Some loser from the daily beast emailed me last week regarding my thoughts on open borders. I have no intention of responding to his email, but here are my rough and ready thoughts on the matter.
Law enforcement agencies, of every kind, are created, funded and armed by capitalist states, to enact the political agenda of it's ruling class. Although the specifics of that ruling class agenda, and the coercive methods by which it is enacted, vary considerably across different nation states in different historic conjunctures, their function, always and everywhere, is to secure the conditions by which the national bourgeoisie can continue to accumulate capital, by furthering the exploitation of the international proletariat.
The bourgeoisie of each nation state is locked in imperialist competition against the bourgeoisie of every other nation state, at the expense of the entire international working class. Capitalist social relations are inherently and irreducibly violent, exploiting the traumatisation of desperate migrants by fetishising national borders as if to imply borders, not bourgeois domination, were the locus of that violence, is grotesque.
The US bourgeoisie are at the helm of the wealthiest and most militarised nation state in human history, if they had any interest in reducing the suffering of working people everywhere, at home and abroad, they would start by scaling down thier empire, ending the non stop military intervention and destabilisation of developing nations, and ensuring that every single American worker enjoyed a much higher standard of living, including but not limited to the total eradication of homelessness, poverty, food insecurity, and deaths of despair.
Every single undocumented American who has resided in the country for 5+ years and has a clean criminal record should immediately be provided with a straightforward pathway to citizenship, this would reduce the extent to which employers are able to pit working people against each other along nationalist lines, thus reducing the appeal of nationalist ideations and effectively neutering any pseudo-explanatory power they may be afforded by members of the bourgeois political apparatus.
Beyond that workers in different countries have the same interests ie. opposing their national bourgeoisie. Only by building class power can they change the relations of domination under which they're now held hostage. Pretending that labor arbitrage, to enrich the US bourgeoisie, and with it the degradation and destabilisation of the global south, is anything other than imperialist bullshit, is an obscenity.
Open borders?
You have no clue what American workers want or do. Please go outside and get a job.
This is the exact argument that the British left should have taken up in 2016 with regards to "freedom of movement" in the European Union, that it has only ever functioned as a means for European capital to exploit migrant labour from Southern and ex-Soviet European countries. Failing to do so ceded ground both to the right (for whom freedom of movement was always rejected on anti-migrant grounds) and the remainers (who still maintain an idealised picture of the EU as an enlightened pro-migrant polity, despite evidence to the contrary).