When liberal Journalist Mehdi Hasan took part in an online debate covering just a few topics, it turned into more of a gauntlet or political escape room than anything else. For one hour, Hasan debated 20 self-described ‘far-right conservatives.’ One of his claims was ‘immigrants are good for America.’ His opponents, of course, did not agree. Several of them unabashedly claimed they were fascists, and took turns spewing virulently anti-immigrant, white nativist positions targeting non-European migrants.

It was shocking, for sure. But their rhetoric was also very familiar to anyone who knows the long history of anti-immigrant sentiment in this country.

One of the participants did not believe immigrants should be in the US at all, even though she was a child of European immigrants. She didn’t see her parents as contributing to any perceived problems — it was the other immigrants. Despite the obvious cognitive dissonance and racism, these conservatives’ fundamental frustration with low-pay, low-quality jobs and the dearth of affordable housing is real. But what they deduced as the causes of their issues, given the data, is misguided. As Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, By America, remarked, “America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” and neither is it due to the presence of migrants.

Immigrant Scapegoating as a Useful Tool

Research consistently shows immigrants help to drive economic growth while having minimal negative effects on native-born workers. According to research by Migration Policy Institute’s Julia Gelatt, immigrants expand the labor force and increase consumer spending, boosting economic growth. The National Academies of Sciences 2016 study — examining nearly two decades of data from 1994 to 2013 — found immigrants had negligible impact on native-born workers’ wages and employment levels.

The evidence goes further — according to the Economic Policy Institute “immigration’s effects on US wages overall range from neutral to slightly positive. Immigrant workers tend to complement rather than substitute for US-born workers of similar educational levels.” This happens because even similarly educated migrants typically take jobs native-born workers do not do, creating minimal direct competition. A new NBER study by Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri shows that from 2000 to 2022 a majority of foreign-born workers to the US were college educated, boosting wages for less educated American workers by 1.7 percent to 2.7 percent.

So Mehdi Hasan was right — immigration is good for America. But this isn’t the whole story.

While immigration benefits the broader economy, undocumented workers face systematic exploitation. Employers, especially those who pay off the books or are in industries with less enforcement, often target undocumented workers, subjecting them to low wages, no benefits, long hours, wage theft, and dangerous working conditions that result in higher injury and fatality rates than native-born workers. This exploitation is concentrated in specific sectors. Roughly half of all field and crop workers are undocumented — jobs with little appeal to most US-born workers. Yet even in these roles, the abuse is stark: 76 percent of undocumented workers report wage theft, while 37 percent earn below minimum wage. This also means they are economically vulnerable. 35 percent of immigrants work in jobs paying under $35K annually, compared to 26 percent of US-born workers.

Despite abundant evidence showing the economic benefits of immigration and the equally disadvantaged position of undocumented workers in the labor market, public officials continue to use rhetoric and policy to obfuscate and redirect poor and working class rage. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) accused undocumented immigrants of causing wage stagnation, Trump and J.D. Vance has blamed the same group for our housing crisis, while Trump (ironically) has repeatedly smeared Black and Brown immigrants as pathologically criminal.

The Historical Roots of Anti-Immigrant Politics

Using economic fear as a tool of division has deep roots in America. Enslaved African-Americans weren’t immigrants, but their labor was contemptible to whites in the north and south. Labor leaders and scholars have extensively documented how the slave-owning elite and northern industrialists weaponized economic anxieties against Black people. This pattern repeated with European immigration in the 18th and early 19th centuries. As new immigrants arrived, tensions emerged between them and both enslaved and freed Black Americans. W.E.B. Du Bois observed how Irish immigrants “blamed blacks for the cheap price of labor” — resentment that erupted into race-labor riots across northern states. Simultaneously, 19th century Italian immigrants faced widespread job discrimination — often branded “wage cutters” and blamed for driving down American workers’ pay. 

Table 1

In 1877, the Workingmen’s Party of California was founded on the premise that Chinese migrants drove down white wages. This party was pivotal in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigration for a decade and blocked their pathway to citizenship. The American Federation of Labor unions also embraced nativist rhetoric, opposing migration from Southern and Eastern Europe because they believed these groups would depress wages and be used to break strikes. 

The Workingmen’s Party didn’t leverage its power against the “Big Four” owners of the Central Pacific Railroad for setting low-wages and poor work conditions, or lobby Congress to add land-grant requirements for workers to be fairly paid. Nope. They attacked Chinese immigrants instead, letting policy makers and corporate owners off the hook. The majority of poor whites in the antebellum south fought to preserve the gruesome institution of slavery which was the lid and pot of their economic suffering.

The Trump Era Playbook

This self-defeating racism and anti-immigrant bigotry persists today and remains highly exploitable by the ruling elite. Trump’s megabill is going to throw over 15 million people off of their health care by slashing $1.1 trillion from ACA and Medicaid while cutting HUD programs like rental assistance and housing subsidies by 44 percent. Four billion dollars will be stripped from LIHEAP and nearly $1 billion will be cut from rural housing program budgets, among numerous other cuts. These cuts make no distinction between US and foreign-born, but they are often justified by anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Table 2

Creating a fake problem to monetize a solution that will enrich big business via taxpayer dollars is playbook. Over the next four years alone, Trump’s immigration enforcement package will explode detention and deportation operations at a staggering cost of over $170 billion to taxpayers. This is a boon for the private prison industry. According to In The Public Interest, CoreCivic’s total revenue jumped 9.8 percent from 2024 Q2, while its net income soared 103.4 percent. GEO Group was euphoric, calling Trump a godsend as they expect annual revenue margins of up to 30 percent. This nativist strategy is coldly calculated and corporations continue to profit from it. 

Hordes of masked ICE agents with their identifying credentials removed, showing up at  workplaces and disappearing people off the streets create a Colosseum-esque spectacle designed to deliver cathartic release to the nativist spectators who blame immigrant populations for low-wages, and high costs of rent, utilities, food and healthcare.  The message being: See? Problems are getting solved.

Scapegoating economically disadvantaged populations is ritual, useful mainly to the elite who have for centuries used it to manipulate and divide working people in service of their economic interests. But none of the ensuing cruelty is possible without our collective complicity. We should endeavor to stop being willing pawns of the ultrarich and unwitting enemies to ourselves, the poor and working class.

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