The first group of immigrants arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Feb. 5 as part of President Donald Trump’s several executive orders aimed at enforcing immigration policies. Trump has announced plans to send 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo Bay, a detention camp notorious for torture and brutal conditions under the CIA, where Al Qaeda suspects were once held.
Trump’s executive order solidifies a strategically planted campaign to dehumanize and criminalize immigrants. We have witnessed a campaign of fear mongering by the right, accusing immigrants of bringing crime and drugs and stealing jobs. Our government has turned immigrants into scapegoats for societal problems. They have become the common enemy people blame for the issues plaguing our society.
Meanwhile, the true enemy has been our capitalist system.
Targeting immigrants to avoid addressing the failures of capitalism isn’t new. Nativism arose during the Gilded Age when nativists feared immigrants would steal their jobs and threaten the status quo. As a result, the United States enacted anti-immigration policies to limit their entry. The Gilded Age was characterized by significant wealth inequality, with the working class experiencing frustration over low wages and poor working conditions in factories.
Nativists felt intense competition due to the struggle for survival, stemming from long working hours and poor pay, essentially fostering a survival mentality. When people are unhappy, they start looking for someone to blame.
Social Darwinism, a capitalist ideal prominent at the time, argued that only the “fittest” survive and climb up the social ladder. These capitalist ideals, which prioritize the individual over the community, contributed to competition and resentment within the working class, making immigrants an easy target for projecting frustrations over the capitalist state.
Immigrants become the scapegoat because of their perceived outsider status. It is much easier to point the finger at someone right in front of you than to confront issues embedded within our systems and institutions, such as wealth equality, which is not as easily spotted.
Confronting capitalistic failures becomes especially difficult when the government upholds them, as seen with laissez-faire policies in the Gilded Age that minimized the government’s role in the economy or today with the nation’s oligarchical state.
Fast forward to today where some claim we are in a second Gilded Age. It is clear that the U.S. government is attempting to divert and distract us from increasing inflation, the growing wealth divide and the country’s direction toward oligarchy by enacting a campaign against immigrants. Immigrants have essentially become a punching bag, with the government using them to misdirect the blame for capitalism’s failures.
Most problems attributed to immigrants are the result of a broken system. For instance, one common misconception of immigrants is their association with crime. The Republican National Committee created a website, BidenBloodbath.com, blaming former President Joe Biden for failing to protect communities against immigrants in the country illegally who, they claim, were bringing in crime and drugs. However, a 2020 study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that immigrants were 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born individuals.
One must analyze the system that prevents us from tackling the increase in violent crimes. For example, the prison-industrial complex has turned prisoners into a for-profit machine, with inmates being forced to work for little to no pay to benefit companies like McDonald’s. This modern-day form of slavery, along with the violent conditions in prisons, prioritizes punishment over rehabilitation. Without formal reintegration into society and with factors like poverty drawing people to violence, it becomes clear that the rise in violent crime is a result of systemic failures. Immigrants share none of this blame.
Immigrants are also frequently blamed for stealing jobs while simultaneously abusing the welfare system. Under the Biden administration, New York City faced intense criticism for giving migrants prepaid cards for basic living expenses, with Fox News claiming that Americans can barely afford housing while migrants receive government support. This anti-immigrant sentiment, tied to Americans’ economic struggles, is not in any way the result of immigrants’ actions but rather the outcome of a system that fosters wealth inequality and forces people to live paycheck to paycheck. It should be even clearer after seeing billionaires sitting in the front row at Trump’s presidential inauguration, whose interests the government is more focused on protecting. The truth is, the rich are getting richer while the working class is left to fight over limited resources.
When it comes to immigration discourse, the debate often centers on who is receiving what and whether it is fair. Anti-immigrant individuals argue that immigrants threaten Americans’ economic opportunities or take the resources that citizens lack, such as the aforementioned prepaid cards or the belief that they steal jobs. However, the real issue is not who is getting what but why our government fails to meet the basic needs of everyone. The focus should be on ensuring equal resources for all, regardless of citizenship status.
Your coworker, neighbor or the person in line at the grocery store could be an immigrant. It’s easier for frustrated Americans to blame something close to them than to address something much bigger, more complex and harder to grasp — the inequality embedded in our capitalist system.
It’s difficult to accept that a government you’ve been conditioned to believe serves you is just focused on protecting the interests of the wealthy. Now more than ever, we must rely on community rather than falling for political campaigns meant to divide us.
Zahira Vasquez is the 2024-2025 Opinion Editor. She can be reached at zivasque@uci.edu or opinion@newuniversity.org.
Edited by Isabella Ehring and Xinyu Zhang