Unregulated & uncontrolled immigration
Trump seeks to rectify a historic crime of the political establishment
As all the world knows, President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders, seeking to move rapidly and effectively toward attainment of the announced objectives of the MAGA movement. Among them are several orders designed to stop illegal immigration and to deport individuals who reside in the United States without documentation and authorization. In today’s commentary, I review the executive orders on immigration, seeking to make clear their directives and their rationale. I then address relevant questions: Do States have a right to regulate migration? What are the causes of uncontrolled international migration? Is international migration a solution to the problems of global inequality and world poverty? What is a solution to the migratory crisis, and what would it take to attain it? Is there a common human interest?
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The content and rationale of the executive orders on immigration
The Executive Order “Securing Our Borders,” signed by Donald Trump on Inauguration Day, declares:
Over the last 4 years, the United States has endured a large-scale invasion at an unprecedented level. Millions of illegal aliens from nations and regions all around the world successfully entered the United States where they are now residing, including potential terrorists, foreign spies, members of cartels, gangs, and violent transnational criminal organizations, and other hostile actors with malicious intent.
Deadly narcotics and other illicit materials have flowed across the border while agents and officers spend their limited resources processing illegal aliens for release into the United States. These catch-and-release policies undermine the rule of law and our sovereignty, create substantial risks to public safety and security, and divert critical resources away from stopping the entry of contraband and fugitives into the United States. We have limited information on the precise whereabouts of a great number of these illegal aliens who have entered the United States over the last 4 years.
This cannot stand. A nation without borders is not a nation, and the Federal Government must act with urgency and strength to end the threats posed by an unsecured border.
One of my most important obligations is to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.
My Administration will marshal all available resources and authorities to stop this unprecedented flood of illegal aliens into the United States.
Section Two of the Executive Order directs securing national borders through the following means.
(a) Establishing a physical wall and other barriers monitored and supported by adequate personnel and technology;
(b) Deterring and preventing the entry of illegal aliens into the United States;
(c) Detaining, to the maximum extent authorized by law, aliens apprehended on suspicion of violating Federal or State law, until such time as they are removed from the United States;
(d) Removing promptly all aliens who enter or remain in violation of Federal law;
(e) Pursuing criminal charges against illegal aliens who violate the immigration laws, and against those who facilitate their unlawful presence in the United States;
(f) Cooperating fully with State and local law enforcement officials in enacting Federal-State partnerships to enforce Federal immigration priorities; and
(g) Obtaining complete operational control of the borders of the United States.
Sections three and four of the Executive Order specify that the construction of physical barriers and the deployment of personnel applies to the southern border.
Section Five of the Order states that “the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take all appropriate actions to detain, to the fullest extent permitted by law, aliens apprehended for violations of immigration law until their successful removal from the United States.” It further directs “the termination of the practice commonly known as ‘catch-and-release,’ whereby illegal aliens are routinely released into the United States shortly after their apprehension for violations of immigration law.” The Section also terminates the program for citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti, through which they could enter into the United States for a period of up to two years, if a person in the USA agrees to financially support them.
Section Eight of the Executive Order directs the Secretary of State to seek international cooperation and agreement under Section 208(a)(2)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which specifies that an alien (other than an unaccompanied alien child) may not apply for asylum if that person may be removed under a “safe third country” agreement.
Section Ten directs the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to give priority to the prosecution of crimes that affect the security of the national borders, such as human smuggling, human trafficking, child trafficking, and sex trafficking.
Another Executive Order signed on January 20, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” directs departments and agencies, beginning thirty days after the order, to cease granting citizenship to persons born in the United States, if the person’s mother is unlawfully present, or if the person’s mother has merely temporary legal presence, except if the father is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. It maintains that the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 was intended to protect the citizenship rights of emancipated slaves and was not intended to grant citizenship rights to persons born in the United States whose mother and father are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, such as persons temporarily or unlawfully present in the country.
Yet another Executive Order signed by the President on January 20, “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program,” suspends the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, in accordance with a new policy that admits only refugees who can fully assimilate into the United States, and who do not compromise available resources. The Order directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to “examine existing law to determine the extent to which. . . State and local jurisdictions may have greater involvement in the process of determining the placement or resettlement of refugees in their jurisdictions, and shall devise a proposal to lawfully promote such involvement.” The Order directs the Secretary to submit a report within ninety days with respect to the feasibility of resuming the entry of refugees into the United States.
In addition, President Trump signed on January 20 a declaration of a national emergency at the southern border of the United States, which requires the use of the Armed Forces. The Declaration directs the Secretary of Defense to order as many units or troops as is necessary to support the Secretary of Homeland Security in obtaining control of the border. The declaration of a national emergency responds to the fact that “our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans.”
Still another Executive Order signed on January 20, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” directs the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) in all the states of the nation. “The objective of each HSTF is to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.’
The Executive Order also directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish detention facilities for removable aliens, ensuring the detention of aliens apprehended for violations of immigration law, pending the outcome of their removal proceedings. In addition, the Order directs the Secretary to authorize appropriate State and local law enforcement officials to perform the functions of immigration officers.
“Protecting the American People Against Invasion” also directs the Secretary of State to undertake diplomatic efforts and negotiations with foreign States, in order to ensure the prompt acceptance of nationals of their nations who are subject to removal from the United States. The Order also directs the Secretary of Homeland security to take all appropriate steps to encourage aliens who are unlawfully present in the United States to voluntarily depart.
In addition, the Executive Order directs the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security “to ensure that so-called ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions, which seek to interfere with the lawful exercise of Federal law enforcement operations, do not receive access to Federal funds.” They also should review all Federal contracts and grants to non-governmental organizations that provide support and services to illegal aliens, in order to ensure that said contracts and grants conform to the law, and when appropriate, pause distribution of funds pending review, and to terminate said agreements when it is determined that there is a violation of law. In addition, the Order directs the Office of Management and Budget to “take all appropriate action to ensure that all agencies identify and stop the provision of any public benefits to any illegal alien not authorized to receive them.”
As is evident, Trump has not put forth the issue of immigration as a political maneuver to get elected. The Trump administration is serious about stopping and deterring illegal immigration.
We now turn to several relevant questions.
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Do States have the right to regulate international migration?
All persons have rights, regardless of their migratory status, but international migration is not itself a human right. States have an obligation to promote the productivity of their economies, taking into account their current level of economic and technological development and their natural and human resources. This challenge, however, can be distorted by the massive influx of persons, whose presence can render available resources inadequate, and whose relatively low wage demand can undermine other solutions to the supply of labor that would work to the benefit of citizens, particularly those who are unemployed or underemployed. The State must control the influx of labor, giving priority to persons who offer skills that are in short supply among native laborers. In addition, the influx must be vetted, attempting to ensure that persons susceptible to criminal and/or violent behavior do not enter the country, based on their antecedents and records in their country of origin. Moreover, it would be reasonable to give a certain degree of priority to the relatives of citizens and legal residents.
Unfortunately, there has been lax enforcement of U.S. migratory laws by the political establishment in recent decades, as a result of the fact that the corporate elite has had an interest in the presence of undocumented labor, in order to directly employ relatively cheap labor, or because of the tendency of undocumented labor to drive the general cost of labor down. As a result of this unfortunate tendency, many irregular immigrants discerned a de facto acceptance of their presence, which they communicated to their families back home. Thus, there emerged a widespread belief that irregular migration could represent upward social mobility for individuals with sufficient energy and boldness to undertake it, who might be able to arrive to a position that would enable them to send remittances home. Indeed, the impoverished nations increasingly depended on such remittances, and states began to include income from remittances in their own economic plans.
But such de facto tolerance was never accepted by the people in the countries to which the migrants gravitate, except for those sectors of the people with idealist notions and/or were in a position of economic and physical security vis-à-vis the threats posed by massive irregular immigration. As the negative consequences increasingly expressed themselves, the people turned against the de facto tolerance, giving rise to movements that are not in essence racist movements, even though they have some racist manifestations.
Long-term political stability requires that States recognize that they have a right and a duty to regulate immigration and consistently act upon this obligation, which includes the right of deportation of individuals who are illegally present in the country. However, because of years of de facto tolerance, which signaled informal legitimacy, consideration should be given to granting exemptions from deportation for undocumented immigrants who can document employment for a certain number of years.
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What are the causes of unregulated international migration?
The modern European conquest of vast regions of the world from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries was fully consistent with the historic human tendency of conquering other lands and peoples. In the pre-modern world, conquest gave rise to great civilizations, mostly to the benefit of the conquering peoples; similarly, the modern European conquest gave rise to a technologically advanced modern world-economy that functioned to the benefit of the colonial powers.
The basic structures of the modern world-economy ensured a fundamental and constantly deepening inequality between colonizer and colonized. The conquered zones were peripheralized, that is, their manufacturing capacities were weakened or destroyed, and their land, natural resources, and labor were used to provide raw materials for manufacturing and industry in the core zone of the world-economy. In this way, development and underdevelopment were two sides of the same global process.
The colonized, of course, did not care much for the arrangement, so they set themselves to political and military struggles to attain their political independence, attained in the early nineteenth century in Latin America, and in the mid-twentieth century in South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. Political independence was not true independence, however, because the economic structures of colonialism remained intact. Thus, neocolonialism was born.
For the last seventy-five years the nations of the Global South and East have struggled against neocolonialism, declaring their right to be fully sovereign, including the right to control over their natural resources, so that they can seek economic development, which is the most important of all human rights. They have sought to develop mutually benefit trade among themselves, sidestepping the unequal exchange of trade with the world powers. This has been a slow and difficult process, because the center of the world-economy is home to the most advanced economies, technologies, and financial resources. But step-by-step, the leading nations of the Global South have increased their political and economic power vis-à-vis the West, and they in turn are supporting the rest.
Meanwhile, the world-system was approaching its natural limits. For four centuries, it had expanded by conquering new lands and peoples, but by the twentieth century, it had run out of new lands and peoples to conquer, inasmuch as it was approaching the geographical and ecological limits of the earth. This fundamental problem was signaled by the stagflation of the 1970s, occurring at the time in which the political resistance and advances of the Global South and East had reached an unprecedented level.
The American corporate elite and political establishment, handicapped by a myopic and ethnocentric vision of the world, was unable to discern the only possible option, namely, seeking mutually beneficial trade relations with the nations of the Global South and East, thereby constructing a gradual and orderly transition to a post-neocolonial world, characterized by mutual respect for the sovereignty of all nations; cooperation among nations in the development of advanced and ecologically sustainable forms of production; and mutually beneficial commerce, which would function as a guarantor of peace among nations.
Instead, the American corporate elite and political establishment sought to preserve its hegemony by launching an aggressive attack on the States and peoples of the world, in three dimensions. First, identifying particular nations as bad examples to the others, by virtue of their insistence of their sovereignty. Sanctions are imposed, and efforts are made to destabilize their political-economic systems. The nations targeted for attack, each in their own moment, have included Vietnam, China, Cuba, Indonesia, Congo, Tanzania, Ghana, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia, among others.
Secondly, the United States and the International Money Fund, utilizing the indebtedness of States that had been caused by the practices of Western banks, imposed neoliberal economic policies on States, thereby weakening the capacity of the States of the Global South to direct their economies toward development. The neoliberal project of the 1980s and 1990s deepened poverty and underdevelopment in most of the world,
Thirdly, a neoconservative ideology gained power, seeking to reestablish American control through military means. Endless costly wars were the result, with destructive consequences for the targeted nations.
The three-dimensional campaign of the targeting of vanguard nations, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism intensified poverty and underdevelopment in vast regions of the world, thereby provoking a mass migration to the region of the advanced economies. This decades-long three-dimensional economic, military, political, and ideological campaign against the nations of the Global South is the cause of the uncontrolled international migration, as people were compelled to abandon their nations in distress, and seek greater economic possibilities elsewhere.
But the three-dimensional campaign also had negatives consequences for the United States. Neoliberal policies in the United States meant greater investment in financial speculation and a decline in American manufacturing, combined with a reduction in government social services. The endless wars were financed by an expansion of federal government debts, and they provoked suffering without purpose for the people. And the people were denied the economic and cultural benefits of positive and cooperative relations with the vanguard nations and their peoples.
MAGA has emerged in response to the sustained economic decline of the United States. MAGA is an anti-establishment movement that has emerged in response to the betrayal of the nation by the corporate elite and the political establishment. It seeks to renew the productive capacity of the nation as well as to establish control over international migration.
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Is international migration a solution to the problems of global inequality and world poverty?
International migration can be an individual solution to a situation of poverty or limited employment possibilities. If a person can obtain employment in the high-wage zone, they may be in a position to send money to family in the low-wage country from which they migrated, although the effort can result in hardship or tragedy.
But international migration cannot possibly be the basis for a world-wide solution to the problems of poverty and global inequality. The solution requires a structural transformation, in which unequal exchange relations between countries and regions are transformed into commercial relations of mutual benefit. This change can be accomplished by peoples’ movements that are able to take political power and direct the State toward the quest for agreements of mutual benefit with other States, and toward the implementation of other measures designed to expand the productivity of the national economy and provide for the fundamental needs of the people. This process of change is well under way in the Global South and East, although it is not well observed or understood in the West. Persons in the Global South participating in this process of change through their work and their involvement in social movement organizations find much meaning in it, even though their lives are often difficult in material terms.
In addition, illegal international migration is an insecure undertaking with many risks to personal safety, typically requiring association with traffickers in persons (who often are connected to sex and drug trafficking). All States and organizations ought to discourage undocumented international migration.
There is a tendency toward misguided humanitarianism among migrant advocacy groups, supported by leftist idealism, that directly or indirectly advocates illegal migration. It would be far better to attend to the fundamental structural changes that the world-system requires, so that all nations will have a reasonable level of economic development, and all persons will have greater possibilities for finding their personal journey in their native lands.
International migration has its place. Some individuals dream of life in another nation, for one reason or another. And national economies often have a need for particular work skills that can only be filled by international migrants. But international migration should be safe, orderly, and regulated.
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What is the solution to the migratory crisis, and what would it take to attain it?
Although the United States has been lax in implementing immigration laws in recent decades, it is also the case that the U.S. immigration authorities have been deporting undocumented immigrants for years. And their experience has been that deported individuals often reenter the United States illegally. Some individuals have gone through this cycle three or four times.
The Trump administration, in planning a significant increase in deportations, seeks the cooperation of the nations of origin of the deported persons. At a minimum, the administration seeks the support of States in authorizing the arrival of flights carrying deported persons and the acceptance of the deported persons. But in addition, the United States is looking for cooperation in developing resettlement programs for deported migrants, so that they can be reintegrated into their native societies and remain in their native lands on a permanent basis. Negotiation on this matter has begun, and it has included the possibility that the United States would provide financial support for resettlement programs.
Said cooperation with respect to the deportation of undocumented immigrants could be expanded to include related areas of cooperation. As progressive Latin American heads of State like Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico and Xiomara Castro of Honduras have stressed, the ultimate solution to the problem of massive international migration is the economic development of the poorer nations. With this insight in mind, cooperation in resettlement programs could be expanded to include the development of mutually beneficial commerce that would contribute to the economic development of the nations to which the migrants are returning. It is not primarily a matter of foreign “aid,” but of creatively searching for trade and commercial agreements that would be beneficial to both parties and would have benefits for the U.S. economy. This process could cast aside economic sanctions against supposed authoritarian States, which has economic costs to the United States in the form of lost trade. Seen in this light, it can be seen that negotiations among States that address the problem of uncontrolled international migration as well as the interrelated issue of the limited development of the poorer nations could produce dynamic breakthroughs with respect to sanctions imposed by the USA against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
We are in a new situation, which creates new possibilities. Nations of Latin America have for years called for cooperation and mutually beneficial trade, ignored by the United States. But now, as a result of a new direction created by Trump and the MAGA movement, the United States is seeking cooperation from Latin America nations with respect to resettlement programs for deported migrants. At the same time, in the present U.S. political moment, we should note, the Trump administration has ceased talking about regime change in supposedly authoritarian States. Rather, the Trump administration is its inauguration day orders and proclamations stressed the productivity of the American economy, including the need for mutually beneficial commerce with other nations.
This possibility of a new era ought to be the focus of Latin American discourse today, lifting it up as a constructive road emerging from the present crisis, instead of imagining a worst-case scenario involving a new period of American empire and annexionism. Latin America should not fall victim to the toxic discourse of the U.S. “left,” which portrays the MAGA movement as composed of fascists and racists and its leaders as tyrants in the making. We should not lose sight of the fact that the central priority of the Trump administration is the expansion of American productivity and the renewal of the American economy. This is an entirely legitimate goal, and it comes from the MAGA movement, which is an anti-establishment movement, based in the working class and middle America, which rejects the unpatriotic indifference to the development of the American economy displayed by the corporate elite and the political establishment for nearly five decades.
One would hope that all States in Latin America are communicating through private channels to the Trump administration, indicating their willingness to cooperate with the United States in resettlement programs and in further cooperation with respect to mutually beneficial trade, which would be consistent with the Trump plan for the development of the American economy. There ought to be a general call in Latin America for mutually beneficial resettlement programs and mutually beneficial trade with the USA, as the only possible foundation for the sustainability of the modern world-system.
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Is there a common human interest?
To the extent that it resolves the international migratory crisis through a turn toward respect for the sovereignty of nations and cooperation among nations, the world-system would be taking decisive steps toward transforming its colonial foundations. All humanity will have a common interest in the sustainability of such a post-colonial and post-imperialist world-system characterized by the practice of the principle of the sovereignty of nations. This includes the nations that have decided for the construction of socialism, if their decision for socialism is respected out of respect for their sovereignty.
The common human interest in a world-system of sovereign nations will increasingly come to human consciousness as the unsustainability of a world of competing imperialisms becomes increasingly evident. At the same time, it is already self-evident that the disintegration of the world-system will likely mean more violence, conflict, and chaos, in which no one has an interest.
Fidel taught that out of the greatest challenges emerge the greatest possibilities. Let us embrace this teaching with conviction. In the midst of the international migratory crisis and the response of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration to it, we need to imagine the possibility of a solution to the crisis through the construction of a world-system that respects the sovereignty of all nations. We need to imagine the possibility of a more sustainable world that emerges from the current international migratory crisis. We need to repeatedly put forth and advocate for this possibility, as the necessary road to secure a future of peace, prosperity, and scientific achievement for humanity.
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