Using immigrants as cheap labor is part of the economic base. The xenophobia used to justify the deaths of immigrants is superstructural. This contradiction is fueling a lot of change already and it will continue to do so for decades to come.

Undocumented immigrants lack legal rights which makes them easier to exploit and discipline so the level of oppression is maintained at the point where they have no rights and are vilified but not increased to the point of actually removing the cheap labor pool.

You see this tension with a lot of companies that exploit immigrant labor actually, corporations understand that they need readily available workers. While there are benefits to having them scared to seek legal protections and not subject to normal labor laws they still need to be in the country to be exploited.

But the reactionary project also is expressing itself to the ground level reactionary through xenophobic and racist rhetoric to mobilize them. The more the base believes immigrants to be the source of their problems the stronger the contradiction becomes, but a distraction of some sort is necessary if you’re going to get enough people on board and not blaming you, the C-suite, for their problems.

Ideally they would just direct policy themselves without the need for theatre. But so long as they have to get people into positions using ‘democratic’ processes they need buy in. So for now they accept fewer laborers and just do their best to make it easy to exploit the ones that make it in to further extremes.

Bonus points if you’re able to distribute public funds into private hands in the process by having the militarized border become a private enterprise with corporate prisons, and of course shareholders love providing ICE with the equipment they use.

Lookin at this thread and thinking about Israel which is like, this contradiction at its sharpest.

to keep an implicit threat on the existing undocumented immigrant population to make them more precarious and more exploitable?

Yes, you need to prove regularly that you are willing to follow up on a threat, else it stops being threatening.

I would say the two reasons are stupidity and strategic.

Immigration is good to keep wages and prices down (if you’re lucky, prices can stay or even increase). However, you must also placate your population which will resent the lost of jobs and wages. It’s why conservative media and politicians rile up their base about migrants stealing jobs and other things while almost exclusively hiring them for back breaking jobs. It’s also why liberals champion immigration while being slow to give them meaningful rights and throwing them to the dogs when the right starts tugging on the overton window. This is the strategic reason for anti immigration. Managing the size of the reserve army of labor is important. Too much unemployment, homelessness, and too many migrants = unstable and unproductive society. Just the right amount = people accept terrible conditions to get by while you profit greatly.

Then there are people who cannot see the big picture and want to kill minorities and migrants and so on because they think it’ll usher in a pure society. Think of the Nazis who wanted to kill virtually all Jews and Slavs, save for a small amount to keep as slaves. If they were competent, they would’ve enslaved the people they hated in order to build their empire. Genocide is a stupid goal for fascism as it allocates a ton of resources into the killing labor sources rather than using them to develop your nation. Now that the undesirables are gone, you have to dig into your supposedly pure society to create new undesirables to exploit.

Racism, not wanting migrants to outnumber them too much, and other reasons I’m to sleepy to go into.

It’s neocolonial in nature. So-called border security and immigration enforcement are what enable migrant superexploitation and the extraction of superprofits by creating a special underclass of underdeveloped workers that have few legal rights or protections, as well as trapping them outside of any potential labor movement within the US that could join with them in a larger labor struggle.

Labor is imported from the refugee crises because it benefits capital, and can be used to play the the domestic working class against the migrant labor to distract. Those that are disappeared are likely deemed dangerous, while others who may have been discontented enough at home to disrupt a neocolonial situation are permitted for unknown reasons. Probably incompetence.

I’m not studied on this but I think you hit on the most major parts - the capitalists want immigrants for cheap domestic labor, and benefit from those immigrants being in a precarious socioeconomic position. At the same time, they want to maintain the divide between the imperial core and the global south, which requires that capital be far more mobile than the working populations are allowed to be. If you allow too few immigrants in, then there’s a labor shortage and worse domestic investment prospects; If you allow too many immigrants in, it becomes harder to maintain the heightened rate of exploitation that they are subjected to, both here and elsewhere.

Immigrants are turned away and deported to manage this balance, and as part of the superstructure- the turning away of immigrants is a necessary part of maintaining the myth of American exceptionalism, which in turn keeps the empire running and keeps workers worried about the ‘national interest’ that just so happens to always align with business interests

Having that sword of Damocles hanging over immigrants’ heads is very useful for exploiting them

When a social system is in decay, the superstructure that once served a supporting role to the economic base begins to eat the foundation of the base structure itself. But since humans experience reality through the superstructure it is nearly impossible for the ruling class to prevent this self-destruction

satiates the settler class

Aroused

including imperialist capitalists.