On top of all the other responses, reactionaries are reactionary. Politicians see that anti-immigration policies drive people to vote and act accordingly. Capitalists are infamously short-sighted and support the politicians that promise the best short term returns, the furthest they’ll focus on is Q4 of next year.

lots of good answers, but nobody has really touched on why the party is doubling and tripling down on xenophobia. and i, for one, don’t have a good answer as to why the “rank and file” of the party would back these ideas. I get that the decision makers at the top are answering to capital, and i think the climate change refugee crisis is certainly a major reason, but why are all the good in-this-house-we-believe libs following suit?

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All great answers. But there’s something people are missing, and it’s a trap created by modern neo-liberal economic thinking.

Humans are not perfectly rational entities. Capital is not an external alien force that is perfectly rational either (yet). It moves and is brought to life by human hands.

The ruling forces at the moment are losing their grip. They are desperate. Somethings ARE running away from them.

They are acting irrationally all the time. They are shooting themselves on the foot, over and over. This is one of those things imo.

Because the moment a union of “illegals” crops up they can come down on it with the full might of the military lol

They don’t actually want to stop them from being here, that’s the lie. They just want them unable to organize

Labor efficiency is up, all The Powers That Be are drinking the Kool aid on automation and AI, it’s still easy to outsource low-skill labor (with the possible exception of agriculture), and climate change is going to make it harder to support large, resource hungry populations.

Thus, I assume the plan (to the extent there’s a plan) is to continue to automate or proletarianize white collar jobs while using immigration as a distraction and an excuse to build up the police state further. When there aren’t enough immigrant workers to fill jobs, start pushing the whites back into lower skilled populations while they enjoy their robot utopia in the cities.

Given that the rich are idiots and automation is definitely not going to proceed as hoped, I’d imagine this plan is going to clash with reality and things are going to get messy.

Maybe they are moving towards relying more on prison labor?

It creates a sort of form of domestic Imperialism, Capital supports anti-immigration so they can domestically hyper-exploit immigrants via threat of calling ICE and kicking them out or killing them.

Frightened “illegitimate” yet still present and active labor forces can make less demands and work for less.

Climate change brings with it 100s of millions of climate refugees. We are already seeing some of this occur.

The destabilising effect of 100s of millions of refugees is beyond anything any state has ever survived before. It will cause collapses and revolutions. These revolutions will be won by socialists if fascists are not around to fight us.

The funding and development of fascism coincides directly with the bourgeoisie feeling a need to use ultra violence to suppress the left. That need is on the horizon and they feel it existentially.

It flows directly from a path of least resistance, the democratic wing of US capital is just as white supremacist and bigoted as their republican counterparts, but crucially less obsessive about it, largely because they have a more secular conception that originates from a New England style mode of capital management, republicans are still by and large southern aristocrats in their epistemology of capitalism

But both still have an instinct toward nativist policymaking, republicans because of their aristocratic obsession with blood and soil, and democrats because they believe it maintains the college educated racial hierarchy of professional asset managers

Without a left to point out the disgusting nature of both these ideologies, the river flows only one way and it’s a toss up of which faction enforces their instincts, the democrats obviously being the more dangerous ones because of the soothing effect they have on the general public and activists, while Republican policy agitates more people toward real and effective opposition

It’s easier to oppose a rotting syphilitic aristocrat, than a clean smart-talking corporate broad member, and this dynamic fools even capitalists who should know better

This is my personal belief, but maybe it aligns with reality. Consider where most of these people are coming from. They come from South America, a region that the US has a direct hand in destabilizing. The immigrants coming across the southern border are the product of that destabilization, and they bring with them the stories they have about their life before and why they needed to leave. These stories directly undermine the narrative presented by the state about these people. They need the population to be fearful of them, so they do not allow them to integrate into the community and, as a byproduct, share their stories with that community.

That sits alongside all the other reasons mentioned already. More power to deport immigrants means more leverage in the hands of those who utilize their labor. Those tools allow for a kind of shadow slavery. Illegal Immigrants exist in a kind of superposition of being criminals before being tried as criminals. By existing inside the borders of the state without proper documentation, you are automatically a criminal. The more you restrict immigration laws, the more you make it difficult to legally immigrate into the country, the more likely you are to drive up the actual number of illegals in the country, and force them into this contradiction.

You don’t want the public to trust these people in any capacity because they might tell them the harrowing conditions under which they exist, and you might become sympathetic to their cause. So they are “othered” in the same way that minorities through history have been “othered” so they can be used as scapegoats for the failings of the state.

easier to exploit people when their immigration status is constantly called into question

Because production inside the core is not really as important to capital as maintaining hegemony, and it sees multiculturalism as a threat to hegemony. Leaving production in the periphery where currencies are undervalued relative to the dollar, and the colonialist power structures allow for superexploitation wages is a more beneficial state of affairs for international, imperialist capital than allowing for those workers to make their way to the imperial core. They still have to allow it in a limited way (who’s gonna mow their lawn?) but they have to keep a tight restriction on it because it threatens the current neoliberal order.

The more precarious Capital can make their lives, the more they can be exploited.