Racialized Capitalism Means Racialized Immigration "Enforcement"

Justin Cummins, Guest Writer for the Beloved Community Communications Team

The ongoing and violent occupation of Minnesota by thousands of illegally masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained Federal immigration enforcement agents is shocking — but it is not surprising. This increasingly dangerous situation in Minnesota and in the country overall has arisen in the context of racial capitalism that currently dominates the nation.
Despite the nice-sounding rhetoric about capitalism, that it promotes freedom and prosperity, capitalism involves the exploitation of people, other life, and resources to the benefit of a privileged few. In other words, capitalism means the freedom to exploit so the proverbial one percent can prosper to the detriment of the planet and life on it. 
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The socially constructed concept of race has been used to rationalize this systematic exploitation and its resulting disparities. Put simply, people of color have been mischaracterized as somehow inferior or even deserving of the mistreatment they have experienced in the United States since before the country’s founding and around the world since colonialism began before that. 

Vilification and outright dehumanization based on “race” have coincided with even self-described liberal or progressive individuals and institutions participating in racial capitalism as it obscenely concentrates wealth and power. This does not mean that people and organizations who identify as liberal or progressive should feel ashamed; the existing capitalist economic system makes it difficult to think and behave differently. Much like the closely related phenomenon of white supremacy, racial capitalism is all around us — akin to the air we breathe — so the sustained awareness of, and active engagement against, racial capitalism (and white supremacy) is vital.

Consistent with racial capitalism, the so-called immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota and around the nation have targeted people of color. The occupying Federal paramilitary force has engaged in documented and repeated racial profiling, requiring immigrants of color to prove they are United States citizens when seized from their homes, their cars, their medical clinics, their workplaces, their schools, or other supposedly safe places. These Federal immigration agents also have abducted, detained, and deported immigrants of color — including young children — who are citizens of this country. In fact, the occupying paramilitary force has murdered in broad daylight native-born whites who, in solidarity with immigrants of color, served as peaceful legal observers to document the escalating violations of fundamental rights.

The message is clear: one’s rights and humanity may not be recognized when one is an immigrant of color. People subjected to such abuses are more easily exploited because of the understandable fear they feel under the circumstances, fueling the racial capitalism fire that has consumed the nation with devastating consequences up to the present. 

In this context, and in response to complaints by immigrants of color about wage theft and other violations of their rights, unscrupulous companies threaten to call or actually call the same types of Federal immigration enforcement agents who have been terrorizing Minnesotans everywhere in recent months. Similarly, unscrupulous lawyers who represent employers or other defendants in labor and employment or civil rights cases use the perceived or actual immigration status of claimants of color or of claimants’ family members to coerce immigrants into settling their compelling claims for little or even into not pursuing their claims in the first place.

In my experience litigating numerous labor and employment and civil rights cases on behalf of immigrants of color as well as on behalf of native-born whites, I have observed a clear difference in how cases are handled by opposing counsel and courts. Generally, my clients who are immigrants of color have been regarded with suspicion or, to put it more legalistically and euphemistically, as lacking credibility when compared to their native-born and white peers. 

Consequently, when it comes to immigrants of color versus native-born whites, opposing counsel typically has made invasive demands for information and documents, insisted on burdensome depositions, and used other abusive litigation tactics to discourage immigrants from seeking recourse for violations that flow from racial capitalism. In addition, courts often have tolerated such conduct by opposing counsel when my clients are immigrants of color. This bias may be unconscious at the individual level, but the adverse impact remains powerful at the institutional and systemic levels regardless.

In sum, immigration enforcement is racialized because capitalism is racialized. The labor of immigrants of color continues to be essential to the nation’s capitalist economic system, and the exploitation of that labor continues to be essential to the profiteering of that system. An economic system recognizing the inherent dignity and interconnectedness of all people — and, therefore, one based on the love underlying the yet-to-be-realized Beloved Community — would look vastly different than the one we have now. Indeed, we cannot have Beloved Community so long as racial capitalism and the related scarcity mindset obscure the vital spirit of mutuality and our radical imagination for a just and sustainable world.

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