Capitalism and the Immigrant Rights Movement in the United States

[Exerpt] This article traces the contemporary United States immigrant rights movement from its origins in 1990s California through current resistance in the Trump era. In doing so, we adopt a Seattle+20 lens in order to situate struggles around migration in relation to global capitalism and the tensions highlighted above. Issues of organized labor and worker power feature prominently in our account. In the United States, migrants played a special role in reinvigorating workers’ movements plagued by decimation and bureaucratization (Lichtenstein 2002; Fantasia and Voss 2004). In a world where borders are increasingly irrelevant for elites and capital, and are ever more brutal for workers, labor movements – unionized and not – provide an important analytical lens for understanding the collective action of migrants. Given the growing centrality of migrants to contemporary global capitalism, immigrant rights movements also contain the possibility of challenging the status quo by subordinating the profit motive to the livelihood of all people, beyond borders, and by elevating democratic mechanisms over market mechanisms