Additional abstract from Ron Hayduk (Back to April 2026 Pacifica Voice)
We live in unprecedented times, from multiple wars, sharp political polarization, growing political violence and mass protest, to rapid technological change, rising economic inequality, mass migration, climate change, and much more.
How did we get here? Are there through lines among these things? Any connections between the war on Iran, the abduction of the president of Venezuela, the demonization and deportation of immigrants, the rise of far-right groups, Christian nationalism, and political polarization and protest?
You bet ya. In fact, this is not the first time the US has seen these sorts of phenomena. In my book, I trace connections among such seemingly disparate events, identifying links to threads of American economic, social and political development over time, as well as connections between domestic changes and policies and international relations and US foreign policy, focusing on the politics surrounding immigration and inequality. The book also seeks to elevate historic and contemporary action by immigrant rights groups, civil rights advocates, and workers of all stripes who have struggled to achieve greater equality, justice and democracy. So yes, spoiler alert, the book offers hope the potential for a happy ending.
During the 2024 elections, immigration and the economy were the two top issues for voters, and immigration and affordability remain top issues today, according to reliable public opinion polls. Although President Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have made immigrants public enemy number one, immigrants are viewed favorably by most Americans. During the past two decades, between 60% and 79% of Americans polled said “immigration is a good thing” for the country, even though many Americans believe immigration should be decreased during recent years. This is true for respondents identifying as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, with modest variation among partisans. Moreover, most Americans have negative views of the harsh actions by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents that result in the detention and deportation of nonviolent immigrants whose only crime is being undocumented and that tear families apart, rather than detaining the “worst of the worst,” as well as contemning the killing of innocent noncitizens and citizens alike.
Similarly, regarding the economy, majorities of Americans regularly report experiencing difficulties keeping up with rising costs of living, from housing and healthcare to education, gas and food. Again, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all report dissatisfaction with elected officials on these issues, with some variation among partisans. Today, President Trump’s approval ratings on immigration and the economy are well below water, the two signature issues that helped him win in 2024.
It’s not hard to see why Americans feel this way. In the book, I present data outlining the contours of these two pressing political issues, as well as varying responses by conservatives, liberals and progressives.
For example, more people are migrating from countryside to city, from city to city, and from country to country than at nearly anytime in human history. Approximately one billion of the world’s eight billion people are in motion. While many migrants from the Global South seek entry into the Global North, most cannot, and for those who can, many encounter hostility and exploitation upon entry. Today, about 50 million people living in the US are foreign-born, representing 15% of the total population, the same proportion when immigration reached its peak during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Interestingly, many Americans think the number and percentage of immigrants in the US is higher than it actually is.
But even these numbers can mask reality. For instance, about half of the 50 million foreign born individuals in the US have naturalized and become US citizens. Does that mean they are not immigrants anymore?
The remaining 25 million include approximately 12 million undocumented people, which means 13 million are lawful permanent residents (“green card” holders) and others with work permits, student visas, and/or those covered by programs that provide legal status and temporary relief, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Thus, contrary to popular belief, less than a quarter of all foreign-born people are undocumented and comprise only 3.5% of the total population in the US. Moreover, most Americans are unaware of the labyrinthian rules regulating immigration, which make it extremely difficult to enter the US legally and/or become a citizen. For example, people who seek to migrate from Mexico or the Philippines often need to wait 10-15 years to enter the US legally, and the average time it takes to naturalize once here is 7-10 years or more. Lastly, the costs involved in navigating the many steps involved in these processes can be quite steep.
The current challenging process is profoundly unlike the process most Europeans experienced during the 19th and 20th centuries, when most anyone could come to the US and was automatically on the process to become a citizen and obtained citizenship in 5 years. In short, the laws and rules during the historical period make the process easy, fast and cheap, compared to today.
Still, immigrants and their offspring comprise more than one in four people in the US and the number of second-generation Americans (children of immigrants) is projected to rise to 36% by 2065. At the state and local level, the concentration of immigrants can be much higher. California for example, holds nearly one-fourth of the nation’s entire foreign-born population – about 10 million people – who comprise more than 25% of California’s total population. Again, a smaller number and proportion are noncitizens, and an even smaller number are undocumented.
Following others, the book seeks to advance a key take-away: political debate about immigration and immigrants cuts to the heart of questions about “who is an American” and “what is the nature of America”? Are we a “nation of immigrants” or are we an “Anglo Christian nation”? Again, these questions are not new either. The good news is the historical record offers valuable insights and lessons not only about how we got here but also that can inform public debate today and policy making going forward.
Similarly, regarding the economy, many Americans struggle to make ends meet, even while the US economy continues to grow as measured by GDP, partly because of sharply increases in wealth and income inequality. For example, in 1960, the top CEOs in American made about 25 times that of the lowest paid workers; today CEOs make 350 times what average workers make. Similarly, although world economic output has expanded significantly, tripling from 1990 to date, such growth is sharply maldistributed with wealthy and high-income countries reaping disproportionate gains.
Wealth and income inequality are greater in the US than in almost every other country in the Global North and have increased dramatically during the past several decades by nearly every major statistical measure. Importantly, wealth and income inequalities are not randomly distributed – they have distinct race, gender, and spatial dimensions.
Over the past 60 years, the US experienced a massive transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class households to the wealthiest households. In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of middle-class families, but by 2022, they had 71 times the wealth of families in the middle. Between 1975 and 2018, $47 trillion dollars were transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1% of the US population. Wealth disparities by race are even more extreme – White families gained an average of $320,000 more wealth than did Black and Hispanic families during these decades (Brown et al., 2024).
Income inequality has skyrocketed over the past five decades. Over this period, the top 1% of American earners nearly doubled their share of national income relative to other groups, even though workers’ productivity remained steady or increased. From 1979 to 2024, average hourly compensation increased just 29.4% (after adjusting for inflation) while worker productivity increased 80.9% (Economic Policy Institute, 2024). In other words, productivity grew at a rate 2.7 times as fast than did worker pay. Where have productivity gains gone? Into the hands of upper-income earners. In 1960s, the average CEO earned 25 to 30 times as much as the average US worker; in 2021, the gap grew to 350 times, with CEO pay averaging $18.3 million compared to average worker pay of $58,260. If workers’ pay had kept up with increased productivity and if labor retained its share of national income, inequality would not be as extreme as it is today.
Worse still, the rate of poverty has increased, and extreme poverty has grown substantially. Today, one out of three Americans are poor and working class. Of the 334 million inhabitants of the US, about 45 million are poor and another 60 million are near poor, most of whom are people of color, immigrants, and women. Approximately 40% of Americans do not have $1,000 if they faced an unexpected emergency.
Immigrants experience among the sharpest inequalities, disparities that are evident both between immigrants and citizens as well as among and within particular immigrant groups. Although immigrants are highly heterogenous and work in every occupational sector, more immigrants work in low-wage jobs, even while a sizable number of immigrants work in middle- and high-income professions. Studies show a greater proportion of the foreign born are represented in the lowest-paying jobs, such as waiters, agricultural workers, and private household workers than citizens, even though a greater proportion of immigrants than citizens work in jobs that call for high levels of education, such as in technology and medicine.
In fact, the foreign born tend to score lower than citizens on most social indicators of well-being, including income, poverty, housing, hunger, and education, with the undocumented at the bottom. Disparities also exist between (and within) immigrant groups: Canadian immigrants have the highest average annual income, followed by Asian American, South American, Middle Eastern, Caribbean, and Mexican and Central American immigrant households. Income inequality and poverty rates among immigrant groups cleave along similar lines.
What is driving these trends and how should we respond? Why should we care?
Inequality produces a broad range of negative impacts on the well-being of individuals, groups, and societies. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, for example, detail how inequality contributes to negative social and health outcomes, including producing higher rates of mental illness, violence, obesity, drug abuse, and lower life expectancy. Moreover, these outcomes are more prevalent in societies with large gaps between the rich and poor, affecting everyone, not just those at the bottom. Crucially, inequality contributes to decreased levels of social trust and political instability. In 2024, Wilkinson and Pickett updated and expanded their original research by introducing two new indices and 27 newly analyzed dimensions. Their update underscores how inequality produces a broad range of harms and contributes to escalating social crises, including declining levels of trust, social cohesion, and attacks on democracy. They conclude by pointing to how the exploding wealth and power of the ultra-rich go hand in hand with the rise of the right, violence, and other social ills.
Conversely, Wilkinson and Pickett show, a greater level of equality in a society leads to significantly improved well-being for the entire population, as measured by factors like better physical and mental health, lower crime rates, higher life expectancy, improved social mobility, and greater social cohesion. Their research shows that even the wealthy experience benefits in more equal societies, due to reduced social stress and anxiety associated with large income gaps. In short, inequality affects us all, not just those at the bottom of the social order.
How should we understand these phenomena and respond? I contend these trends reflect policy failures flowing from ineffective politics that can be addressed politically.
Politics
Regimes nearly everywhere struggle to address the challenges of deepening inequalities and growing migration.
American workers, who struggle to make ends meet and watch their standard of living decline, wrongly blame immigrants for their declining well-being. Employers, faced with an insufficient pool of workers with particular skills needed, seek to expand visas to recruit foreign workers. Labor unions want workers to be brought out of the shadows and given amnesty so that migrants can avoid exploitation by employers and enjoy the same protections as other workers. Federal agents and police, who should be focused on real threats, instead chase immigrant farmworkers, busboys, and nannies, keeping terrorized families separated from loved ones. Religious and ethnic groups seek to end deaths in deserts and the inhumane treatment of immigrants. Nativists see the racial and ethnic diversity that accompanies immigration as a threat to “their” societies, perceiving migrants and demographic change as “replacing” them and causing social ills. Immigrant rights and social justice advocates seek to decriminalize and humanize immigrants, create pathways to citizenship, and create belonging. Americans indicate in public opinion polls that they prefer a realistic, comprehensive, and fair approach to immigration, one that regulates immigration flows and includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The top two issues for voters in the 2024 elections that sent Trump back to the White House were the economy and immigration.
Confronted by contending social groups, conservative and liberal policy makers struggle to manage migration, achieve shared economic prosperity, and maintain political stability at home and abroad. Yet, both conservatives and liberals fail to achieve these goals because they downplay the role played by capital accumulation processes and imperialism that drive mass migration and growing inequalities to begin with. Essentially, they seek to treat symptoms rather than address root causes, leading to ineffective solutions.
US conservatives associated with the Republican Party contend mass migration constitutes an “invasion” and they champion “solutions” that range from closing borders and restricting legal immigration to denying public services to immigrants and mass deportation. President Trump and the MAGA movement demonize immigrants by claiming they are criminals who “poison the blood” of America, which has the effect of fomenting hate and violence toward migrants, displacing people’s stress about the economy and other legitimate concerns onto immigrants, making immigrants scapegoats. Trump frames immigration as an urgent national security danger to generate White racial resentment, fueling conspiratorial theories that immigrants and people of color are “replacing” Whites and thereby pose an existential threat. Right-wing groups lament the decline of US power, arguing for “America first” policies to restore US economic and political dominance to protect “civilization.”
Meanwhile, liberals associated with the Democratic Party call for better methods to “manage” migration through a more rational immigration policy tied to national economic needs and an aging population. Liberals embrace the notion that America is a “nation of immigrants” and celebrate immigrants’ economic contributions performing vital services from construction and agriculture to health care and domestic work. Yet, their embrace of immigrants as an economic resource reduces migrants to a commodity, which contributes to the dehumanization and exploitation of immigrants. Indeed, liberals including presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden embraced the insidious distinction in law and rhetoric between “good law-abiding hardworking deserving” immigrants and “bad criminal undeserving dangerous” immigrants, policies and narratives that laid the groundwork for contemporary framings and deportation by conservatives. More positively, some liberals advocate for “sanctuary” laws and “protective status” that provide a modicum of safety and temporary reprieve for the undocumented from deportation, as well as champion increased pathways to citizenship.
Despite such differences, nevertheless, both liberals and conservatives tend to agree that immigration policy should limit the “future flow” of migrants. Otherwise, they contend, chaos and decline will ensue. Moreover, many Democrats and Republicans support limiting family-based unification and moving toward “merit-based” immigration policies that admit “talented” immigrants – those with higher levels of education and skills – or temporary guest workers. Such policies, while designed to “promote economic growth” and meet “labor needs” of an aging population instead exacerbate inequalities by draining higher educated and skilled migrants from sending countries and expose low-skilled and low-educated migrants to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and unforgiving labor markets.
Regarding inequality, liberals and conservatives similarly lack real answers. In response to increasing economic crises afflicting the US during the past 50 years, from the “stagflation” during the 1970s – that period of stagnant economic growth, unemployment, and rising inflation – to the steep recessions that occurred during the early 1980s, early 1990s, the Great Recession in 2008, and the current period, both liberal and conservative policy makers have advanced various “solutions” that not only fail to address the underlying conditions producing these crises but instead have contributed to increased income and wealth inequality.
Following other scholars and advocates, I argue for a different approach, one that better illuminates processes driving growing inequality and mass migration, and that advances more effective solutions.
Social Structures of Capital Accumulation
Political economists call the conditions under which profit-making occurs in a society the “social structure of capital accumulation.” In an ideal capitalist world, the social structure of accumulation would be stable, companies would make profits, reinvest profits to expand operations, and workers’ income would keep up with the standard of living. But that ideal has rarely existed and has not lasted, even when achieved for a period of time.
Every capitalist economy experiences downturns, whether a relatively mild one or a severe crisis. During the Great Depression of the 1930s and in the crisis of the 1970s, the social structure of accumulation went through major changes, both domestically and globally. In the US, the Great Depression led to increased government intervention in the economy, the establishment of social welfare programs, laws promoting the growth of labor unions, and the creation of an international financial architecture that promoted free trade and the expansion of US economic and military power overseas. This new social structure of capital accumulation, sometimes called “regulated capitalism” with a “capital/labor accord,” lasted for three decades. Similar “social democratic” structures of accumulation were developed in European countries, particularly among the Scandinavian nations.
Following WWII, as the US economy doubled and tripled in size, labor unions forced capitalists to share part of their growing profits with workers in the form of increased wages and expanding benefits, which insured workers’ income kept up with and even exceeded the cost of living, in exchange for labor agreeing to limit strikes and temper demands by rank-and-file workers who sought to control investment decisions or abolish capitalism all together. New Deal era policy imposed steep taxes on the wealthy and corporations, funneling those funds into social welfare programs and the building of schools, housing, hospitals, transportation, parks, and other infrastructure that supported expanding communities across the country.
However, this 30-year period of relatively “shared prosperity,” which both Democrats and Republicans continue to say they seek to recreate, had a seamy side: it rested on the subordination of people of color, women, and exploitation of workers of all stripes inside and outside the US. African Americans, Puerto Ricans, women, and other marginalized groups were largely locked out of many New Deal programs, such as Social Security and housing programs, and labor unions often kept out people of color or relegated them to the worst jobs. Moreover, America’s largess rested on the projection of US economic and military power overseas in ways that exploited peoples in the Global South, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, delivering economic gains to American workers and consumers. In other words, a crucial part of this “social structure of accumulation” involved forms of US imperialism.
Moreover, as Jefferson Cowie observes, this period of “regulated capitalism,” when wealth and income inequality remained relatively low, was the “great exception,” bracketed by long periods of steep inequality before and after. During the 1970s this era of shared prosperity, when the US experienced a form of “social democracy,” began to unravel as the US entered a period of “stagflation” characterized by declining profits, unemployment, inflation, and political discontent. The rebuilt economies in Western Europe and Japan, and the rising Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries soon challenged US hegemony, along with a growing number of independence movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. In addition, growing militant mass social movements in the US posed a serious challenge to its ruling elites, including civic rights, labor, feminist, LGBTQ, environmentalist, and peace movements.
Elites, who struggled to respond to the economic crisis and mass movements, responded by launching a series of attacks on labor and progressives at home and abroad. In so doing, elites ushered in a new social structure of capital accumulation, called “neoliberalism.”
Neoliberalism, which began under the presidential administration of Jimmy Carter (1976–1980) and was institutionalized by Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and Bill Clinton (1992–2000), involved deregulating domestic and international markets, banking, and corporate operations, reducing government social programs, criminalizing immigrants and people of color, and most especially, undermining the power of labor unions and intensified exploitation of working people at home and abroad. Neoliberal policies were ostensibly designed to promote the growth “free markets” and international trade in order to re-invigorate and stabilize capital accumulation processes.14 In the end, however, neoliberalism accelerated inequality and helped produce the Great Recession in 2008, which thrust the global economy into a deep recession, upending the lives of millions of people who lost their jobs, homes, and retirements. Since then, economies have limped along in most parts of the globe, generating greater inequality, migration, and political strife.
In response to the failures of neoliberalism, populist movements have emerged on both the left and right in the US and elsewhere, advancing alternative social structures of accumulation. In the US, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump launched their respective presidential bids in 2015 by making their opposition to global free trade agreements central to their campaigns, highlighting how the North American Free Trade Agreement undermined union jobs and contributed to economic devastation affecting working people and communities across the country. Both Sanders and Trump called out leaders of their respective parties that mutually embraced NAFTA and neoliberal forms of free trade, even as Sanders and Trump advanced radically different proposals as solutions.
The turn toward neoliberalism undermined the material conditions that formed the basis of popular support for the nearly 40-year dominance of the Democratic Party during the 20th century. The Democratic Party’s “New Deal Coalition” was anchored in the working class, who were the most loyal Democratic voters. During this period, surveys of voters regularly described Democrats as being for the “common people” and being the kind of person who “works for his wages,” while describing Republicans as for the “better” or “higher” class and as someone who is “well-off financially” and “wealthy.” Yet, by 2024, these depictions were reversed – a greater number of people polled said they view Democrats as of and for “elites” and Republicans as the party of and for the “working class,” even while these images are not grounded in material reality and a sober assessment of policy positions.
This political class dealignment resulted in large part from the Democrats embrace of neoliberalism. On the one hand, neoliberalism accelerated the growth of finance, real estate, science, and technology sectors of the economy, spurring the flow of capital and people into metropolitan areas that became increasingly expensive. During this time, income and wealth rapidly accrued to the top tenth of the population, with the highest gains going to the top 1%. Moving in the other direction, neoliberalism weakened labor unions, squeezed workers, accelerated deindustrialization, hollowed out working-class communities, and increased part-time and contingent work. This gave rise to the “precariat,” a term combining “proletariat” and “precarious,” associated with the rise of the “gig” economy, characterized by unstable and degraded forms of employment. Increasingly expensive urban areas saw the exodus of poor and working people who experienced displacement from gentrification. Communities across the country saw increases in food and housing insecurity among their populations.
These material changes undercut the Democrats’ credibility among many of its adherents, creating an opening for Trump and the MAGA movement to fill the void and make appeals to disaffected working-class people who felt abandoned by the Democratic Party. As Bernie Sanders summed it up in his postmortem of the 2024 election, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
To be sure, the class and ideological basis of Trumpism and MAGA is not rooted in the working class. Rather, as John Bellamy Foster argues, it is:
“rooted in a tenuous alliance between sections of the monopoly-capitalist ruling class at the top of society and a mobilized army of lower-middle class adherents far below. The latter see as their chief enemies, not the upper echelons of the capitalist class, but the upper-middle class professionals immediately above them and the working class below. The primarily white lower-middle class overlaps with rural populations and adherents of religious fundamentalism or evangelicalism, forming a right-wing, revanchist historic bloc.”
Moreover, Trumpism and the MAGA movement have tapped into, revived, and amplified a long train of retrograde ideas including racism, sexism, nationalism, and Christian fundamentalism – ideologies that course through American history. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued, once ideas emerge, they can become material forces. In so doing, Trumpism and MAGA capitalize on the real material-class forces that give rise and animate right-wing populism in the US and beyond.
Both Trump administrations and Republican-dominated congresses have featured steep tax reductions, cuts to social programs, elimination of government agencies, and a reorientation of US political relations around the globe. Trump promotes tariffs and shifts in international arrangements to advance new forms of American imperialism. While liberals’ approach is bankrupt, Trump’s poses significant threats to immigrants and workers of all stripes.
Moving in another direction, Sanders and his protégé Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez (AOC), provide a markedly different response to the failures of neoliberalism. Sanders and AOC continue to generate broad support for progressive proposals, such as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and the Fight for $15, policy proposals made popular by social movements that have powered their campaigns, including labor, environmental, civil rights, feminist, LGBTQ, and peace movements. During the spring of 2025, for example, a quarter of a million people attended Sanders’ and AOC’s “fighting oligarchy” tour (Johnson, 2025). Democratic Socialist Zorhan Mamdani’s mayoralty in New York City has reenergized calls for radical alternatives to “business as usual.” Even many mainstream Democrats have now embraced an “affordability” message, even while there are differences in how they seek to achieve such an end. In these ways, such radical progressives call for significant changes to the status quo (neoliberalism), rather than a return to it, championing a brand of “democratic socialism” as a new social structure of accumulation.
Yet, many mainstream Democrats and liberals largely seek a return to the pre-Trump status quo. Many mainstream liberals call for the restoration of free markets, government programs, and “institutional norms” that prevailed before Trump.
The problem is, that status quo is now seen by large and growing segments of the population as failing to effectively address ongoing economic and political crises, seeing both conservative and liberal “solutions” as bankrupt, as exacerbating problems faced by poor and working people rather than addressing them effectively.
In short, both Sanders style economic populism and Trumpism represent divergent responses to a dying neoliberal world order, the current “interregnum,” where the old order is dying and the new order has yet to be born, as Antonio Gramsci described of the 1920s and 1930s.
Similarly, regarding migration, mainstream groups tend to misdiagnose problems and primarily seek to treat symptoms. For example, many mainstream liberal analysts and policy makers contend migration results largely from poverty and violence. While few would deny that poverty and violence – and the search a better life – contribute to increased migration, the larger question is what produces poverty, violence and less than desirable conditions of life to begin with? What can and should be done?
A View from the Left
Radical scholars and progressive groups cast light on the root causes of mass migration and growing inequality, offering sharply different analyses and political responses.
Marxists illuminate the ways capital accumulation processes create wage laborers out of subsistence farmers, transform agrarian societies into industrial and urban societies, produce surplus population and degrade labor, enrich bourgeoises, and spur migration on a global scale. Scholars in the Black radical tradition highlight the ongoing legacy of colonialism and slavery affect disparate patterns today. Feminists underscore the essential role women play in maintaining and reproducing social life by performing unpaid household care work. Environmentalists point to the unfolding climate catastrophe that contributes to growing migration and inequality, and other analysts cast light the ways US economic and foreign policy produces mass migration and inequality by destabilizing regimes in Latin American, generating what Juan Gonzalez calls the “harvest of empire.”
Such analysts unearth fundamental processes that shape outcomes. For example, scholars detail the staggering level of value transfer from the Global South to the Global North: from 1995 to 2021, it is estimated that $18.4 trillion in value has been captured by the Global North from the Global South. Within the Western Hemisphere, the US has drawn comparable wealth from Latin America and the Caribbean. Such value transfers vasty enrich “core” regions and increase the dominance of world powers largely by “under-developing” “peripheral” regions, spurring migration. In these ways, radical scholars shed light on the nature of “unequal exchange” involved in the underlying generators of massive transfers of wealth at the center of processes, shaping patterns of inequality and migration.
The notion that mass migration and growing inequality begin with capital accumulation and imperial processes has yet to fully penetrate liberal and conservative circles, but it is gaining traction in radical political quarters. The turn toward neoliberalism is now largely acknowledged as an abject failure by a growing number of scholars, labor organizers, immigrant rights activists, community organizations, think tanks, members of media, and the broader public. Today, many people recognize the free trade race to the bottom in pursuit of cheap goods and natural resources creates mass misery and political instability at home and abroad
The failures of neoliberalism have contributed to public disillusionment with governing institutions, rule-based norms, and incumbents of all political stripes, and not just in the US. In 2024, voters rejected incumbent parties in 80% of the elections that occurred in 70 countries across the globe, perhaps the highest number of elections on record that resoundingly rejected the status quo. This realization, that neoliberalism is a dead end, increasingly appears as “common sense” to many people, generating responses that range from forms of “nihilism” to forms of revolt. Even analysts associated with the Democratic and Republican parties now acknowledge their bi-partisan embrace of neoliberalism has failed, recognizing it contributed to the loss of public trust. In the context of the faltering neoliberal order, a shrinking middle class, and a growing precarious and impoverished working class, migrants have become fodder for conservative and liberal political factions alike.
Yet, in the face of underlying economic forces, increasing violence, and intensifying environmental crises, borders and walls do not deter desperate migrants; nor do they meet the needs of growing numbers of poor and working-class citizens in the US and elsewhere.
Mass migration and inequality are two sides of the same coin. While mainstream analysts point to the role of poverty and violence in migration patterns, they conflate causes with their consequences. Following others, I argue that poverty and violence are the consequences of neoliberal capitalism and imperialist interventionism, antecedents that create poverty and violence to begin with, which spur migration and inequality.
To address poverty and violence involved in migration, capitalism, and imperialism require fundamental change, not staid approaches that seek to create better conditions for business investment and increase security measures as the Biden/Harris approach prescribed. Similarly, to reverse growing inequalities, we need to advance new economic models, such as those developed by progressive groups.
In short, without addressing root causes, finding effective, lasting, and just solutions will remain elusive. Understanding root causes is a key step in crafting effective solutions. Just as in medicine, making a proper diagnosis is vital to implement an effective treatment that improves health and well-being. Conversely, making an incorrect diagnosis can lead to applying an ineffective treatment, continued illness, and worsening outcomes.
Untangling the Political Roots argues rapacious capitalism and imperialism drive inequalities at the root of mass migration and growing inequality, highlighting the role of the US. To advance this argument, I develop a broadly left analytic framework grounded in elements of Marxist theory, migration and immigration studies, social movement studies, and political science. This framework, encapsulated in the concept of the “social structure of accumulation,” focuses on several key factors that combine to shape patterns of migration and inequality, including: (1) capital accumulation processes, (2) racism and racialized social structures, (3) state institutions and policy, and (4) class conflict and political mobilization.
I apply this analytic framework to examine selected cases during two periods in US history: 1870–1925 and 1970–2025. These two periods, dubbed the Gilded Age and the New Gilded Age respectively, were selected because they are years when: (1) the proportion of immigrants peaked, reaching nearly 15% of the total population; (2) the US experienced rapid economic and social change, including rising inequality and political polarization; (3) immigration and inequality became salient and contentious issues that generated sharp political conflict on both the left and right; and (4) immigrants and workers organized and mass social movements manifested, producing both progressive and reactionary policy and politics. These periods are also eras when America projected significant economic and military power overseas that shed light on the role of US imperialism in generating migration and inequality, particularly vis-à-vis Latin America and the Caribbean.
As such, these periods contain a wealth of information to address the book’s central questions, providing useful insights and lessons for contemporary advocates and policy makers grappling with issues of mass migration and growing inequality today. To do so, I use a mix of historical, empirical, and interpretive methods that draw upon a broad range of primary and secondary sources, including census data, public records, surveys, and studies by social scientists, research centers, policy groups, and community organizations.
To be clear, the book does not conduct a comprehensive analysis of these broad subjects and periods; nor does it review and engage the full range of debates and the vast literatures involved. The book does not argue such a left approach is the only or best way to address these complex questions and processes. The book’s aim is more modest, seeking to historicize and reinterpret mainstream approaches to the politics of migration and inequality in the US from a broadly left perspective.
In so doing, Untangling the Political Roots aims to further research agendas that employ Marxist theory and left approaches to these subjects. The book seeks to highlight the ways capital accumulation processes, imperialism, racialized social structures, class conflict, and public policy interact and shape patterns and politics of migration and inequality in the US. Finally, the book seeks to elevate cases where immigrants and workers organize across divides to exercise collective power in ways that advance radical ideas and progressive policy, cases that hold valuable lessons for scholars, policy makers, and organizers interested in creating equitable, just and sustainable outcomes today.
Is such a world possible? This book argues for an emphatic yes.
Human development of productive forces has increased our collective capacity to eliminate hunger and poverty. Although neoliberals argue austerity is necessary because they claim there are not enough resources for everyone, radicals counter that there is plenty – it is merely maldistributed. For example, according to public policy scholar Mark Paul, if wealth was “distributed equally, each and every adult American would have roughly half a million dollars in wealth to their name. If income were distributed equally, we’d each have an annual flow of $95k.” Even if such redistribution allowed gradation along the lines of Marx’s dictum, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” inequality could be sharply reduced and needs and wants could be amply met.
Although these numbers would be lower if done on a global scale, redistribution from the Global North to the South would eliminate poverty and provide a solid floor on which everyone could live well. As the economist Ladislau Dowbor has argued, the problems experienced by people in the Global South are:
“not economic, it’s not a lack of resources; it’s a problem of political and social organization…. Global GDP is 100 trillion dollars per year, equivalent to 4,200 dollars a month per family of four people. It is enough for a decent and comfortable life for all. All that would be needed is a tax of only four percent on the fortunes of the richest one percent of humanity.
Such reforms would be game changing.
It would not be the first time. The world’s social democracies emerged during and after the Great Depression and WWII, enacting a range of policies that reduced poverty and inequality for decades. In the US, the rise of organized labor and the unionization of one-third of all workers by the 1950s, along with New Deal policies and a post-WWII economic expansion, lifted many immigrants and workers out of poverty and sharply reduced inequality, fueling the expansion of the middle class. From 1946 to 1979, the lower four-fifths of American households saw their income rise as much or more than did upper-income households, partly due to the power of labor unions, progressive income and corporate tax policy, and generous social welfare policy (e.g. the GI bill, FHA mortgage guarantees, Social Security, etc.), although it is important to note that women, African Americans, Mexicans, and other people of color were largely locked out of such programs and gains. The social movements of the 1960s and 70s helped remove barriers to relief and increased access to such programs and greater opportunity that also decreased inequality. In 1960, the poverty rate in the US was 22%, where one out of five people were poor. By the early 1970s, poverty was cut in half, reduced to 11%. In the 1960s, CEOs made an average of 20–25 times more than did the lowest paid workers in a company; but by 2022, it was 350 times or more than the lowest paid worker in the company.
The bi-partisan embrace of neoliberalism during crises of capital accumulation coincided with the globalization of production, financialization of economies, “fiscal crisis of the state,” and the growth of international labor migration. As we explore in chapter three, neoliberal programs such as the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) “structural adjustment policies” forced many governments in the Global South to slash expenditures on healthcare, education, housing, and food subsidies, which were key drivers of international migration, particularly in poorer countries. In the US, neoliberal globalization, deregulation, tax cuts, attacks on labor unions, and cuts to social welfare programs combined to produce steep inequality. Such policies and processes also contribute to climate change.
The powerful undertow of capital accumulation processes continues to undermine social democracies in Europe and elsewhere, reducing standards of living and increasing inequality. The failure of regimes to address these challenges, along with the influx of millions of migrants and rising climate change, has fueled right-wing movements. In the US, the rise of “extreme market capitalism” eviscerated key elements of New Deal and Great Society programs – America’s version of “social democracy” – in ways that hollowed out communities in “rustbelt” and rural parts of America, creating conditions ripe for Trumpism to forge a reactionary politics that taps people’s discontents and mobilizes racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism, even as Trump and the Right wage war on the working class. Although “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders sought to speak to the plight of people left behind in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns for president, energizing progressive movements and elevating alternative visions and policies that better address the failures of neoliberalism and climate change, leaders of the Democratic Party and of mainstream media outlets largely thwarted these promising efforts.
Nevertheless, rising numbers of immigrants and their increasing role in labor organizing helped shift unions’ stance to support immigration and embrace immigrants in their ranks by 2000 (labor had largely opposed immigration historically). The massive immigrant rights marches of 2006, when millions of immigrants marched in over one hundred cities across the US, put immigrant rights on the political map and helped power pro-immigrant and pro-worker policy at the local, state, and national levels.
Since Trump took office in 2025, a nascent intersectional and international movement has been growing, manifesting in a series of demonstrations every few weeks or months in thousands of cities and towns across the US as well as in other countries. Along with a reenergized labor movement and peace movement, these developments bode well for the prospects of transformative change making.
Mass migration and inequality pose particular challenges and unique opportunities for the left in the US and elsewhere. On the one hand, immigrants are being pitted against the native-born in labor and housing markets, exacerbating competition and conflict among low-wage workers and people of color. Witness Trump’s efforts to demonize and deport millions of immigrants, claiming that immigrants drive up housing costs and take “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” This process threatens to further fragment an already divided working class in ways similar to earlier periods of mass immigration when nativists and capitalists undermined the potential for greater collective action by immigrants, African Americans, and workers of all backgrounds, fueling right-wing political projects that advanced forms of White supremacy and elite domination into the 20th century.
On the other hand, immigrants and their descendants are rapidly changing the racial and ethnic makeup of the US, creating opportunities to address structural racism and economic exploitation through their sheer numbers. Immigrants now reside in nearly every census tract in the US, affecting communities and scrambling racial and political dynamics. In 1990, 78% of White people lived in predominantly White neighborhoods, but by 2020 that number plunged to 44%, making people of color the majority in many neighborhoods.
To be sure, demography is not destiny. Whiteness is fluid and White supremacy has maintained its power by the absorption of previously excluded groups, as occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries when many “in-between peoples” (e.g. Southern and Eastern Europeans) became “white.” As many scholars and organizers have noted, since anti-Black racism is the structuring racial ideology in the US, dismantling racial capitalism is paramount. Otherwise, the flip side of the “browning of America” could end up being the “yellowing of whiteness.” The electoral gains Trump made in 2024 among Latinos, Asian Americans, and even some African Americans is testimony to these dangerous processes. As discussed in the chapters that follow, distinct racial and political projects can either reinforce existing racial hierarchies or transform them in liberatory directions.
As the faltering neoliberal order continues to increase proletarianization, it creates conditions ripe for an intersectional class-based politics.
On the other hand, solidarity is not automatic; forging a sense of shared fate and forming coalitions requires concerted and sustained organizing. As Marxists put it, a “class in itself” can become a “class for itself.” Under the right conditions and historical moment, the working class can develop a shared identity and act in solidarity to exercise its collective power. To be sure, right-wing populism is resurgent because its politics of division pits groups against each other in ways that undermine progressive class-based alliances.
Still, immigrants and workers of all stripes sometimes do overcome ethnic, racial, and political divisions, particularly in labor unions and social movements, recognizing they share much in common, though not without tension and conflict. Immigrant rights and worker movements have waged creative and effective campaigns that not only beat back attacks targeting them, but that advanced radical ideas and achieved real gains, such as in the cases in California, the 2006 immigrant rights marches, the Fight for $15, and other cases. Organizers brought together diverse groups to win living wages, universal child care, immigration and criminal justice reform, affordable housing, healthcare, language assistance, higher education, abolish debt, and other shared goals. Such cases demonstrate that a politics of solidarity that wages campaigns aimed at raising working-class living standards and fosters collective care can be effective.
In the context of ongoing crises of neoliberal capitalism and climate catastrophes, these dynamics could turn out to be either opportune or disastrous.
While demographic change has fueled right-wing movements, the upsurge in labor organizing and progressive social movements has simultaneously generated new opportunities for progressives to advance radical politics and policies capable of achieving a more equitable, just, and sustainable world. During the past decade, more people have marched in streets and occupied town squares across the US than at nearly any time in recent memory, advocating for worker rights, racial and gender justice, immigrant rights, environmental justice, and global justice. And while the movements that elevated “democratic socialism” have waxed and waned in the US (Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) and UK (Jeremy Corbyn), as well as political formations in Europe (Syriza, Bloco, Podemos, Die Linke) and the “pink tide” in Latin America, these movements have opened up horizons that continue to reverberate today. After years of defeats and lowered expectations, these bursts of movement activity and radical left politics have created new possibilities to unite fractured groups and win tangible gains.
Although the reelection of Trump and the rise of the right pose an existential threat to immigrants, workers, women, people of color, and the environment, Trumpism and neoliberal failures are again galvanizing and energizing progressive movements, as happened during the first Trump administration. As Trump inevitably fails to improve the lives and living standards of the vast majority of people who voted for him, Trumpism will again prove vulnerable.
What will come next? Might progressive movements surge, converge, and expand their capacity to produce desired change? Changing demography alongside rising inequality and political instability present the left with new opportunities to challenge racial, class, and political fault lines and shape the trajectory of the future. The outcome depends, in part, on how workers of all stripes line up with immigrants and vice versa.
The moment is filled with great peril as well as promising possibilities. While the future is open and contingent, one thing is certain: the politics of migration and inequality will play a role.