It's like illegal immigrants (Mexicans in my area) are the boogeyman that everybody around me agrees to hate. What, materially speaking, is causing this?
It drives a wedge between the working class and allows Mexicans to be exploited for slave labor in agricultural work under the threat of deportation of them and their families. It also gives a ton of false excuses for the failures of capitalism, I remember recently Musk has been pushing the whole "Illegals are taking all the affordable housing" thing.
Especially convenient since the capitalist politicians and their CIA war criminals are the ones that made the nations south of the US border difficult to live in...
Profiting off a problem they cause... then blame the victims...
It also allows them to alter the perception of refugees fleeing hostile governments from South America, as lazy bums who want to fuck up America by traveling over 4000 miles across mountains and rivers to get to America. Americans cannot be allowed to learn the reasons why these people fleeing South America, to learn that their governments were destabilized so that bananas could remain cheap, or so that oil prices wouldn't become cheap, or anything other myriad of pretzel shapes Cia spooks will create to justify their crimes against humanity.
When the lower "white" classes start to feel economically/politically downtrodden, the upper "white" classes point to the non-whites (immigrants) as the cause of their problems to deflect attention away from them.
Remember...
Italians? They weren't always considered, white.
Germans? They weren't always considered, white.
Irish? Doesn't matter that they typically are one shade away from being transparent... They weren't always considered, white.
my absolute favorite bit from this genre is that drivel by ben franklin where he calls swedes non-white because they're swarthy!
was the only swede he'd ever seen a charred corpse retrieved from a house fire, or what?!
Probably best to refer to people as undocumented immigrants though.
'Illegal' immigrants kinda plays into that reactionary rhetoric.
Classic racism.
It's ironic since only illegal immigrants in North American continent are white yankees...
Racism mostly. Folks are struggling big time and it's easier to swallow the "it's immigrants fault!" propaganda than it is to think critically about why folks are struggling, so that's what folks do.
reinforcement of chauvinism and national identity to deal with capitalism crises, or rather, distract people of it. it happened before with romani, jews, homosexuals, looks like the target are now immigrants from global south.
- an ungodly amount of projection, white people colonized the whole world, pillaged everything and now they use it as a excuse to spread fear that previous victims of colonialism want revenge and colonize back the west.
P.S. Jesus Christ, I've been asking so many questions here lately.
Apologies for the long post. I don't know how much context you already understand, so I'm kind of starting from scratch. Please ignore anything that you already know. I'm not trying to talk down to you. I just wanted to cover all my bases.
In a capitalist society, it is useful for there to be a significantly lower paid portion of the population. This allows the extraction of wealth, and by extension, creates privilege.
There are many ways to do this, but one of them is to demonize an entire culture. That way, the average person will not feel the need or necessity to fight for their rights, you don't need every single person to hate this culture. You just need a good portion of the population. That way, it's controversial to defend them.
Since Mexico is border to the United States, there happens to be a lot of citizens coming in. That's pretty natural and not unexpected at all. But the alt-right has decided to demonize them because it makes them an easy target. There's also a lot of them and so demonizing that culture means that there is more underpaid people for the picking.
It also helps that they're brown. White people typically target brown people. And this isn't even unique to the United States.
Also, most people don't understand that that's what's going on. Most people are watching the news or hearing from their friends that the brown Mexican people are all dirty, and sending over their criminals, and are causing crimes and stuff like that. Statistically, it's the opposite. Immigrants tend to stay under the radar. Lay low. Not break the law. Not cause a fuss. That's one of the reasons that they're easily manipulated. Because they tend not to speak up when they're underpaid or are lacking benefits that they should have. This is even people who are here legally. There's absolutely nothing illegal about them being here, but they still have to lay low because... racism.
Why now? Probably because the elections are coming up. As it turns out, you really want your political rhetoric to get your base excited once every political election. The rest of the time, you usually can take advantage of them without too much fuss. It could also be that maybe your local area is just cycling through demonizing different groups, and it was time for the Mexicans to come up. But that makes it sound pre planned, and I don't believe in conspiracy theories. A few people might start the rhetoric on purpose, but then it becomes self-sustaining. Social media just tends to move through different outrage cycles.
Racism
For proletarians, it's the fear of losing your job to someone who is most likely willing to work for shittier conditions than you out of desperation and an inability to be choosy from say having no family around to help you out.
For the bourgeois, the fear of a lack of control - say from either a rise in crime making the chance of getting murdered in their homes go up from 0,01% to 0,015% or from getting the workers angry and aware of exploitation or any other breakup of the state that acts in their interest.
The US doesn’t care about preventing climate change, but they’ll do all they can to prevent climate refugees from coming here. They’re just starting early while they have the chance. Also just regular fash divide and conquer surplus army of labor shit.
It is a plot by Bourgeois to create conflicts between the working class ever since the British empire implemented the racist caste system in their American colonies to prevent the union between white indenture servants and black slaves. When the US and other British diaspora countries gained independence from the British empire, they decided to continue and even entranced the racist caste system for the infighting. Although the staged racist infighting between privileged white freeriders and illegal immigrants is a reason for the Pax Americana support to terrorists and tyrants in other countries, the main reason that the British idaspora elites are creating the illegal immigration through intentionally displaced refugee is the need to sustain slave laborers that they cannot outsourced through the Bretton Woods institutions since they had robbed the hard working, innovation, and successful Native Americans, Inuits, and Metis through the 150 years of fake school holocaust that Nazi German copied.
If you want to understand it more at an electoral level even though as Marxists we reject these terms, the 2016 election showed that Republicans are likely to lose presidential elections in perpetuity due to the dying white Boomer demographic. Young latinos (especially Mexicans and Puertoricans) have been shifting towards a progressive view. The fear existed that Republicans might have to become more moderate. Jeb Bush was that plan, but they had two alternatives Ted Cruz for attempting a right-ward shift and Trump for a hyper-right turn. I don’t think the GOP even expected the Trump style to catch on but it has. Now even most Democrats are to the right of Mitt Romney on immigration which is obvious (to us) but sad.
The idea of a blanket amnesty is over, which Biden very much has the authority to grant but WON’T because his corporate interests far outweigh his electoral ambitions.
The standard tactic of the capitalists to get the workers to start blaming immigrants for stealing their jobs instead of blaming the capitalists for their conditions.
