As the United States turns 250, the American people are in a profound struggle to define who they will be. More Americans than ever are experiencing dreams deferred, and the ranks of the unemployed, poor, homeless, and addicted are growing. Most people know something is profoundly wrong and are searching desperately for a way out.
One of the responses to this crisis has been to attack immigration and immigrants. Immigration control is Donald Trump’s top priority in his program to Make America Great Again. He says immigrants take jobs from American workers, strain communities, menace cities, and degrade America’s social fabric. He deployed trigger-happy ICE agents in raids that harassed and killed innocent people.
In response, democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani says that immigrants built, powered, and now lead New York. In his victory speech, he shouted out “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties,” and dared Trump to come after them.
The political theater of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani leaves the deeper meaning of immigration in this crisis untouched. When immigrants come to the United States for a “better life,” what is the meaning of their journey? What is the significance of immigration to the self-conceptualization of the American people? Who has the moral authority to lead America out of this crisis?
Standing at another crossroads in history, Martin Luther King gave a speech in 1967 entitled “The Three Evils of Society.” He diagnosed the darkness of the times as the logical result of America’s triple sickness of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. Racism is the lack of soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men. Materialism is the lag between technological and moral progress that encourages greed, exploitation, and blindness to human suffering. Militarism is the use of violence abroad to deny freedom to the world and freedom at home.
Immigrants are presented as underdogs and evidence that the American dream is real. However, they benefit from and uphold the very sickness that Martin Luther King diagnosed. The terrible truth is that too many immigrants, skilled and unskilled, documented and undocumented, consent to the triple evils. In their pursuit of the American dream, they consent to anti-Black racism. In leaving behind their civilizations and seeking upward mobility for themselves and their families, they embrace individualist Western values. In embedding themselves in the West, they join an empire that denies freedom to the very nations they come from. To find a way out of the crisis, the American people, native and foreign-born, must refuse cooperation with the triple evils. Immigrants must run to the people they are running from: the freedom fighters that produced them and the Black people who can lead them in a revolution of values. Only through finding their place in the struggle to defeat the triple evils can immigrants really become American and find their place in this country.
Racism
While immigrants do not necessarily come to the United States with the intention of upholding racism, they become willing tools of a racist system. In times of upheaval, the pattern of American history is to import immigrants who have no historical memory of the struggles of the American people. Immigration policy allows the nation to put off dealing with the consequences of injustice and inequality by attracting new converts to the Empire.
The Hart-Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 struck racial quotas from immigration policy and changed the skin color of the immigrants, but not the assumptions of immigration policy. In the 60s, the American Medical Association engineered a doctor shortage by making medical school more expensive and exclusive. As a result, many Black medical schools closed. Legislators then pursued a policy of importing foreign medical graduates rather than making medical education accessible to the masses.1 As Black Freedom Fighter Diane Nash said, “Bringing Asians in the 60s meant it would not be necessary to educate us in large numbers to become medical professionals. In a decade [that] made it possible to incarcerate so many of us and not have a deficit in medical professionals the country needed.”
It worked the other way around too; importing doctors drained the Third World of badly needed professionals. In 1977, the physicians migrating to the U.S. represented one quarter of the annual output of all medical schools outside of the U.S. and the communist bloc.2
After deindustrialization devastated the American working class, the ruling elite transitioned to a knowledge-war economy powered by Silicon Valley. Rather than educating the deindustrialized American people and their children, they disinvested in education, especially in the Black inner city. They imported skilled immigrants from Asia whose education was already paid for courtesy of the anti-colonial struggles of Asia. More than a quarter of Silicon Valley’s highly skilled workers are immigrants, and more than 40 percent founders of tech startups are immigrants.3
Undocumented immigrants bear responsibility too. Undocumented immigration had a concrete impact on labor movements, which fight to improve the conditions of all workers. One of the greatest forces for peace and democracy in the country was the United Packinghouse Workers of America. It was led by Black workers like Charlie Hayes and Addie Wyatt who were deeply influenced by Martin Luther King. Under their leadership, the union connected the struggle for labor and civil rights to the struggle for peace and democracy at home and abroad. However, from the 1980s onwards, the meatpacking industries moved their factories outside of union strongholds to smaller towns. These factories replaced the base of the meatpacking industry from Black workers to undocumented immigrant labor. As a result, the nation lost one of its most advanced forces for peace and justice.
A common leftist refrain is that working people must unite to attack billionaires rather than their fellow working people, i.e., immigrants. This is often directed at native-born Black and White workers who are accused of succumbing to divide and conquer. While this is true in theory, the reality is that the ruling class wants a traumatized and fearful workforce rather than a people trained in generational struggle. Scholars have found a moderate positive correlation between Black unemployment and undocumented immigration.4 Ethnographic evidence has shown that employers prefer Latino undocumented labor to Black and white labor because they can exploit them more easily.5 While their conditions of work are horrible, at least they are working; whereas Black male unemployment is in the double digits. A policy of unregulated immigration ticks the boxes of political correctness, degrades the regulations and standards that labor fought for, and provides billionaires an exploitable workforce. Immigrants must look up to the Black movement, which in the face of exploitation and suppression fought for the freedom and dignity of all workers. They must seek to know and unite in struggle with their Black brothers and sisters; it is immigrants who must strive for unity first and foremost.
The post-1980s waves of immigrants have no connection to deindustrialization, the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, or the Civil Rights movement; their upward climb helps the ruling elite reconsolidate its grip on historical memory and perpetuate the lie of American meritocracy.
Immigrants can be the most virulent proponents of anti-blackness. Under the cloak of “people of color” victimhood, they feel empowered to engage in the worst behavior. If they can make it as disadvantaged minorities, why haven’t Black people been able to? African immigrants like Barack Obama regularly talk down to Black people. Asian store owners sell subpar products in Black neighborhoods and have killed black youth with impunity as in the recent case of Chikei Rick Chow’s murder of 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton. Mexican street gangs in Los Angeles conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Blacks to drive them from the region. As Minister Louis Farrakhan said, immigrants made their American dream out of the Black nightmare.
Materialism
Immigrants will often say they came to America to secure a better life for themselves and their children. They seek a life of opportunity and material well being, which they say they could not get in their home countries.
James Baldwin connected whiteness to the search for safety. Whiteness is the drive to protect oneself at all costs, even if someone else is suffering. Those who search for safety abandon moral and collective human responsibility. However, safety does not really exist anywhere. Those who search for safety never find it, because life is tragic. Everyone must pay the price of the ticket and trade certainty for sacrifice.
It is often not the poorest who come to America, but those with the resources to make the journey. All immigrant groups are more educated than native-born Americans, with the exception of Hispanics.6 While their living standards may be lower in the countries they come from, they are hardly the most impoverished. Even those who are not from the cream of their societies come to the United States attracted by the image of American prosperity sold by the State Department in Hollywood movies. They aspire to an easy life of individual freedom, consumer goods, and opportunity. When they achieve this success at the expense of Black people, they sell this image back to their relatives back home.
As Indira Gandhi said, “The affluence of the industrialised nations itself attracts and exerts a certain pull on the more fortunate sections in the developing countries, further sharpening the difference between aspirations and their fulfillment. This in turn leads to the alienation of the elite from the rest of society, because they are attracted by the glamour of catching up with their opposites in the advanced countries while their own society cries out for bread.”7
Moreover, the children of immigrants, whose existence rationalizes their parents’ search for safety, bear the price that their parents refused to pay. Their material success does not make them immune from the spiritual, psychological, and civilizational crisis of the U.S. First generation immigrants can isolate themselves in ethnic enclaves, but their children cannot. They must reject the safety their parents sought for them and join the American people in discovering and fighting for alternative values for this society.
Even if they don’t know about Black people, immigrants have examples of leaders who followed a higher moral compass. Anti-colonial revolutionaries put their people before themselves and even their children. Nelson Mandela spent decades in prison and refused the conditional release that would have reunited him with his family and children in 1985. Mandela said his daughter Zindzi grew up without a father, who, when he returned, became a father of the nation. Mahatma Gandhi gave everything he had to the Indian Freedom Struggle rather than his own son’s education, resulting in their estrangement. Mao Zedong sent his son to fight against American imperialism in Korea. He died in a napalm strike at the age of 28. Ho Chi Minh chose the Vietnamese struggle over a family life completely. His only possessions were a typewriter and two sets of clothes. He vowed that until everyone in his country could have more than this, he would, like the people, have only two sets of clothing himself.
These leaders share much in common with the leaders of the Black Freedom Struggle in America. They, too, sent their children in harm’s way in the Birmingham Children’s March and the Freedom Rides. Black freedom fighters could not and did not shelter their children. They marched alongside them to secure freedom for all. They chose sacrifice over material gain and to stay and fight rather than run. Immigrants and their children must make the same choice.
Militarism
Since the Cold War, immigration policy has been a subset of foreign policy and a tool for militarism. American policymakers removed racial quotas from immigration not because they were against racism, but because they did not want to seem racist during the Cold War. They labeled immigrants as “refugees” when they came from countries they were against, like Hungary, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and “economic migrants” when they came from pro-Western dictatorships like Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. Economic migration is a safety valve to reduce the tension caused by America’s neocolonial control over their countries; rather than stay and fight, economic migrants are given the option to come and join their oppressors. The State Department carefully screens and labels the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” according to how it will help them achieve and maintain imperialist control over the world.
Many immigrants, like the Vietnamese boat people, claim they are fleeing persecution, when in fact, they are fleeing revolution.
Immigrants consent to imperialist criteria from the beginning of their process. Item 52 on Form I-485 application for a green card, questions whether the applicant has ever been a member of, or involved in, or in any way associated with a Communist party. Much of the peace movement in the Third World has some affiliation with communism and communist parties; in order to check “no” on this declaration, immigrants must by definition sever themselves from progressive world humanity and consent to Cold War ideology.
Once they are here, immigrants make up a Westernized diaspora with outsized influence on domestic politics of their home countries. There is a clear connection between the pro-Western politics of South Asia’s foreign policy establishment and the predominance of its diaspora in the West. For example, India’s Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s son Dhruva Jaishankar is the Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America based in D.C. He, like many children of Indian elites and the middle class, has one foot in India and one in the U.S., where he lives and works. His think tank advocates for closer U.S.-India ties including a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” U.S.-India AI Fellowship, and U.S. India Technology Cooperation, all policies that India is pursuing currently. It hosts discussions with Israeli defense ministers like Zohair Palti. Cloaked in technocratic language, these initiatives are highly ideological and promote a neocolonial and Zionist worldview that Jawaharlal Nehru would have been appalled by. Meanwhile, Indian intellectuals in Western academia attack the Indian Freedom Struggle while never questioning the imperialist system that gives them legitimacy and status.
In the most extreme cases, immigrants advocate regime change and war against the countries they come from. When the war on Iran started, social media was flooded by pro-regime change Iranian Americans celebrating the strikes. Cuban Americans like Marco Rubio have become a vicious contingent within the U.S. elite bent on destroying the Cuban Revolution. Their voices are held up as proof that “the people” want regime change, when they are in fact a minority empowered with the platform of empire.
Towards a Revolution of Values
Immigrants must seek moral authority, not from their identity as immigrants, but from searching for and standing for the truth. They must seek to know Black people against Western propaganda. They must fight against the wars of destabilization and dollar dominance that made their immigration necessary. They must fight for policies of social uplift at home and abroad. They must strive for not only upward mobility for their families, but for freedom and justice for all people. They must refuse cooperation with the oppression of Black people because it is the oppression of all workers and all people; if their American dream comes at the expense of Black people, it is not freedom, but spiritual sickness.
Immigrants and their children must inherit what they’re running away from, what Martin Luther King called the uprisings of the shirtless and barefoot of the Earth. It is in these struggles that they share the most in common with Black people. And it is through the Black Freedom Struggle that they can redeem the values of the anti-colonial struggles that produced them.
There have been principled immigrants who embody the promise of immigration much better than Steve Jobs or Sundar Pichai, though they are less well known. E.S. Reddy was a freedom fighter who learned from his participation in the Indian Freedom Struggle never to compromise on freedom and solidarity with other freedom movements. He came to the United States in 1946 as a student. He joined the Council on African Affairs and became close to W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Alphaeus Hunton. He worked at the United Nations as part of the Special Committee Against Apartheid for decades where he helped bridge liberation struggles and people’s movements for peace and freedom in the West.
Vito Marcantonio was an Italian immigrant who rose from the slums of New York to become a great Progressive Congressman in the 1930s and 40s. At a time when Irish and Italians hungered for white identity, Vito Marcantonio rejected it. He fought for working people, opposed the Korean War, defended Du Bois in his darkest hour, and championed Civil Rights decades before there was a nationwide movement. As Du Bois says, “He believed in America when America no longer believed in itself. He talked America, defended America and suffered for America. He was a great American. But he was also a great man and this nation could offer him nothing that ever could make him forget his essential manhood.”8
Master Fard Muhammad immigrated to the United States from the Islamic world in the early 20th century. He blended into white society, witnessed its evil firsthand, and found God in the Black poor in Detroit. He taught the common Asiatic origin of all darker peoples and that the Black Man in America would lead the world towards an order of true peace and brotherhood.
These immigrants upheld their honor and rejected safety by following the moral leadership of Black America. America is neither a melting pot for assimilation, nor a “salad” of diversity. It is a crucible for democracy. Only by throwing themselves in the fire can immigrants become part of a new American people.
- Eram Alam, “Cold War Crises: Foreign Medical Graduates Respond to US Doctor Shortages, 1965–1975,” Journal of American History 110, no. 2 (2023): 6-9. ↩︎
- Alam, “Cold War Crises,” 18. ↩︎
- Margaret O’Mara, “Arrivals,” in The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 95–99. ↩︎
- Harry J. Holzer, The Effects of Immigration on the Employment Outcomes of Black Americans, statement before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 4, 2008 (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2008), 9. ↩︎
- Laura Lopez-Sanders, The Manufacturing of Job Displacement: How Racial Capitalism Drives Immigrant and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market (New York: New York University Press, 2024). ↩︎
- Tiffiany Howard, The State of Black Entrepreneurship in America: Evaluating the Relationship Between Immigration and Minority Business Ownership (Washington, DC: Center for Policy Analysis and Research, Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, 2019), 9 ↩︎
- Indira Gandhi, The Years of Challenge: Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi, January 1966–August 1969, rev. ed. (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1973), 261. ↩︎
- W. E. B. Du Bois to Vito Marcantonio, August 12, 1954, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, 3. ↩︎
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