The Harris and Trump campaigns are competing with each other to be seen as the one who will be more anti-immigrant. While Trump has touted ludicrous, racist and completely false horror stories about immigrants, Harris is staking her campaign on “border security”: the militarization of the border and deportation of immigrants. Her campaign has released ads, filled with cops and border patrol agents, bragging about her role in backing “the toughest border control bill in decades.”
Trump’s promise: mass deportation
Trump’s platform on immigration is horrific. His platform promises that he will carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” If enacted, this would include the massive use of police and military personnel to conduct state violence on marginalized communities. Trump also promises to end a variety of rights for undocumented immigrants, including due process and birthright citizenship.
In his platform, Trump also promises to deport people for holding Pro-Palestinian views (whom he refers to as being “pro-Hamas radicals”), while advocating for other ideological screenings for aspiring immigrants. Finally, he promises full reinstatement of several of the anti-immigrant policies from his first term, like the border wall and the “Muslim ban,” the discriminatory travel ban on travelers from multiple Muslim-majority countries. Many of these policies were not actually ended after he left.
A Trump presidency would undoubtedly lead to major rollbacks of civil rights. Even if Trump is not elected, state governors such as Greg Abbott have unleashed racist police state terror through measures such as the SB4 “show me your papers” bill, signed into law last year.
Harris: outflanking Trump from the right?
Until recently, Harris had been mostly out of the public eye after her embarrassing 2021 anti-immigration tour to Central America, where she told immigrants: “Do not come … you will be turned back.” The callous language and tone of her pronouncement was one of the factors leading to her sidelining as a main face of the administration. Her rushed appointment to the presidential ticket after Biden dropped out has now brought her anti-immigrant history back into view.
The Harris campaign’s platform is comparatively sparse, but her rhetoric reveals goals and methods surprisingly similar to Trump’s. She routinely brags about backing a bipartisan anti-immigrant bill which her campaign ads call “the toughest border control bill in decades.” This bill would have allowed the federal government to “summarily deport migrants who enter between ports of entry without permitting them to apply for asylum” — in other words, a mass deportation of refugees that violates international law.
This bill was almost passed in February, but Trump used his power over the Republican Party to block the bill in the Senate, fearing that this would undercut his own immigration platform in the coming election. Harris has consistently promised to revive this bill once she enters the White House. In essence, Harris and Walz’s promise to the United States is that they will be more effective at enforcing Donald Trump’s racist border policies than Donald Trump.
Both corporate parties have swung to the far right on immigration
It’s not difficult to imagine what a Kamala Harris border policy would like: she has already presided over four years of the Biden-Harris border militarization. Most of the policies conducted by the first Trump administration were maintained and advanced under Biden. For instance, Biden continued building the highly unpopular and environmentally destructive border wall while conducting almost as many deportations as Trump. Nor have the many ICE detention facilities, once correctly denounced as cruel and inhumane by Democrats, been closed.
Harris and her wing of the ruling class prefer to lend bipartisan legitimacy to their anti-immigrant policies to contrast with Trump’s crudely racist platform, but the end result is the same.
The cause of the so-called “refugee crisis” is imperialism and capitalism. As the U.S. destabilizes much of the world with wars, sanctions, and coups against progressive government, and capitalism-driven climate change intensifies, millions of people will seek to flee the countries in the crosshairs. The most powerful weapon of the U.S. establishment has been divide-and-conquer tactics to scapegoat immigrants and refugees. As servants of the capitalist class, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are dedicated to this system.
What is truly needed is a united working-class, anti-imperialist movement that rejects this racist onslaught by both corporate parties. This must be united around a bold platform: a recognition that imperialist meddling is the cause of the refugee crisis, border militarization and deportations are an attack on human rights, and the real solution is to reinvest the almost trillion-dollar-per-year war budget into housing, healthcare, education, jobs, and environmental protection for all.
The socialist campaign of Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia is running on a platform of this type. The campaign has promised to end imperialist terror waged on the rest of the world by the U.S. empire, cutting the military budget by 90% and closing the over 800 military bases scattered by the United States around the planet. These crucial resources can then be reinvested back into society for the benefit of all. At the same time, De la Cruz and Garcia are running on the promise of full legal status and equal rights for all immigrants.
The Democrats and Republicans have shown that they are incapable of addressing the compounding crises facing working class Americans. They are out of ideas, and have resorted to age-old tactics of racist fear-mongering and working class division. It is precisely this vulgar, extreme swing to the right by the U.S. political establishment that makes the need to organize outside the narrow confines of these two corporate parties — building a truly independent people’s movement — so necessary.
