Mexico and Columbia Refuse to Accept Deported U.S. Immigrants

What it means for your weekend

Early Sunday, Trump announced 25% tariffs on imports from Columbia in response to Columbia’s decision to reject two U.S. military flights carrying individuals being deported from the U.S. This, in turn, occurred one day after Mexico similarly refused to accept individuals being deported from the U.S. This was a predictable outcome, but it is worth thinking about whether there will be significant impacts on the power of global capital and the deep state, and how it moves the balance of power between humanity and those forces.

To begin, the interaction between the U.S. and Central and South American countries – i.e., the U.S.’s attempt to send individuals from the U.S. to those countries, and those countries’ refusal to accept those individuals – will likely continue to stiffen the boarders between those countries and the United States. Pressure has been building in this arena for decades, as U.S. covert and overt activities in Central and South America starting in the middle of the last century in turn led to significant pressures on poor people from those countries to migrate to the U.S. While there have been increasing limits put on immigration, northern population movement from Latin America into the United States has been relatively free. More than anything, however, in terms of U.S.-Latin American relations, Trump represents the imposition of significant limits on that freedom. Of course, the pressures that U.S. capital and the deep state exert on Latin America will not stop, whether or not Trump’s crusade to stop immigration into the U.S. is successful.

Trump’s desire to shutoff Latin American immigration poses an interesting challenge for U.S. capital and the deep state. U.S. capital deeply desires cheap labor, and the massive levels of immigration into the U.S. from Latin America over the past few decades puts significant downward pressure on wages for workers in the country as a whole. This is of course welcomed by U.S. capital. However, this influx of individuals into the U.S. has produced social pressures, as well as pressures on the U.S. welfare state. (Of course, this population transfer from Latin America into the U.S. is far from the only source of these pressures). So, for a while now, U.S. capital has been staring down the face of an increasingly tense contradiction: its ceaseless desire to drive down wages, but its grudging need to provide conditions that keep its human life blood content (read: avoid social unrest so that the system can continue to operate smoothly). It seems at last that U.S. capital has reached the point where it can no longer allow the status quo to continue, and Trump is a symbol of this inflection point.

Capital and the deep state generally prefer the status quo, so, especially during Trump’s first campaign and Presidential term, these forces attempted to exert great pressure against Trump since he was perceived as a disrupter. That deep state resistance seems to have significantly decreased during Trump’s second Presidential campaign. (I base this assumption on anecdotal evidence, primarily from observing how mainstream media treats Trump, and through the actions of U.S. oligarchs. The mainstream media pushes the propaganda line of the deep state, and the actions of U.S. oligarchs seem to be a good enough proxy for the desires of the deep state as a whole. So, I feel reasonably confident in this assumption). Therefore, at least for now, it seems that capital has conceded that, through Trump, it must allow for the strengthening of international borders between the United States and Latin America in terms of the movement of humans. Put differently, the battle between humans already living in the United States and their desire to prevent additional humans moving into the country (speaking incredibly generally) seems to have won out over capital’s desire for the cheapest possible source of labor (at least in the short term).

The hardening of international borders seems to me as though it might be helpful for capital (and in many important ways, detrimental for the proletariat). Capital is unable to avoid creating the conditions for its own destruction. International borders that are completely open for the large-scale transfer of populations (and, more specifically, the large-scale transfer of working class and poor individuals) allows for a consolidation of the proletariat on a global scale. I believe that, in order for capital and the deep state to be permanently overthrown and for class to be abolished from humanity, the proletariat must become united across the globe.

International borders are incredibly harmful for the proletariat; capital will always choose to move to countries where it faces less pressure from the proletariat, and when it moves away from countries where pressure has built up within the local proletariat capital is able to decrease pressure in the global capitalist system overall. Take, as a simple example, the movements of capitalism following the World Wars. Prior to the World Wars, pressure on capitalism had built up within the proletariat of many Western industrialized countries, including the United States. Following the World Wars, capital began to move throughout the world, which lessened pressure on capitalism in the medium term for these same Western industrialized countries.

As time has passed since the World Wars, and capitalism won a seemingly final victory over the leftist revolutions of the twentieth century, pressure created by capitalism has returned to levels that feel relatively close to a breaking point for capitalism. But, instead of these pressures being concentrated in industrialized Western nations, the pressures are spread throughout the globe. (To be clear, I do not believe that we are moments away from the end of capitalism. But I do see similarities in the scale and scope of catastrophic events that occur throughout the globe now as those that occurred in Western countries prior to the outbreak of the World Wars). Capital and the deep state now no longer have the option of using the “pressure release valve” of exploiting previously untouched sources of human capital from the global south. Almost all sources of potential human capital throughout the globe are now being put to use for the purposes of profit and consolidation of deep state power.

So, finding itself between a rock and a hard place, capital has seemingly decided to concede that it must prevent the proletariat from consolidating across international borders. (This is likely not a very conscious choice for the deep state, but the results of closing borders make the question of whether it is a conscious choice irrelevant). Now that borders are beginning to close, at least relatively speaking compared to the era of globalization at the end of the twentieth century and start of the twenty-first, pressure can build between the proletariat and capital within individual countries without risking the proletariat uniting across the globe. It is better for capital to lose a battle with the proletariat in one country than lose such a battle across the entire globe.

Of course, capital’s great weakness is its inability to comprehend the fact that the planet earth is not a planet of unlimited natural resources, nor the fact that human beings have needs entirely outside the realm of consumption and “utility.” By forcing populations of Latin American countries to remain in those countries, where conditions will continue to deteriorate because of U.S. and global capital’s ceaseless drive for more sources of profit, capital is just delaying the inevitable rupture. It is akin to preventing wild fires in the short term, which leads to a growing fuel supply, such that there will eventually be a wild fire so big that it cannot be prevented nor contained. Wars will likely begin in Latin America as the pressure builds, and those wars will likely cause the breakdown of international borders within Latin America. The move to shut down borders will probably also increase tension between the proletariat and capital/deep state in the U.S., since U.S. capital will no longer be able to rely on the downward pressure on wages created by individuals from Latin America. At this point, I will stop trying to predict anything else that could happen as a result from the closing of borders.

But, on a final note, it is important for members of the proletariat to remember that open borders are a necessity for the final victory over capitalism, inasmuch as open borders allow for the global consolidation of the proletariat. As of right now, the proletariat does not have control over whether international borders will remain open – that decision is made by capital and the deep state. However, the proletariat can be ready for borders to reopen, one way or another, so that when the proletariat classes of different countries meet, they are ready to unite. Probably, ways that the proletariat class of an individual country can prepare are by practicing organizing and building solidarity, through mutual aid and community-building activities outside of capitalism. As international borders once again start to break down, these practices will be vital in order to facilitate the integration of proletariat classes from countries across the world.

*Edit: goddammit, as soon as I published this I saw that Columbia actually decided to accept deported individuals from the U.S. after Trump threatened tariffs. It doesn’t change much about what I wrote, except that the first paragraph is incorrect.