The causes of illegal immigration
North-South cooperation and improving productivity are the solutions
The colonial foundations of the modern world-system
European colonial domination of vast regions of the Americas, Asia, and Africa from 1492 to 1914 is the fundamental cause of the development of the West and the creation of underdevelopment in the colonized region. Said global inequality, in turn, is the primary cause of the massive and uncontrollable migration from the Global South and East to the most advanced economies of the West.
Beginning in the period following the First World War, the colonized peoples forged movements that sought to transform colonial political-economic structures and to preserve and renovate their cultural traditions. However, Western institutions of higher education were not capable of colonial analysis, that is, seeking understanding from a perspective grounded in the fundamental objective reality of the colonial situation. Western academic institutions were fragmented into the distinct disciplines of philosophy, history, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology, thus blocking the emergence of the necessary comprehensive philosophical-historical-social science dedicated to understanding the emergence of the modern world-system. In addition, the Western academy was burdened by a naïve epistemological concept of value freedom, misdirecting scholars and researchers away from the dialogue among civilizations that was necessary for understanding the dynamics of the modern world-system and for discerning the solutions to its contradictions and conflicts.
Immanual Wallerstein achieved a breakthrough for the lost Western academy. In the 1960s, Wallerstein personally encountered African nationalists, who described their fundamental reality as a “colonial situation,” that is, as shaped by a political-economic-cultural relation between two societies, those of the colonizer and the colonized, which created a single system which itself was a world. As a result, Wallerstein arrived to the insight that the basic unit of analysis had to be world-systems, and not societies, where each was treated as a society with political, economic, and cultural autonomy. He dedicated himself to understanding the origin and development of the modern world-system, and he and his colleagues established a new field of study that took its place among the many fragmented areas of study, calling itself the Political-Economy of the World-System.
Unfortunately, Wallerstein was not able to push the new paradigm to its full construction, due to insufficient sustained encounter with the social movements and people’s revolutions of the Global South and East, which had two consequences. First, it left him with a limited understanding of the new forms of socialism that were emerging in the Global East and South. Secondly, it prevented him from attaining a breakthrough with respect to epistemological questions, with new insights attained from the perspective of the South. He therefore was not able to use his significant capacities and influence to forge a new epistemological consensus among philosophers, historians, and social scientists, which conceivably might have limited the influence of French post-modernism.
I studied Wallerstein’s writing on the historical development of the world-system in the 1980s, in the wake of my previous personal encounter with African-American nationalism and my study of the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan. The cognitional theory of Bernard Lonergan pointed to a resolution of the epistemological implications of the radical difference in worldviews between black nationalism and white social science. Lonergan’s formulation sees the possibility for attaining objective truth through encounter and critical listening with persons from different horizons and worldviews. Seeing the implications of this insight, I viewed Wallerstein’s analysis of the historical development of the world-system as pointing to the need for personal encounter with persons organically tied to the people’s movements of the Global South. I have been committed to such a mission since 1991, beginning with Honduras but then pivoting to Cuba, due to the advanced characteristics of Cuban political culture, which includes a window of observation of people’s revolutions and movements throughout the Global South and East.1
Wallerstein did attain, however, an understanding of the colonial foundation of the world-system, which unfortunately remains beyond the horizon of U.S. political culture, except for the badly named Cultural Marxists, who speak of colonialism as a state of mind, rather than as a material force that created the political economy of the modern world-system.
I have in previous commentaries reviewed the historical development of the modern world-system, drawing principally from Wallerstein as well as other scholars with relevant insights. My commentary of May 25, 2021, points out that the sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America was made possible by several environmental factors that provided the conquerors with horses, steel, and herd immunity to deadly diseases. In the aftermath of the conquest, the Spanish imposed systems of forced labor on the indigenous populations, making possible the exportation of large quantities of gold and silver to Spain, which used the bullion to purchase manufactured goods from northwestern Europe. The expanded market stimulated by the Spanish demand for goods provoked structural transformations in northwestern Europe, including the expansion of craft manufacturing, the commercialization of agriculture, the consolidation of land, and the conversion of agricultural land to pasture. These dynamics created a landless peasantry, who migrated to towns, providing a surplus labor supply for the expanding craft manufacturing. These transformations created a higher market demand for food in northwestern Europe, which was supplied by eastern Europe, where the landholding class imposed a new form a forced labor on serfs and peasants, which Wallerstein calls “coerced cash crop labor,” enabling the exportation of grains, timber, and wool to northwestern Europe. (“The Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas, 16th century: The origins of the modernization of Northwestern Europe”).
Thus, a world-economy came into being during the sixteenth century, with a geographical division of labor. Northwestern Europe was converted into the core zone of the new world-economy, expanding its craft manufacturing and modernizing its agriculture, importing necessary raw materials from peripheral zones, and exporting manufactured goods to Spain and Portugal. Latin America and Eastern Europe were converted into peripheral zones that exported raw materials to Western Europe, using different forms of forced labor.
In my commentary of May 28, 2021, drawing upon Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, I describe the economic and military European penetration, led by England and France, of vast regions of the world from 1750 to 1914, including the Ottoman Empire, the Indian subcontinent, the Russian Empire, Southeast Asia, the Arab world, and Africa. These regions were peripheralized, that is, they were converted into exporters of raw materials through various systems of forced labor, which resulted in the reduction or elimination of their manufacturing. An elite class within the colonized was created in the peripheralized regions, a class that had an economic interest in the perpetuation of the core-peripheral relation with the colonial power. At the same time, the process of peripheralization reduced the standard of living of the majority, as resources of land and labor were used for the purpose of producing raw materials that were sent to Western Europe. In contrast, the peripheralization of these regions functioned to the advantage of the core of the world-economy, in that it provided cheap raw materials for its manufacturing and markets for its manufactured goods. These dynamics stimulated the Industrial Revolution in the West after 1780, particularly Britain, France, Belgium, the western region of what would become Germany, Switzerland, and the northern states of the United States. (“The European conquest of Africa and Asia, 1750-1914: History must be understood, not ignored”).
The period 1919 to 1979 was characterized by the emergences of anti-colonial movements and revolutions in Asia and Africa. As is a normal human tendency, the conquered and oppressed peoples resisted by taking up arms, except in conditions where its futility was evident. But as the colonial edifice was constructed through the passing of years and generations, the colonized began to struggle in and through the institutions and structures of the colonial process itself. They sought to take political control of the structures established by colonial domination, becoming independent nations with full and equal rights in the modern community of nation-states. The process played out differently in Latin America as against Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, but during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the colonized peoples were able to attain political independence.
But it was not true independence or genuine sovereignty. What emerged was a neocolonial world-system, characterized by formal political independence in the context of control of the world-economy by the ex-colonial powers and their hegemonic partner, the USA. Imperialism emerged as the policy of the world powers, a policy of interference in the affairs of the supposedly independent nations. Imperialist policies support accommodationist political movements in the neocolonies, and they provide aid to governments that are able to repress and contain nationalist populist movements that seek a more autonomous road. When recalcitrant governments emerge in the neocolonies, imperialist governments impose economic sanctions, support coups d’état, and/or carry out military interventions. [“The structures of the neocolonial world-system: Understanding racism in global and historical (colonial) context,” February 6, 2024].
The Cuban scholar and former diplomat Jesús Arboleya has described the key characteristics of neocolonialism. It involves a figurehead bourgeoisie in the neo-colony that is subordinate to transnational corporations and their interests. And it includes financial institutions in the neo-colony that are subordinate to transnational banks and international financial agencies. Neocolonialism involves control of the political process in the neo-colony by a political class that is subordinate to the figurehead bourgeoisie and its interests, thereby ensuring the protection of the interests of the core nations and the transnational corporations based in the core. Moreover, neocolonialism maintains social control in the neo-colony through, first, the armed forces of the supposedly independent state, which are trained and supplied by the core power; and secondly, ideological penetration of the neo-colony and the dissemination of ideas that justify and legitimate the existing political-economic system. (“Neocolonialism and the New Imperialism: The persistent quest of the neocolonized peoples for true sovereignty,” Abril 21, 2023).
However, the neocolonial world-system cannot be sustained, for two reasons. First, the world-system has overreached the geographical limits of the earth, and it has run out of new lands and peoples to colonize and peripheralize, giving rise to permanent economic stagnation. Secondly, the neocolonized peoples persist in a determined effort to attain true sovereignty, thus generating a persistent condition of conflict between imperialist and anti-imperialist States. These factors have given rise to a sustained structural crisis of the world-system.
The signs of the structural crisis in the world-economy became increasingly apparent to many influential members of the U.S. power elite during the 1970s. But they could not discern, or they refused to accept, the unsustainability of the world-system. They reacted with renewed aggression, trying to shore up the world-system and to preserve U.S. dominance. Accordingly, the U.S. government, first, imposed global economic neoliberalism, beginning with Reagan, justified with claims that the policies of States were undermining the efficiency and productivity of national economies. Secondly, it launched neoconservative wars of aggression following 9/11, justified as a “war against terrorism.” As a result, the United States has found itself involved in endless military wars. And it constantly imposes economic sanctions against recalcitrant nations, and it disseminates ideological distortions against nations that seek an autonomous road. The political culture of the targeted nations refers to the economic and ideological attacks as “unconventional war,” appropriating the term from U.S. manuals.
The sustained attack of the neocolonized peoples by the global powers since 1980 in the form of neoliberal economic policies, neoconservative endless wars, and multidimensional unconventional wars has deepened the poverty and vulnerability of the peoples of the earth, already impoverished by four centuries of colonial domination and by the emergence of the structures of the neocolonial world-system. It has generated an uncontrollable and unsustainable international migration, which itself has become a sign of the structural crisis of the world-system.
The various patterns of international migration in the neocolonial world-system
Structural inequality between core and periphery—founded in colonialism and maintained through neocolonialism—continues to evolve as a process of deepening underdevelopment in the periphery and ongoing development of the core. This has given rise to three simultaneous and to some extent contradictory dynamics.
(1) The mass migration of individuals from peripheral to core zones, as individuals hope to resolve their personal economic difficulties by relocating to a higher wage zone. This individual resolution does not address the structural sources of the problems faced in the periphery, although it can alleviate the difficulties somewhat, as successful migrants can send remittances to their families in their country of origin. It is emotionally costly, inasmuch as migrants are separated from their families and their primary cultures, often permanently. And it can generate conflicts in the countries of destination.
Because of its numerous shortcomings, individual migration to core zones should not be encouraged as a general solution. However, key actors in the countries of destination encourage individual migration through lax enforcement of immigration laws as well as through employing and providing services to undocumented immigrants. These key actors include employers with interest in the lower wages of undocumented workers; politicians and activists with an interest in changing the ethnic group composition of the nation; and persons and organizations with humanitarian concerns for the wellbeing of immigrants.
(2) The declining competitiveness of the core relative to the upper levels of the periphery, which Wallerstein calls the semi-periphery, referring to nations which have attained an intermediate level of industrial capacity through gradually marshaling national resources. The declining competitiveness of the core occurs because of the capacity of the semiperiphery to appropriate core technologies through imitation or reverse engineering, and to use their relatively low wages to produce the goods more cheaply. Within the existing structures of the world-system, the core can respond to the greater competitiveness of the semi-periphery in one of four ways.
(a) Relocating factories to semi-peripheral and peripheral zones. This has been by and large the strategy of the advanced economies of the West, which has had a negative impact on economic development in the core and on the vitality of its communities.
(b) Using immigrant labor from the periphery and semi-periphery through a strategy of open borders, which also has been widely adopted in the West. It is a strategy that abandons the twentieth century social democratic tendency of support for organized workers, a tendency that viewed higher working-class wages as improving national purchasing power and expanding the market. The strategy of open borders erodes the salaries of native workers and leads to working-class rebellion against the political establishment in the long term.
(c) Maintaining prices at a level competitive with the semi-periphery while maintaining relatively high salaries for native workers through (i) reducing corporate profits for the good of the national economy, which can have positive long-term benefits by more broadly distributing purchasing power; and/or (ii) though state subsidies, which have the positive consequence of widely sharing the cost, but which erodes national productive capacity in the long term, by sustaining companies that are not competitive in the global market.
(d) Using core scientific and technological advantages to develop new industries or more advanced products in established industries, conceding the old products to the semi-peripheral challenge. This is the best long-term solution to the semi-peripheral challenge within the existing structures of the world-system, because it ensures continuing core advantage as well as continued technological advances for the world-economy as a whole. The emergence of Silicon Valley is an example, except that it should be developed with native labor first, and turning to the granting of work visas only to workers who have specific skills that native labor cannot supply on the scale necessary for the unrestrained advance of the new productive sector.
(3) Continuing advances in productivity in the core, accompanied by corresponding increases in the skills of core workers, making necessary immigrant workers for less skilled work of lower prestige. The tendency has had a weak expression in the United States, because of insufficient investment in productivity and in education and training. It is, however, the best approach for the core in the context of the existing structures of the world-system, because it involves fueling the productivity of the core economies and at the same time providing an outlet for the pressures of deepening underdevelopment in the periphery. However, the migratory influx must be regulated and controlled, granting visas to foreign workers for their capacity and willingness to contribute specific work tasks. The work force to regulate migration should be of sufficient size to enable efficient and rapid admission individuals who fill specific labor needs.
Taking into account the above considerations, we can see that four broad policy initiatives would contribute to the alleviation of the problem of uncontrollable international migration.
(1) Mutually beneficial trade among nations and North-South cooperation, an approach that implies gradual but real transformation of the world-system, and not merely solutions within the context of existing core-peripheral economic structures. This approach would be consistent with the common interests of all, because all States must promote the development of their national economies and their national industries, which constitute the backbone for the wellbeing of their peoples. But they must promote national economic development in a manner that does not superexploit other peoples, thus promoting global conflict.
The strengthening of a national economy through imperialist policies is no longer possible, because too many nations have developed a capacity to resist imperialist intentions, thereby creating a situation in which the practice of competing imperialisms leads to constant mutually destructive conflicts. The only possible road is cooperation, creatively searching for mutually beneficial trade and commerce as the foundation for the continuous development of all. Particularly, North-South cooperation would be important, because the North has the resources that the South needs, and because North-South cooperation would overcome the historic pattern of the deepening underdevelopment of the South, thereby eliminating the source of the uncontrollable immigration to the North.
North-South cooperation is the key to the transformation of the neocolonial world-system into a more democratic and sustainable world-system. Mutually beneficial trade among nations, in the forms of South-South cooperation and North-South cooperation, is the persistent call and demand of the Global South and East.
(2) Pressuring the corporate elite to accept lower levels of short-term profit for the long-term good of the corporation and the national economy. The crime of the political elite in recent decades has not been its attention to profits. Rather, its crime has been that it has attended only to short-term profits, ignoring the long-term, and not seeing that all corporations have an interest in being embedded in a vital and expanding national economy.
(3) State and private investments in the national economy, encouraged by the intelligent use of tariffs and taxes. This would constitute a reversal of a tax and tariff structure that has promoted the gradual decline of national manufacturing in recent decades. Tariff and tax incentives should be directed toward particular sectors of the economy, in accordance with a national economic plan that is adjusted annually.
(4) State control and regulation of immigration is a right and duty of the state, necessary for the protection of the national economy and for national security. The lax enforcement of immigration laws, driven by support of irregular immigration to attain short-term profits and by a misguided and idealist humanitarianism, has done much damage to the United States.
Although it goes against our humanitarian instincts, a certain level of distrust toward individuals seeking to enter the United States is reasonable, because criminal elements always gravitate toward places of high wealth and economic activity. Measures should be in place for vetting migrants, including the checking of previous criminal activity. Immigration cannot be an ad hoc phenomenon. Migration must be regulated, and it must be rooted in a national economic plan that defends the interests of the nation and the people.
The U.S. political establishment has utterly failed with respect to these four points during the last half century. The MAGA movement has emerged as a pushback against this failure, forming itself during the last decade as an anti-establishment people’s movement rooted in populist nationalism and common-sense intelligence. The Trump administration has taken decisive steps that respond to the national situation, particularly with respect to the control of immigration and the stress on revitalizing American productivity. However, the Trump administration and the MAGA movement are addressing these four points only partially. They are hampered by a profound ethnocentrism that prevents them from seeing the possibilities for mutually beneficial cooperation with the states of the Global East and South, which are cooperating in concrete ways to establish a new world order, more just, democratic, and sustainable.
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Further considerations
The ongoing transformation of the neocolonial world-system (into a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system) expresses in the real (material) world the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic: from thesis (colonial domination on a world scale) to its antithesis (worldwide anti-colonial and anti-imperialist people’s movements) to synthesis (a democratic, post-colonial world system, which respects in practice the sovereignty of nations). In the post-colonial world order, because of its norm and practice of respect for the sovereignty of all nations, there would be space for some nations to decide for the construction of socialism, without this decision provoking conflict or controversy. It should be noted that the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic is a materialist synthesis, in the sense that it is emerging in the real, material world; it includes ideas in the unfolding dialectical process, but it is not merely a synthesis of opposed ideas.
The nations that today that are constructing socialism, like China, Vietnam, and Cuba, have developed people’s democracies, different from representative democracy, with higher levels of direct participation by the people. The widely held belief that said nations are authoritarian is a myth, constructed on false assumptions with respect to points of contrast between the differing structures of the two political systems; a myth disseminated by powerful forces desperate to preserve the structures of the neocolonial world-system in the face of the challenge emerging in real political practice forged by the nations of the Global East and South.
The post-colonial world system under construction accepts the decision of particular nations for socialism, and indeed, China and Cuba are among the leaders of the post-colonial construction. But the new world order does not impose a decision for socialism. The emerging world order exhorts each nation to develop its own political system, appropriate for its political-economic and cultural conditions, in accordance with the will of the majority, who ought to arrive to consensus on the basis of ample public debate. The essence of the post-colonial movement is not socialism but anti-imperialism; its fundamental demand and expectation is that all nations respect the sovereignty of other nations. The movement calls for democracy in precisely this sense of respecting the sovereignty of all, with each nation free to decide for representative democracy or people’s democracy. There is in the emerging world order a lack of tolerance for true dictatorships, with non-violent approaches to encourage countries to adopt some form of democracy.
The concept of Hegelian-Marxist synthesis unfolding in the real material world has nothing in common with the so-called Cultural Marxism that has been put forth in an authoritarian manner by middle-class academics and activists in the United States. The real anti-imperialist synthesis is being forged by popular sectors in the nations of the Global South and East, including middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs, but composed in the majority by industrial, agricultural, and service workers. The active participation of workers gives the worldwide anti-imperialist movement a healthy and vital dynamic, which reveals the essential goodness of humanity, which is invisible to the peoples of the North, due to distortions in the legacy media, conservative media, and social media.
The peoples of the Global South and East have forged in practice the anti-imperialist synthesis from the colonial situation, but they invite the peoples of the West to join the anti-imperialist movement and to cooperate in the construction of a more just, democratic, and sustainable world. They are motivated in this invitation in part because they need the resources and the technology that the West possesses (as a result of colonialism and neocolonialism). But also, because they do not blame the peoples of the West for colonialism, seeing it as a social sin that reflects the human condition. In their worldview, humans by nature are capable of social and personal sin, and all the peoples of the earth have demonstrated their ample capacity for sinful comportment. But, they maintain, humanity is free to choose a different road. Reflecting this capacity, the peoples of the Global South and East, under the guidance and direction of exceptional leaders, are constructing, piece-by-piece and day-by-day, a more just, democratic, and sustainable world. All the world is invited to join.
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I have been throughout my career in the periphery of the U.S. academic world, far from its prestigious institutions and publishing houses. Therefore, my persistent work on analysis of epistemological questions from the perspective of the revolutions of the South has had much less impact than Wallerstein’s work could have had, if he had addressed epistemological questions from the perspective of the South. I did have two brief moments of interchange with Wallerstein. The first was in the 1990s, when he endorsed my book on the need to reconstruct the concepts of Marx from the vantage point of the South (Beyond Ethnocentrism: A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science). He wrote to me that more social scientists should address epistemological issues, as I was doing. And the second moment was in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Wallerstein traveled to Cuba, and we discussed his possible participation in a project that I was developing in Cuba, which did not materialize. In any event, Wallerstein, along with C. Wright Mills, remains in my view, the most significant U.S. sociologist, as a result of his contribution toward the formulation of the historical development of the modern world-system. May he rest in peace.