The Offensive Against Migrants is Against All Workers

This editorial by Ana María Aragonés appeared in the June 17th, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier leftist daily newspaper.

Terror and cruelty are being inflicted upon migrants in the United States, now supported by the U.S. federal government’s disgraceful “message” that they are “invaders” and that residents must become spies on their neighbors and denounce undocumented migrants. This is reminiscent of the darkest days of Nazism in the 1930s, a precedent that led to World War II due to the leaders’ inability to find a way out of the structural crisis.

The proposal then, as it is now, was protectionism, nationalism, and migrant deportations. Leaders refused to change their strategy, and after the deaths of nearly 60 million people, they were forced into a drastic readjustment that led to a shift from orthodox neoclassical ideology to Keynesianism.

While what happened in other historical moments is not repeated, the truth is that there are terrifying similarities. The structural crisis of the neoliberal model of 2008-2009, in the face of its contradictions, lead to profound changes in the model’s basic dimensions, such as the diversion of productive investment toward financial speculation, obscene enrichment of a privileged minority, a profound offensive against workers, wage controls, widespread poverty, and inequality. However, those driving the change are the right and the far right, whose proposals aim to deepen the contradictions of the neoliberal model.

The central claims of the proposed models, which we can characterize as “fascistoid” (Valenzuela dixit), are hallucinated against the left, against “leftists,” against socialism, communism, and, of course, migrants. These proposals continue to seek the dismantling of the state and, therefore, privilege the private over the public, thus privatizing and commodifying universal rights such as health, education, and housing.

Productive investments continue to be diverted toward financial speculation, thus confirming a blatant form of imperialism supported by the military-industrial complex, one of whose functions is to interfere in territories to control strategic minerals.

But why this focus on combating migrants? In reality, it’s about disguising what is actually an attack on the entire working class. The maneuver is to generate the idea that they are lawbreakers for lacking documents, when it constitutes an easily overcome administrative offense, which the authorities fail to address because they are then criminalized and easily exposed to the punishment of deportation. The goal is to generate fear and panic, thus seeking to discipline others and to perceive that there are differences when it is the tactic of the elites who divide into classes what should inherently be united. This is a historical way to avoid what the elites have always feared: the power of the workers.

That’s why, in neoliberalism, the emphasis was on destroying unions, against collective bargaining, that is, a terrible attack on the working class to subjugate it, and that’s why they are opposed to and horrified by what they call “the leftists.”

Migrants are not new, but they are now massive, a product of the enormous difficulties that countries in the South have faced in the face of the onslaught from the Global North, which has, by every means, prevented countries from attempting paths that would allow them to change the models that impose dependence and subordination.

What migrants are experiencing right now in the United States is the tip of the spear that highlights what is happening to the working class around the world. And this is the key moment to unify the workers’ struggle to change this predatory model for an emancipatory project that upholds the right to immobility—that is, the right not to migrate.