Who Benefits From "Disruptive Immigration"?

An answer to a reader's important question

In my previous essay, The Immigrant Crisis, a reader asked a question about the following passage:

…worse than either of them is the neoliberal capitalist center, those who profit from both the displacement that causes immigration and also the societal breakdown that mass immigration causes.

She asked:

Who is profiting from the displacement and from the societal break down? Maybe it's obvious, and I have some hunches, but I'm curious of specifics in regards to immigration. Big tech? Landlords?...

Upon seeing her question, I realized that the answer probably isn’t so obvious as it once was. The weaponization of immigration used to be core analysis of the left, but that left doesn’t really exist any longer. It’s been fully replaced by (neo-)liberal social justice theories, and the few of us still hewing to these older analyses are smeared as anachronisms at best or covert fascists at worst.

So, I wanted to give a longer response here. This will probably also benefit everyone, regardless of whether you’ve read the essay or not (though, do please consider reading it — I think it’s one of my more beautiful recent pieces).

Downward wage pressure means higher profit margins for all employers

First of all, immigrants exert a downward pressure on wages. Immigration — both in its “legal” and “illegal” forms — increases the number of available workers in a place, and the most basic economic rule, “supply and demand,” applies not just to prices of products, raw materials, and rents, but also to the price of labor.

When there are a lot of available workers, bosses can hire them for less. When there are not many workers available, the wages those workers can demand for their time increases. That’s why no capitalist government would ever want full employment in their nation. In fact, high unemployment is very beneficial to the capitalists, as long as it doesn’t reach such a point that no one can afford to buy what the capitalists are selling to them.

If you’ve read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, you’ll be aware of one of the most catastrophic historical moments for the owning classes in recent history. That was the Black Death, which wiped out 30%-60% of the population of Europe. The perverse result of this was that surviving feudal peasants were suddenly in positions of great power. The surviving feudal lords suddenly had to negotiate with those peasants, give them more rights and fewer tariffs.

This is why capitalists love immigration. It’s an easy way to reduce the collective power of workers by increasing their numbers. Those workers compete with each other, essentially bidding down wages. Each becomes more willing to take a job for less money than they’d prefer, and these lower labor costs then increase the profit margin of the capitalists.

Upward price pressure on housing benefits banks, developers, and landlords

Again, remembering the law of supply and demand, an increase in population increases the demand for housing. This raises the cost of rents and of homes for everyone, and therefore increases the profits of landlords, developers, and the banks who finance housing sales.

This probably doesn’t require too much explanation, since every one of my readers from the United States and the United Kingdom has likely already experienced the out-of-control inflation of home and apartment prices. But what’s also important to understand is how these increasing costs affect the rest of the lives of workers.

Many people find themselves forced into living outside of cities and commuting long distances to work. Especially if you have or would like children, this is often the only way to afford being a family. Here in Luxembourg, most people wait until they have secured a home to have children, and because homes are so expensive (1.3 million on average), they often cannot afford to have a child until they’re in the mid-30’s.

This is one of the roots of the “demographic crisis” in Europe, by the way. Most people who are actually from here cannot afford to have kids and therefore choose not to. But this then reduces the amount of available workers in a country (and remember, fewer workers means higher wages), and so the capitalists urge the government to replace those missing future workers with people from outside the country.

Immigrants are easier to exploit, thus reducing workplace gains for everyone

Maybe you already know that I worked in restaurants much of my life, and I was able to see this process directly. Restaurant owners rely heavily on both legal and illegal immigrants to run their establishments, especially to do some of the worst kinds of work like dish washing. The same goes for other industries like hotels, meatpacking, construction, and especially for agriculture. The kinds of physical work required to do those jobs and the constant injuries the workers incur are quite substantial.

In a fair society, the wages you’d get from doing dangerous or physically harmful work would be quite high to compensate for those risks and injuries. But that kind of fair society is only created through organized worker pressure. When workers collectively refuse to accept low wages and unsafe working conditions, the bosses are forced to change those conditions and to pay more.

But imagine you’re an immigrant, desperate to find work. You’re quite likely to take jobs that others would not, and also to not complain about those conditions. And if there is a steady enough supply of immigrants like you, entire industries can avoid ever changing those working conditions.

When workers say that “immigrants are taking our jobs,” liberals usually smugly answer with “they’re doing the work you won’t do.” And the liberals are right to a degree: no empowered worker would take those jobs under those conditions and for such little pay. But immigrants have less power, and so therefore they can be more easily forced into such work.

Social dissolution is necessary for increased capitalist profit …

The parts of The Communist Manifesto where Marx described the bourgeoisie’s transformation of society are really worth a read, regardless of whether you are interested in Marx or not. I named my book on Marxism — and the course I instruct on that book — after one of the phrases from it, “all that is sacred is profaned.”

Here’s the entire paragraph where that line is from (don’t worry if you don’t immediately understand it):

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

What Marx is describing is not just the effects of capitalism, but also the mechanism by which capitalism is able to continue. Capitalism disrupts society and dissolves social relations in order to constantly create new means of profit and to reproduce itself.

People rooted in close-knit communities which produce most of what they need — both economically and socially — are the most resistant to capitalist exploitation. If you look at the happiest times of your life, when you felt most connected to the place you lived and to your family, friends, and neighbors, you’ll probably notice these were also the times when you weren’t spending a lot of money buying things you didn’t need. On the other hand, times when you felt least connected were probably also times you were spending a lot of money on entertainment, alcohol, restaurants, and other purchases to try to make up for that feeling of disconnection.

Expand this observation on a larger scale and you’ll notice that social disconnection is one of the key drivers of economic “growth.” The more alienated people feel from their communities, the more likely they are to try to fill that void through consumption.

The “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” which Marx described is a necessary engine of capitalism. What I’ve called “disruptive immigration” is increasingly becoming a reliable fuel to run that engine.

Of course, it’s not the fault of the immigrants that such disruption occurs. As I said in the previous essay:

“When a large group of us (remember — I’m an immigrant) move into a place, we will change it no matter whether we want to or not.

It’s not our fault, but it’s our effect regardless. And the disruption we cause increases the feeling of alienation within the communities into which we move, making the people already there feel as if they no longer recognize the place or are even at home there. This leads them to seek that social connection through increased consumption.

… and also for increased acceptance of state control

And this brings us to one of the most infuriating results of the recent manifestations in England. The U.K. government has been using the violence of the protests as a justification for implementing even more authoritarian surveillance and civil disorder laws.

For instance, here’s Keir Starmer gleefully describing these expansions:

“We will establish a national capability across police forces to tackle violent disorder. These thugs are mobile, they move from community to community. We must have a policing response that can do the same. Shared intelligence, wider deployment of facial recognition technology and preventative action, criminal behaviour orders to restrict their movements, before they can even board a train. In just the same way that we do with football hooligans.”

But before you get the idea that such a thing is justified in light of the political allegiances of some of the “thugs,” I’d suggest you recall the way both liberal and conservative governments in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States justified these very same increases in response to violence from Islamic terrorists.

If you’re not old enough to remember the PATRIOT Act in the United States, maybe you’re old enough to remember François Hollande’s repeated renewals of a state of emergency in France justifying extraordinary surveillance power after a truck plowed through a busy street in Nice:

“The new emergency law gives the police power to carry out searches without the approval of a judge, a measure that lawmakers had let lapse when they last renewed the state of emergency. It expands that power by allowing the police to carry out an immediate “follow-up” raid if they find information about another location frequented by the person who is the target of the search.

The new law also allows the police to seize data from computers and mobile phones, a power that the country’s highest legal authority had struck from an earlier version of the emergency law as unconstitutional. It gives the police a new power to search luggage and vehicles without judicial approval. In response to the Nice attack, it allows authorities to ban gatherings for which safety cannot be ensured. And it expands the list of meeting places that the local authorities can close without a judicial warrant to “particularly” include “places of worship where there are calls to hatred or violence, or provocation to commit terrorist acts or praising of such acts.”

Other countries have repeatedly done the same thing, using the fear of immigrant violence as a cover to seize extraordinary powers. In each of those instances, the population is often quite eager to accept these expansions of state power in order to guarantee their safety.

What the UK government is doing is no different. It’s just using a different immigrant-related disruption to justify new powers of surveillance, restrictions of movement, and direct punishments.

Of course, capitalists also benefit. Imagine the orgasmic thrill running through the bodies of every surveillance tech company whenever a government announces these expansions. And by the way, the UK government — like most governments in the world — doesn’t actually run its own web hosting or data management, and technologies like facial recognition require massive amounts of storage and retrieval infrastructure.

A final word

Again, I absolutely must re-iterate: immigrants are not the problem, but we cause problems nevertheless. If you have any doubts at all about my sentiment on this, read my previous essay.

And the situation of immigrants is really an awful one. They’re weaponized by the capitalists and the state, and often blamed for many problems they don’t actually cause.

Also, it’s especially important to remember that much of the instability of the countries from which immigrants come was caused by the capitalists in the first place. Take NAFTA, for example:

When NAFTA was drafted and implemented in 1994, supporters believed its established free-trade zone would stimulate economic growth and shrink wage disparities between the three participating countries.15 But the facts prove that such prediction did not work out. With regard to the increased immigration resulting from NAFTA, in 1995, there were 2.5 million Mexican illegal immigrants in the United States and by 2006 that number had almost quadrupled to eight million.

The same goes for the increasing global crisis of climate change, which will soon flood the borders of every capitalist nation even faster than it floods the coastal cities of Florida. This is a capitalist-caused crisis, just as capitalists are often at the root of many of the wars in the middle east and the constant political instability in the rest of the Global South, especially South and Central America.

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