While I should be enjoying summer break, I’ve regrettably been made aware that current online discourse is once again focused on migrant workers and their position in Western society.
The debate is taking place on the aggressively Nazi website X.com (formerly Twitter, formerly entertaining) and is centred around the leaders of president-elect Donald Trump’s new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Readers may know Musk as the apartheid-era emerald mine heir who purchases ideas and inventions and pretends that they’re his own. Ramaswamy is a newer entrant to the public sphere – a Republican figure who became wealthy from pump-and-dumping stocks on an Alzheimer’s treatment which had already failed four clinical trials.
The argument began when far-right activist Laura Loomer lamented Trump’s appointment of venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence, due to Krishnan’s previous support for an increase in “high-skilled immigration.” This inevitably caused a rift between the base of the MAGA movement, who explicitly hate migrants of all backgrounds, and the tech-bro sect of MAGA, who are a stand-in for the capitalist class; also fine with hating migrants, but visibly reliant on exploiting Indian migrant labour to prop up their sector.
Things escalated when Ramaswamy posted a bizarre essay-length tweet blaming American culture, right down to the TV characters that they idolise, for apparent American mediocrity which requires harder working and smarter migrants to be brought in for advanced tech jobs. Musk echoed the sentiment.
Americans are well-accustomed to blaming Black culture for the ruthless oppression of Black people, but white Americans being told that they have a degenerate culture, by an Indian man no less, has sent them spiralling over the edge. Even their hero Elon Musk, who was supposed to help them fight the globalist elites, wants to replace them with the ‘unwashed’ Indian masses instead of putting Americans first! Heartbreaking.
The fallout is hilarious, but it reveals two very important points – the main one being that migrant workers are perhaps the greatest political football ever.
Politicians can say that they’re cracking down on migrant workers, but their capitalist backers, who we know really pull the strings, need migrant workers to maintain their entire economic system. It can’t function without them.
Not only did Western capitalism and colonialism entrench poverty in the Global South, and not only does it uphold this disparity through trillions in stolen wealth every year, it also requires the import of workers from Global South countries to meet its demand for a reserve army of labour and infinite GDP growth. These workers are subsequently demonised and scapegoated for political gain. So the ruling class gets it both ways. By stirring up fear and hatred toward migrant workers, politicians win votes, whilst also intimidating migrant workers against speaking up for fair wages and working conditions, thus driving down wages and conditions for all workers. It’s a pattern that spans the globe.
In the United Kingdom, the previous Conservative government spent NZD$1.5 billion on a highly-publicised deportation scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. A grand total of four people left, and did so voluntarily.
In Texas, half of all workers in the construction industry are undocumented, reporting lower wages and less safety training than their documented colleagues. The sector would completely collapse without them.
Even in Australia, the polling favourite to become the next prime minister, Peter Dutton, recently had to walk back his promise to cut migration due to pressure from the capitalist bosses. To compensate, he has now become even more anti-Indigenous and anti-Palestinian/Muslim.
This is where the contradictions between capitalism and nationalistic and xenophobic politics are laid bare. Capitalism thrives on artificial divisions between workers (in this case migrant vs. non-migrant) driving wages down and preventing solidarity which could actually threaten the bosses. Nationalists and xenophobes use these divisions to try and explain capitalism’s stagnation or decline in people’s living standards, and talk a big game about a mythical return to tradition or crackdown on migrants. But, as they are beholden to capitalism and its logic of expansion and exploitation, they never actually change that dynamic and never will. It’s a fairytale, it’s a sham, and it’s a distraction from the true cause of social ills – capitalism.
As these sects of the political right butt heads over the theatre of hating migrants, our role as socialists continues to be to reject these nonsense arguments wholesale. We reject these manufactured divisions between workers, which are based on manufactured borders between capitalists. We support all workers in their struggle for fair wages and working conditions.
The secondary point illustrated in this round of online discourse is more just personally grating for me than anything else. It is that no matter how much immigrants, in particular upper-caste Hindus, kiss up to demagogues on the political right and proclaim that they’re ‘one of the good ones’, they will never be part of the team. You can delude yourself into thinking that your wealth and sycophancy will insulate you from the bigotry that you align yourself with, but when that bigotry runs out of other targets, it will turn to you – the brown man in the clown suit. Enjoy!
