Cody Turner, Socialist Alternative (ISA in the United States)
(This article is by our sister organisation in the United States, Socialist Alternative, countering the racist migration policies of the Trump administration; it was first published on 15 March 2025)
Trump has only been in office for a month and a half, but we’ve already seen serious attacks on undocumented immigrants. His administration has used horrifying rhetoric to describe undocumented people as inhuman, naming them as the reason why US-born people across the country are struggling to get by. ICE is now permitted to go into schools, hospitals, and churches, which were previously off limits. Migrants being held at Guantanamo Bay report brutal conditions, and Trump has said he hopes to house as many as 30,000 people there.
While the most vehement attacks have come from Republicans, the immigration policies of both corporate parties have been drifting to the right over the past 30 years. In fact, it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who first started using Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants. Trump enacted Title 42 in his first term, and despite campaigning against it, Biden used Title 42 to remove almost three million migrants with valid asylum claims, in addition to deporting a total of 1.5 million.
Both parties are beholden to the billionaires, defend capitalism at all costs, and benefit from demonizing immigrants to divide workers while they profit off our backs. Below, we explain the truth behind some of the most common lies the right wing and the billionaires tell about immigrants.
Lie 1 – “Immigrants are stealing jobs”
This is the most common lie told by the right. As it stands, most of us work long hours and make too little while currently nearly seven million people are unemployed. But if we all worked less, we could employ all workers and use the gigantic profits of the billionaires to ensure no loss in pay. Bosses benefit from a reserve of unemployed workers in a similar way that they benefit from exploiting undocumented workers. Having a large number of workers desperate enough to work long hours in bad conditions for little pay means bosses can drive down wages and working conditions for everyone by threatening to replace or deport anyone who dares ask for more. Unions should be at the forefront of organizing undocumented immigrants and all workers to ensure well-paid union jobs for all, so that this divide-and-rule tactic of the bosses fails.
Lie 2 – “Immigration causes housing prices to go up”
Housing costs have skyrocketed over the past decade. Building affordable housing isn’t profitable for developers, which leaves working people to fight over the small amount left. Many workers must rent to be anywhere close to their job. Renters are spending more and more of their paychecks on rent, because landlords can jack up prices whenever they feel like it. Studies show that the increased cost of buying a house is not caused by immigration, but by low supply, fluctuations in interest rates, and developers’ greed. Immigrants have to deal with this too, and have the added layer of knowing their landlord can call ICE if they step out of line. We need universal rent control, and we need to tax the bloated developers and corporate landlords to fund a massive increase in high-quality, permanently-affordable housing so that there are enough homes for everyone, including immigrants.
Lie 3 – “Immigrants get free healthcare but don’t pay taxes”
All immigrants pay sales tax and documented immigrants pay income taxes like everyone else. Undocumented immigrants don’t have a clear path to pay income tax, but many find ways to do so anyway, to the tune of $97 billion in 2022.
The U.S. healthcare system is out of reach for tens of millions of people, but that’s not because of immigrants. Under this for-profit healthcare system, insurance and pharmaceutical companies make massive profits by denying us care and charging us insane rates for treatments needed to survive. It’s hard enough to access healthcare with insurance, but many immigrants lack even that. Undocumented immigrants are routinely denied care or forced to go to the ER and pay the highest prices possible. The only ones making it harder for all of us to access the healthcare we need are the soulless healthcare executives who would rather watch us die—immigrant or not—than lose a penny in profits. We need to fight for free, universal healthcare for all, paid for by taxing the rich.
Lie 4 – “Immigrants are criminals”
The crime rate among immigrants is actually far below that of U.S. citizens. More importantly, this lie is part of a bigger lie that the worst crimes are committed by poor people and people of color, and that the right protects you from them. Poverty-driven crime is a result of capitalism, which creates such dire conditions that people don’t have any other option to survive. At the same time Trump filled his cabinet with sex offenders and snake oil salesmen who have made billions by exploiting our labor and evading taxes. The legal system in the U.S. was created to protect the rich, but Trump and his cronies break even those laws for the goal of maximum profits at the expense of workers.
Lie 5 – “Immigrants don’t belong here; they’re not like us”
Last year, Vice President J.D. Vance told the outrageous lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs. This is the latest and perhaps most extreme version of the lie that the cultural identity of immigrants is at odds with U.S.-born workers. Cultural differences exist between all workers, but we have far more in common than we have differences. For starters, workers everywhere share a common enemy: the bosses of every country who seek to exploit us and make us suffer for the sake of their profits.
All these lies serve to further divide workers so bosses can isolate us and drive down wages and working conditions. For workers across the globe, an injury to one is an injury to all. But the reverse is also true. A victory for one is a victory for all. We must fight the bosses’ divide-and-rule tactics, and for a socialist world and a better life for all.
