Undocumented Immigrants and Fugitive Slaves
We've Been Here Before
The Trump administration is constantly asking itself, "How can we be more cruel?" Nowhere is this more evident than in its policy toward the presence of undocumented immigrants within the U.S. labor force. Some thoughts on this, but first ...
"No Kings" Protests, Saturday, June 14
This Saturday, Donald Trump is staging a military parade in Washington, D.C., to celebrate his birthday. Across the country there will be protest rallies organized around the theme of "In America, We Don't Do Kings". Click on that link to find the rally nearest you.
Now, back to our irregularly scheduled program ...
Objectives of Trump's Anti-Immigrant Politics
Trump's policy is being masterminded by Stephen Miller, his deeply xenophobic deputy chief of staff for policy. (See this article in Forbes: "Stephen Miller Pushes For Even More Surprise ICE Raids—His Deportation Quotas, Explained". The policy has two objectives:
Make life miserable for working-class immigrants in the United States, both those with legal authorization to work and those without. Either make them more exploitable in the workplace, or get them to leave the country.
Drive a political wedge between U.S. citizens and immigrants. Encourage citizens to fear and loathe immigrants. In contemporary parlance, make immigrants into "the Other."
The Fugitive Slave Act
If you were a (white) American citizen living in a city like, say, Boston, in 1851, you would sooner or later have had to grapple with the question, "How do I react to the presence of fugitive slaves in my city?"
Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads:
"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."
Translating from the Constitution's tortuous phrasing: When an enslaved person escapes from bondage in one ("slave") state and crosses into a different ("free") state, the free state may not prevent the slave's owner from seizing the slave and returning him or her to the slave state and to the status of slavery itself.
The Fugitive Slave Clause was part of the deal that got the former southern colonies to sign on to the Constitution in 1787, but it was irregularly enforced in the first half of the 1800s. As part of the so-called Compromise of 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. According to Wikipedia that law required law enforcement officials in all states "to arrest people suspected of escaping enslavement on as little as a claimant's sworn testimony of ownership." Once arrested, alleged fugitives from slavery were not entitled to jury trials and "any person aiding a fugitive by providing food or shelter was subject to up to six months of imprisonment and up to $1,000 in fine."
By the 1850s many, if not most, northeners found slavery distasteful even if they had little sympathy for Black people. Only a minority of northeners supported the abolition of slavery, but many resented having their state judicial systems being put to use in the re-enslavement of escapees. Some northern states passed laws attempting to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act. At least one northern state court declared the Act unconstitutional. "The Fugitive Slave Law brought the issue [of slavery] home to anti-slavery citizens in the North, as it made them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery."
Fugitive Slaves and Undocumented Immigrants
If we zoom out for a moment and compare the political questions of slavery in the U.S. in the 1850s and immigration in the U.S. in the 2020s, we see that both are labor questions. What modes of exploitation of labor are legally permitted in the United States, and who gets to claim the benefit of those laws?
In the ante-bellum South, Blacks were not citizens; they were the property of the slaveowners. Among the liberties of which Blacks were deprived was the freedom to sell their ability to work for wages to any potential employer. In the ante-bellum North, whites citizens had the options of being independent farmers or wage-laborers: options captured in the slogan of one of the organizational predecessors of the Republican Party: “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Men.” The Civil War started out as a battle over the extension of the slave mode of production to U.S. territories which were not yet states, but ended, via the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, terminating the existence of that mode of production.
What we call wage labor when viewed from the perspective of those looking to sell their ability to work is, of course, capital when viewed from the perspective of those looking to purchase other people's ability to work. The purchase and sale of labor-power is regulated by laws at the federal, state and city levels of government. In particular, federal law regulates the ability of non-citizens to legally sell their labor-power to employers looking to purchase it. Many capitalists would like to purchase the labor-power of non-citizen workers, particularly if they can get it at bargain-basement wage rates. Other parts of the ruling class -- at this moment including the Trump administration -- find it expedient to demonize immigrants.
The Trump-Miller anti-immigrant hysteria is the political expression of the latter. The administration has ordered the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to shift its focus from deporting immigrants convicted of crimes to immigrants in general. This shift has meant that U.S. citizens are now seeing non-citizen neighbors being swept up and arrested as if by a secret police force -- or by slavecatchers. The demonstrations breaking out in the past week in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere in the past week echo those in the 1850s that sought to free slaves re-captured under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act. The moral challenge we faced in the 1850s is the same as that which we face today:
Which side are you on?
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