A consistent defense that capitalist liberals and conservatives like to go to when defending DACA and Dreamer’s is how much surplus value Dreamers generate. Of course, they don’t actually use the words “surplus value.” What happens is nearsighted liberal mouth pieces like Joy Ann Reid go on twitter tangents about how much money Dreamers pump into the economy, or about how many start their own businesses, or how many of them have ‘served their country’ by helping us to invade others.
The point is, too many people are using the revenue generated by immigrants and their labor as justification for keeping them in their country. Or they perptuate this onesided self-serving dialoque of how immigrants already make America great without acknowledging the reality of our treatment of immigrants up to this very day. In fact these people will talk about DACA and Dreamers as if they are all Mexican or Spanisgh speaking immigrants. This is an act of racism because not all Dreamers are from Spanish speaking countries and this adds to the already staggering list of ways we ignore our Asian and Pacific born Immigrants. Accessibilty to information for those who speak Spanish is more attainable than for those who speak Cantonese or Mandarin and even then the resources are not explicitly made available.
In any case, the dialoque that people take when defending immigrants based on the work they do is classist, and classism is a form of racism for it is the the politics of the class struggle that intersects all other struggles. Patriarchy, racism, xenophobia all have their roots in the capitalist system. To ignore class is to ignore the disporpotional fact that most of the poor are people of color and immigrants, especially when one considers how undocumented immigrants cannot collect welfare benefits. This is only perpetuated when we say crap like “Immigrants Make America Great” or “Immigrants pay such and such in taxes” or “Immigrants make up blah blah blah percent of this industry.” The biggest issue with this capitalist notion that an immigrant is only as good as the surplus revenue they generate is that it reinforces the racist idea of Nationalism, one which liberals claim to be against but their fetishization of Immigrants making America great with their labor and capital only reinforces the idea of Nationalism. Borders mean nothing except to the powers that be that draw them. Immigration should be as simple as moving to a new apartment down the street, a matter of choice in a time of peace rather than a forced choice in a time of displacing crisis. The only reason it isn’t is because crisises are easier to capitalize on than anything else.
So my point is that you are not any less nationalist, and therefore not less racist, than the people screaming for DACA to be repealed and Dreamers to be deported if you only measure the worth of immigrants by the amount of money they generate or labor they provide. Because borders are artificial constructs in of themselves, deportation should not even be a punishment, or even exist as a concept. The very act of deporting anyone is an act of racist Nationalism, are we so unsure of ourselves that we can’t handle a few criminals? And even then, why not work on creating a society without criminals instead of just shoving people we label as such into other countries? Can this other country handle crime better than us? Is so how can America be so great if we are so quick to kick out people we don’t value? More to the point, why is there any kind of person we don’t value?
The intentions of the people defending DACA based on their generation of surplus value are good, but good intentions under capitalism is still capitalism. Joy Ann Reid and her contemproaries should be ashamed of themselves for reducing the suffering of these families to that of dollars and cents. The ones who refer to the Dreamers who are veterans also have good inentions but ignore how most people enlist out of a lack of options, however my tangent about the realities of class and soldiers is for another day.
In summary, no one deserves to be deported. No one who makes a point of crossing a border should be kicked out just for crossing a border because we as a planet should not even have borders in the first place. A person is not just their job or the money they generate, and liberals who want to do right for immigrants should realize that. Stop making yourselves feel better by perpetuating the racist dialoque of the “Model Immigrant.” Stop emphasizing peoples worth by the money they generate. No human is illegal, and no human deserves to face the dehumanizing process of being kicked out of a country, period.
James J Jackson 