleashed an economic crisis that fueled much of this mass migration.
The third-largest group of refugees, at 2.6 million (11%), come from Afghanistan, where the US invasion killed hundreds of thousands of people in a 20-year war and military occupation. In 2019 alone, the US military dropped 7,423 bombs on Afghanistan. Today Washington freezes the country’s assets, starving its people.
The fourth-biggest group of refugees, at 2.2 million (9%), come from South Sudan, a region that continues to suffer from imperialist interventions.
The fifth-largest group of refugees, at 1.1 million (5%), come from Myanmar, where Washington has meddled as well.
For decades, there have also consistently been millions of Palestinian refugees worldwide. Today there are more than 7 million. But they are often excluded from the total count of refugees and thus invisibilized, because their families were ethnically cleansed and expelled by Israel and have been prevented from returning.
US immigration law was founded on racism
The extreme violence that refugees and immigrants endure at the hands of the US government today has its roots in Washington’s explicitly racist laws.
The first bill the US Congress passed regarding citizenship was the 1790 Nationality Act. This confined citizenship to “free white persons.”
Only white men who owned property and resided in the country for two years could acquire this vital right. Women, non-white people, and indentured servants were not considered citizens.
The Nationality Act created the legal classification of “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” As a result, Asian immigrants who came to the United States to work did not have rights, making it difficult for them to own property or get representation in courts.
White males who did not own property won the right to vote on a state-by-state basis. Women did not get the right to vote until 1920. Black Americans did not truly have their right to vote protected until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These racist immigration laws similarly have their roots in slavery.
The first English slave ship to arrive to North America hit the shores of Jamestown, Virginia in August 1619. People of African descent were viciously enslaved by the white ruling class for 246 years after. Today, the long-term effects of slavery are still felt in the United States.
In 1857, the US Supreme Court upheld the policy to deny Africans the right to become a citizen, with the Dred Scott decision. As a result, the justice system ruled that people of African descent were “beings of an inferior order” and subjugated by the dominant race, whether emancipated or not.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, after Chinese workers built vast tracts of the US railroad system, allowing corporations to trade from coast to coast to grow their wealth. Despite their contribution to the country, the law blocked Chinese workers on US soil from being eligible for citizenship.
A few decades years later, Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, which gave preferential treatment to “desirable races” of Western Europe over those migrating from the Global South.
Growing resistance to US abuse of migrants
More and more people in the United States are learning about this racist history and its impact on politics today. And they are taking action to try to change it.
In 2021, there was a wave of protests in California, after Governor Gavin Newsome vetoed Assembly Bill 616, which would have made it easier for farm workers to form a union. Hundreds marched to Plump Jack winery, which Newsome owns.
United Farm Workers (UFW) also held a large march in 2021 in Washington, DC, bringing thousands of farm workers from 10 US states together to demand a path to citizenship.
Workers at grocery stores across the United States are currently on the verge of a strike as well.
Presente!
Let's march for legalization, now is the time, this is the year, we can't wait.
Pass legalization for farm workers, dreamers, TPS holders, and essential workers. #SiSePuede pic.twitter.com/vul4dysGKp
— UFW Foundation (@ufwfoundation) September 21, 2021
Undocumented workers play an essential role in the US economy. Their financial contributions and labor power should encourage the Biden administration and Congress to provide them a path to legalization.
Instead, the government has continued to fail the working class, and undocumented workers in particular.
Washington’s favored treatment of some Ukrainians over other refugees and migrants demonstrates how immigration policy is used as a weapon against the undocumented community.
All workers escaping violence and war should be treated with dignity and respect, and given the resources to establish a new life, not be used to push an imperialist agenda.

rich daniels
2023-04-01 at 10:59
Good article. At a certain level of generality, it illustrates Marx’s notion of the reserve army of the unemployed, detailed especially in later sections of CVI.