The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Blanca Missé:

Welcome to Solidarity Without Exception, a podcast series about working people’s struggles for national self-determination in the 21st century and what connects them and us. This podcast is produced by the Real News Network in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network, and I am Blanc mise. We are releasing this episode on Mexico as Trump threatened again to impose new tariffs on imports from Mexico while continuing his massive ice terror raid and detention and deportation plan, ICE has arrested more than a hundred thousand people suspected of violating immigration law. Since Trump took office in January, 2025 to the first week of June, the figure amounts to an average of 750 arrests per day, double of the average of the past decade. Many of the immigrants arrested are sent to countries where they have no roots or relation, and some have even been sent to the Kott facilities in El Salvador known for the violation of human rights.

The vast majority of them have no criminal record. More significantly, the number of immigrants in detention center keeps growing, now exceeds more than 50,000, and we know that new detention centers are being built, other prisons are being reopened to housed, arrested immigrants, and these centers are all privately managed and owned by big corporations such as the GEO Group. These are workers who come to the US looking for a better life and to ensure the key sectors of the economy like agriculture, hotel and restaurant industries. In our podcast today, our guest is going to delve into the structural causes of immigration and analyze what is behind the current Trump policies toward Mexico and also towards immigrants. And more importantly, he’s going to offer an alternative view to that of the mainstream media on immigration who will hear a working class perspective and the case for a different immigration policy, one that respects human rights, workers’ rights and is in sync with the needs of working people in the US and Mexico.

Our guest today is Justine er Chacon. He’s an activist, a labor unionist and educator who lives in San Diego Tijuana border. He’s also a professor of Chicano Chicano studies at San Diego City College, and he’s the author of No One Is Illegal with Mike Davis, radicals in the Barrio. And more recently, the border crossed us the case for opening the US Mexico border. Justin, welcome to our podcast Solidarity With Without exception. We’re really delighted to have you on to talk about the neo-colonial relation that maybe the US has with Mexico and what’s happening with the Trump administration right now.

Justin Akers Chacón :

Thanks for inviting me. I’m glad to be here.

Blanca Missé:

Yeah. I would like to start our discussion today maybe by recapping a little bit what is in the history of the relation between the US and Mexico. You’ve said that we need to think of this relation not as a merely economic or diplomatic relation, but more strictly to start with its colonial origins and reading your work and the work of many other activism scholars. This history is pretty important to understand what’s happening today, right, with Trump in power and even what’s been happening in the last year. So could you unpack a little bit what it means to say that the US has a colonial relation with Mexico? What are the key things we need to have in mind to understand this?

Justin Akers Chacón :

Yeah, so that’s an important question. It also requires a little bit of a historical analysis because there are different ways in which the US has imposed a colonial relationship on Mexico, of course, beginning with military invasion and occupation and annexation of Mexican territories in the 19th century. But we see that that historically had been followed by a project of significant capital export into Mexico in the second half of the 19th century, to an extent that which Mexico’s economy was largely under the domination of foreign capital, primarily the US by the time of the advent of the Mexican revolution, the first decade of the 20th century. So that phase of economic colonialism played a direct role in the factors that contributed to the Mexican revolution. And so in the period of and after the revolution, we see much of the social and political content of the revolution being one in which there was an attempt to reclaim Mexico’s economy, its wealth, it’s oil, it’s all of the natural resources that had fallen under the domination and control of foreign capitalists to reclaim those for the Mexican people so that the character of that revolution was one and reaction to the extent of which US economic colonization had been established.

And I think there was an effort in the period, especially after World War II for Mexico to try to develop its capitalist system independently of US direct foreign control. And I think that experiment was short-lived and ultimately gave way to a process in which the United States began to once again accelerate its capital export. And ultimately, by the end of the 20th century, reaching a scale in which many different sectors, key sectors of Mexico’s economy were again largely under foreign capitals controlled by US capitals, not exclusively, but in terms of the dominance of that relationship. And so in concluding in terms of the colonial relationship, I characterize drawing from theoretical formulations by Lenin and others. Subsequently, we can recognize that the scale in which Mexico’s economy has been economically dominated and incorporated as a kind of subsidiary or an extension of the US economy has reached a scale on which that determines the politics of Mexico.

And it frames how the political parties operate in relationship to that. And so while I would say it’s not a direct in sort of military or direct sort of colonial relationship in which there’s no autonomy for the Mexican state and capitalist class, I would say that there’s such a scale of control that’s exerted through that system in which very, very much narrows the range of political possibilities in terms of how the current composition of the Mexican state and how it operates and the ruling class for different reasons. One in which is that the current Mexican state under the regime of AMLO and now Scheinbaum, the Morena government has tried to navigate some degree of emphasizing national capitalist development while not also not disrupting or in any way challenging and even expanding relationships with US capitalism. And that also reflects the way in which the Mexican capitalist class has developed, especially over the last several decades in kind of integration and subordination in US capital. And so these kind of partnerships sort of lock in how I would say the Mexican capitalist class sort of sees itself in a relationship between the Mexican state and the US government and US capitalist class, but navigating between these boundaries, but still allowing for the perpetuation and even strengthening of those imperialist relationships, which I can talk about more as well.

Blanca Missé:

So basically since the 19th century, the US has been not only being an obstacle for the economic development of Mexico, and you mentioned how it was both the trigger and the stop of the Mexican revolution, but it has become more and more a dominant power, which has imposed also its political ruling in an indirect way, right? So we were saying it’s not like the old colonies, but

Justin Akers Chacón :

There’s

Blanca Missé:

A new form of imperialist domination that still allows little wiggle room for Mexico to develop. And I think one, maybe the most recent episode that we’ve heard about is what happened with nafta, right? With the free trade agreement. And could you maybe summarize, I mean, I know it’s difficult to do it quickly, but I mean there’s a lot, even these discussions today about immigration, we go back to NAFTA and what happened to the Mexican agricultural system and everything. So even if we were to understand today, the most recent flux of migration across the border, I think this particular package of policies that the US imposed on Mexico are important to have in mind. So can you explain a little bit how NAFTA altered this imperialist neo-colonial relation?

Justin Akers Chacón :

So nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement really was a plan developed in the United States to essentially compel Mexico to open its economy, to unfettered unlimited US capital. And this has to be understood in the context of the effort to try to reestablish some degree of control over of the economy and the period of after the Mexican revolution in which a lot of safeguards and restrictions were built around foreign intervention into the economy and restrictions on foreign investment restrictions on all forms of capital export. So that’s a reflection of what the revolution was able to accomplish. But it also was limited, right? Because these series of protections were essentially predicated on the idea that Mexico could develop itself into a first world country based on its natural resources, protecting those natural resources and developing its own capitalist economy and inserting itself into the global economy in ways in which it could leverage its economic power.

But this didn’t work, and there’s multiple reasons why it didn’t work, but the failure of that model enabled the US to lend more money to help finance that model, but then Mexico getting further into debt and then essentially reaching an economic crisis in which it couldn’t repay that debt. This was over the period of the 1980s and ultimately the US using that debt leverage to compel Mexico, and there were definitely people in the Mexican ruling class willing to go along with this, but to compel the Mexican state to rewrite its constitution, to remove practically all of the protectionist elements of its constitution, all of its national developmentalist policies and laws and things like that. So there was a gutting of Mexico’s political infrastructure to allow for massive capital export back into Mexico. So Mexico today is still in the culmination of opening up to such an extent that it’s now the most open economy in the world. It has the most free trade agreements. It essentially has, it’s now the opposite of what it once was. So by doing that, the United States then opened up a massive market for capital export. It now had access to buying up and consuming large sectors of the economy of land. It now had access to buying out production, reshaping it to now be in line with the supply chains needed for US production. But it now had access to a hundred million workers

Where unionization had been in decline in Mexico. And through this process of the restructuring associated with nafta, the Mexicans government and US capital partner to smash and break down the remaining sort of sectors of unionization in Mexico, making, contributing it to having one of the lowest rates of unionization in the world, authentic unionization. So this created a massive boon for the US economy because now there could be large scale capital export production shifted nearshoring the terminology and taking advantage mostly of the vast quantities of Mexican labor that could be degraded and paid less for the same type of work north of the border. And then creating a whole regime of free trade rules that basically favor capital being, having the complete right of mobility, but then also creating a trade regime that favors the ability to repatriate profits on a large scale with basically little or no actual taxation.

It’s really a very pro capitalist regime that allows for significant amounts of wealth to be made out of this process. And so there’s this facilitated wealth transfer on a massive scale nafta, and then its new iteration in the United States, Mexico, Canada agreement. And over this period of time, we see the byproduct of that massive wealth transfer out of Mexico reflected in the way in which large sections of the population of Mexico are going to be economically displaced. And ultimately it’s going to restructure the country internally in terms of people migrating to the cities, but also people from the cities migrating to other parts of the country or to the United States or to Canada. So this begins a massive displacement process that also impacts politics in this country because it’s created the conditions in which migration can be also criminalized at the same time, while these sort of neo or semi colonial relationships are being expanded and pushing more people to have to relocate within the North American economy.

Blanca Missé:

So basically with nafta, it was open field for the US to extract natural resources, get cheap labor, and also impose its products and its production, which led, as you said, a massive displacement from the countryside to the cities and from the cities to abroad. And that’s also the root of the migration, what has been framed as a migration crisis. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later. But before we go into migration, which is one of the hot topics today, I would like your opinion, your take on what is new with this Trump presidency because if we take this macro analysis, we see that this colonial relation, imperious relation of domination, capital extraction has been going on for more than a century and a half,

But there’s still also a sense that this particular administration is aggressive, more aggressive. So is it more aggressive or how is it different? How should we understand the kind of relation Trump wants to impose? And also because one of the paradoxes, right, is that Trump says that he does not believe in free trade. He wants to go back to tariffs. So it could be a little bit confusing in the sense that it is kind of shifting 180 degrees, the most vilified policy, which was the free trade policy and putting in place a protectionist policy, which in theory will protect everybody, Mexicans and the US and workers. So how to make sense of this new administration. Is there continuity? Is rupture, is it worse? Is it bad in a different way?

Justin Akers Chacón :

Yeah, I think the answer is all of those things. But yeah, I think one way of understanding Trump is it is an acceleration of processes that were already at play, but it’s also something qualitatively different in terms of the scale, the extreme measures being taken, for instance, in terms of repressing immigrants or the waging of tariff wars, things like that. But I think one way of understanding the specific context in which Trumpism has an opportunity to manifest and represent a way of advancing the interest of the US capitalist class is recognizing what’s happening globally, what’s happening internationally. There’s a lot of significant changes taking place in the global imperialist system where the US is being challenged economically, especially by China on a global scale, on a regional and global scale in terms of the competition to have access to natural resource and markets. And all that comes with wanting to expand your global economic and political reach.

The US is also facing its own crises economically in terms of its ability to maintain the dominance that it once had in terms of its existing relationships. So an imperialist crisis, the United States losing its economic dominance. And the way that this is also playing out militarily where the United States is now, essentially it’s in full war mode supporting the arming, the genocide and Israel and its campaign of war and terror against the Arab world. It’s fully invested in the conflict in Ukraine, and essentially it’s maintaining its rivalries with Russia and wanting to contain Russian power. So these are all indicators and reflective of the sort of imperialist crisis and the buildup towards war with China. It’s almost like a daily discussion now in terms of the chessboard maneuvering between United States and China, but also militarily. So these factors I think help explain why a Trump can emerge.

I don’t think it’s by chance, I think it’s a political shift in which the United States is trying to exercise more hard power, but also use its economic heft to restructure and extract more from political, I mean from all relationships it has even with what would be considered former allies or making what would be sacred relationships between these capital countries now making them all contingent on what the United States can take from them. So I think this reflects that interim perilous crisis. I think it reflects a deepening capitalist crisis. And the US ruling class I think is also going through some changes in terms of we’re seeing the rise new sectors of capital that are far more politically geared towards war and more backing in terms of the restructuring of US society. And its emphasis on as much as possible reasserting its dominance that it’s losing. So I think these make the situation more volatile and it makes the circumstances more open to what we’re seeing today, which is the far right asserting itself behind Trump, and essentially seeing Trumpism as a way to advance their project to get their power back.

And I think the other element of it is that the US also at its root, at its base is a white supremacist. The ruling class politics always reproduce and regurgitate white supremacist, white nationalist politics. And so that’s brought into the mix through the front door of Trump’s White House. And we see how that also factors in terms of how it intersects with imperialism. And so when we sort of pull these things together, we can see that there’s these deeper structural crises internationally within an imperialist in the capitalist system. And we also see that there’s not solutions to these problems that can be manifest in ways that resolve the crisis only intensify them. And so the way in which Trump has weaponized immigration policy to a point where we now have a kind of gestapo that ice is an expanding gestapo of a political police, but it’s also a racial, and it also has all these other characteristics in terms of who it’s going after.

At least now we have a situation where Trump is now sort of creating an international gulag system, shipping people that are being kidnapped, detained, disappeared into a sort of international system of detention centers. I mean, this is all qualitatively different, but it represents I think, the scale of the crisis and how there’s no solutions. And so it basically draws from this idea of more criminalization, more victimization and in terms of how Trump is trying to develop this political project in a way also that it sort of can somehow respond to the crisis inside the United States, but it’s not, it’s actually exacerbating the crisis. It’s creating a much more volatile and contradictory kind of circumstance, which is where we find ourselves today.

Blanca Missé:

Yeah, thank you for your answer. I think you did show that even if it seems in the surface that this is the opposite of the previous, it is a deepening, an escalation, a worsening of this economic domination now with, as you said, with military means, but also going back to this racist white supremacist core right in the United States and mobilizing people to even in this moment of despair of the US losing its dominance to kind of assert its domination at home and abroad with more violence. I would like now to talk a little bit about one of the topics you are the most known as a public in intellectual as an activist, written two books or three about it, which is this migration, right? The media, the news, every day they talk about the border crisis, immigration crisis, and we’re being inundated with people we don’t know where to put these people.

And you’ve over and over you, you’ve unpacked and criticized this framework and try to go to the roots of the economic and political domination underneath. And as you said before, that this attack on immigrants is not solving the crisis the US is in. But as a socialist or a social activist, what is the frame through which you articulate the question of migration in the United States and what will be an alternative framing to think through these problems? I think everybody’s trying to figure out how do we think of migration in different terms that help us solve the problems we need to fix because white workers, US workers are pit against foreign workers and everybody seems we’re fighting for the same piece of cake. And so there’s an even electoral of Trump, right? There is a social and political anxiety brewing in the country because of the lack of economic development and in the us. So what is the analysis you have to offer for working people in the US to think of this moment and also in general, what is needed to address the question of migration?

Justin Akers Chacón :

I think one of the things that I’ve tried to emphasize in my writing research and activism in terms of understanding migration is how it’s interconnected with the sort of operations of the global imperialist system and also within the framework of capitalism. And what I would characterize as a kind of political crisis, one significant political crisis within the capitalist system is its capacity to address the question of displacement and migration except to further criminalize it, right? Even though it’s a process that’s directly related to how capitalism operates. And so when I say it’s an imperialist crisis, we can look at how there’s increasing waves of global displacement and migration through war, through military invasion, through occupation, through funding regimes that are declaring war on people within their own territorial boundaries or people that are occupying or colonized. So there’s that aspect. There’s also, within capitalism, there’s a way of understanding how when we look at the world today, we see higher rates of inequality in terms of how capitalist systems are allocating resources.

So from the United States further south, we see that the way capitalism has operated is it’s created. There’s more of a polarization where more wealth is going to the top in societies and or more wealth is being exported through economic relationships of imperialism. The point being is that the way in which capital operates internationally and domestically is that it contributes to disrupting ways in which people historically have maintained their standard of living or had opportunities to have work to sustain their needs, or it’s created regimes in which there’s more extraction and exploitation of people so that more profits can be made domestically and repatriated internationally. And so it creates greater amounts of inequality within societies. And ultimately these factors working together push people to have to relocate. They have to find ways in which they can acquire the resources they need to survive. And so under capitalism and imperialism, we can see that if wealth is being extracted from the countryside and people who made their way of living through farming or through some kind of agricultural or rural productive capacity, if that land is privatized or sold off or bought out by companies that produce for export, but they want to maximize the profits that they make, so they’re going to pay people, they’re going to displace people, but then also pay them as little of a wage as possible.

You create a situation in which communities that can once be sustained now are disrupted and people have to sort of follow now where the job opportunities are, so you follow the money. So wealth is flowing. In this case, it would be flowing in different directions internally and internationally. So basically at the very basic level, capitalism to create more wealth for some and exploit others more, it has to create circumstances in which there’s disruptions of people’s ability to sustain themselves. So migration has been increasing each year, both internal and external migration has been increasing each year in relationship to how the global capitalist and domestic capitalist systems are working in terms of their allocation of resources. As more and more people are displaced, they have to go elsewhere to find work. This is why we have hundreds of millions of people now living and working outside of the cities or the countries that they’re from.

But there’s also a second side of this. Well, there’s many sides, but a second side of this is that migration performs another important function, which is the necessary labor, especially because people are following where the money outflows are going, where the wealth outflows are going. So if that’s building the economies where that wealth is controlled, then that means there’s the potential for more jobs to be created in that area. Then it’s further complicated by the fact that inside a domestic economy, so we have migrants coming from different phases of migration from different parts of the Americas, but we have people coming from Mexico who are performing necessary labor and inside of our economy, but at the same time, there’s underdevelopment of working classes here. There’s inequality already in the class structure. So capitalists have learned and perfected, and this operates through the state, their state, they’ve learned and perfected the means to criminalize migration while depending on it and while profiting from it.

But the criminalization is necessary for two reasons. One is because racialized, so migration is racialized. And so that there can be the blaming of migrants for especially racialized migrants, for taking the opportunities or somehow benefiting at the expense of US-born workers who are oppressed and exploited. So there’s the racialization of it. And then to keep those racial and national divisions because you have to, that’s part of the process is there can’t be class unity between different sectors of workers. That’s been a factor in US labor history in which the ruling class has always maintained divisions or worked overtime to maintain these divisions. But the second side of the criminalization of migrant labor is that it itself makes the labor more exploitable. And so you can increase the rate of exploitation by denying basic rights to people once they are inside the economy. And that’s essentially how it works.

So we have a large population of undocumented people, but that’s been created, that’s been curated in the sense that it’s grown as part of this project of having a larger and more diffuse sector of the working class, not have basic democratic rights, not even in contemporary period, not even have the right of mobility, the right to be in public without the threat of being arrested or detained. And so this is a structured process, and I wouldn’t say that it was a grand design, but I would say that it’s developed in this way because it’s demonstrated its capacity to serve the capitalist class most beneficial. So I say that it’s not bad policy, it’s the way capital, it’s the way in which us capitalism in this case, and I would say internationally capitalist class around the world, have followed and applied this method in their own ways, but to extract more from migrants to weaponize and politicize migration as ways of keeping groups of workers divided based on these divisions.

So it’s become in and of itself a beneficial means for extracting more wealth from labor overall, but also the only means of by politicizing it and weaponizing it as a policy like Trump has done, and so many other far right and anti-immigrant political parties and movements are doing. It’s basically trying to present a solution to a crisis that people are experiencing in terms of inequality and underdevelopment, all of the things that go along with that. But it’s doing it making it worse. It’s doing it by creating the conditions in which things are going to get worse for all workers in terms of the criminalization policies themselves.

Blanca Missé:

So I mean, I think you laid out very clearly how migration and the way migration is both presented as a problem as a crisis and encouraged and maintained and nurtured is a symptom or a manifestation of capitalism and helps the goals of capitalism, creates inequality, creates displacement, provides necessary labor that can be offshore and and the criminalization of migration is absolutely necessary for migrant workers to play this role in the economy. Now, I would like to tackle one of the questions you’ve been raising, specifically the title of your last book, the Case for Opening the US Mexico border is a pretty radical position to say, well, the real solution would be to open the border. And this is something we also hear in the demonstrations of immigrant rights activists, at least in California, we didn’t cross the border, the border cross up open the borders, no borders.

That’s something that goes, we’ve also seen the slogans of No Eyes, no detention, but we also have seen these slogans that question the idea that we should have borders and police borders. But no, if I were to say this to my colleagues in my union and say, well, the solution is to open the border, it will raise a big discussion among the coworkers. What does it mean we’re going to get invaded? We cannot accept everybody in the country. So what is meant by this case of opening the US Mexico border? What is the point you and many others in the social movement are trying to make to address the migration crisis?

Justin Akers Chacón :

I think one way of starting to think about what it means to call for an open border is to understand that it’s not really made clear to us how the border actually functions. We get the idea that the border is a sort of space where armed agents are basically keeping people out or they’re creating some kind of divide between the two countries. The reality is that the border is really a type of political fiction, but it does have a very specific function, political fiction, meaning our economies are the United States and Mexico, for instance. There’s so much integration that much of Mexico’s economy now works as part of the assembly line to the US economy. And so one way we can look at this as like Mexico has the fifth largest auto industry in the world, how many people know that? But the majority of that auto industry is US and international auto producers who basically move capital in.

But the United States moves so much automotive productive capacity into Mexico to take advantage of the lower labor costs and the less unionization and to the higher profitability that Mexico’s car industry, in many ways is the US’ car industry operating through Mexico. And last year, the US automakers exported 1.6 million cars from Mexico production lines to the US and they were sold, and this is one of the most profitable arrangements, but there’s different in which this operates. So when Trump says something like, oh, we’re going to put 30% tariffs on goods coming from Mexico, the US media will never tell you that part of the discourse and part of the conflict behind this is that those tariffs are going to largely hit US capitalists operating through in different sort of investment regimes in Mexico. But my point being is that if we look at the United States and Mexico in terms of capital and money, there’s no border.

And so you start to deconstruct, well, what does the border actually do? What does the concept of the enforced border actually do? It keeps out, while it regulates the movement of workers and the movement of poor and dispossessed people, that’s really what it does. I mean, if you look at, I live in San Diego and San Diego, Tijuana is a metropolitan complex. There’s a couple million people in San Diego, a couple million people in Tijuana, and you have this border wall between it, but there’s almost a billion dollars of goods crossing each day on trucks and trains, and there’s 30 to 50,000 people crossing the border. The US Mexico border is the most crossed border in the world, right? Hundreds of millions of crossings each year. So my point being is like, well, where do we get to that? What level of control then actually exists?

So the level of control is now reducible to the regulation of labor markets in the United States, and that connects back to the point in which we can see that this process of creating a larger and larger non-citizen sector of the economy that doesn’t have basic labor rights is actually strategy tied to profitability. So what would it mean to open a border? Well, people are already moving across that border in legal or without authorization. So opening a border would mean basically opening the border to the movement of workers and essentially giving, essentially allowing for some process for people to not have to be undocumented and to basically have direct access, freedom of movement, freedom, the right to work and things like that. So in all practicality, it wouldn’t be radically different than what it is today except for that one fact that by having a border regime and which laws flow from the criminalization of unauthorized migration, but it’s a migration that is essential to the functioning of the US economy, right? Then you’re essentially creating the means by which you can have more and more people placed within the economy who don’t have basic rights. And that becomes in and of itself a profitable scheme. But yeah, the other of it is if we didn’t have a border, wages would go up on both sides of the border.

We would have the possibility to form unions that would extend across borders because the biggest capitalist exploiters in the United States are also the biggest capitalist exploiters in Mexico, and there’s so many supply chains and assembly lines and distribution, cross-border distribution networks where I live in San Diego in the last five years, last several years, they built Amazon built two Amazon fulfillment, massive Amazon fulfillment centers, one in very south San Diego, close to the border, and then one on the Mexican side of the border. And it’s very fascinating because it really does exemplify how the border actually works under capitalism. And so the two fulfillment centers have their modern and industrial technological facilities. The one two miles south of the one on the southern side of the Mexican border, the workers get paid about one to $3 an hour, whereas the workers on this side of the border get paid 18 to $21 an hour.

The thing is, but the thing is that, and then the workers who work on the US side are mostly from Tijuana. They’re allowed to cross the border to work, and they work in the US side facility. The facility moves goods between the two facilities freely because they built the facilities close to a border crossing point, and it’s a commercial crossing point, which means it’s set up to allow goods, these big semi-truck and things to move more freely. It’s called the Otai Mesa crossing. So they built on both sides of that so they can move their goods between, but serve two different markets, pay the workers the lease possible. And it’s also interesting is before this expansion of this commercial crossing point, before it happened, Amazon actually paid a lot of money to the Democratic Party in San Diego because the Democrats are dominant here to support the expansion of that commercial port.

So years before they built the facilities, they were already lobbying and they got the city to agree to pay a large percentage of that expansion. So basically capital is driving, it’s using the border, all of these benefits. And so if you didn’t have that border, those Amazon workers would be able to create a union. They would be able to demand equal pay for equal work. So that’s the way that borders function at its base, is to regulate and divide and keep undocumented workers in a state and to create the illusion that we’re two different economies and that we’re competing with each other.

Blanca Missé:

I mean, I think now I could make the case to my coworkers in the sense that what you have explained is because capital, no borders, and the fact that capital has no borders, but labor has borders, has created this huge sense of inequality, displacement, that it’s almost a matter of reparations to say if capital has no borders, the bare minimum thing would be that labor should have no borders either, right? Because the amount of wealth that has already been created and ammas and appropriated and sucked out of Mexico and sought out of working people in the US and Mexico makes that the bare minimum theme would be, well, we could continue working for you, but at least can we just abolish the most egregious form of discrimination you have imposed on us. Without any consent and any discussion, I would like to maybe finish our interview today by talking about how the immigrant community in San Diego has reacted to the last round of raid and attacks on immigrant communities and the forms of solidarity and resistance across the border.

Because we try always in the podcast not only to give explanations and analytical arguments, but also for folks who listen to us to understand how we can fight back, get organized, what are examples of struggles we can connect with to understand that this is not like lu doom, right? That there is a little bit of hope because we have seen tremendous mobilizations in LA and also in Tijuana, in all of these cities in San Diego. So can you tell us a little bit what has happened in response to the raid and also what are the kinds of struggles you’ve seen that we should learn about, that we should model, that we should replicate and popularize to fight back against this form of domination?

Justin Akers Chacón :

Yeah. Well, I think one aspect of this is that there’s been a significant shift in the US population as a whole in the working class against the state attack on immigrants. And so that’s one of the first things I would say is that even before the uprising in LA against the massive deployment of ice and military and the rebellion that provoked beautiful rebellion before that, there was a situation on a much smaller scale in San Diego where ICE went into a very gentrified, predominantly middle class, white, middle class neighborhood, and attacked this chain of Italian restaurants, one of a chain of Italian restaurants. And it was fascinating because people came out of all of the, they came out of the stores, they came out of the restaurants, and it was people who even a few years ago, you wouldn’t see being in solidarity with immigrants or if they were, it was just a passive solidarity.

But you see people coming out and standing in front of the ice vehicles, you see people in the face of these agents with rifles and they’re yelling. And it did represent a kind of turning point in the way in which a larger segment of US society, and I would say especially in the working class, but beyond that in terms of seeing the attack on immigrants through especially through these means as something that’s not in their interest, something that’s harmful or will negatively impact. So I think there has consistently been a recognition that migrant, undocumented workers are an essential part of our community and part of the economy. There’s these kind of basic understandings of that. But I think politically, this is the first time since the big uprisings of immigrant workers in 2007. This is the first time we’re seeing a kind of broader segment of society moving into active resistance against ice and against the state.

I think it’s very significant because it does also begin to reflect how the ideological glue of capitalism is not as strong as it once was, and the economic crisis, sort of economic crises are expressing themselves now in the political crises. And so that’s significant, and we can learn from that. I think the uprising in LA is significant in the sense that it, once again shows, in this case, I would characterize as the Mexican, Chicano, Latino working class sectors. In this case, the spontaneous, not as organized, but that’s been the characteristic of rebellions in this country for some time. But a sort of uprising that shows the potential and the will to now not go quietly in the face of repression, but to resist. And so I think part of that reflects the experience in which people have been terrorized by ice, and the criminalization has persisted through several administrations, and the material conditions are getting worse because many of the migrant peoples that are being victimized are people who’ve been in the country for some time, they’ve been working and they’ve experienced living in the society for some time. Part of it reflects kind of yata attitude,

But also part of it reflects some of the memory, I think, of the struggles previously and also the role that on a small socialists and pro-immigrant activist organizers have been building sort of networks to do different things in terms of defending the community. So in LA and San Diego, for instance, while in LA, it’s more developed in terms of the infrastructure of resistance, organizing, resistance to ice. They have patrols, they have emergency response networks, there’s social media networks now where people will be called to an area to respond to an ICE presence, things like that. We’ve seen other segments of communities align with and support immigrant defense. And so there is an infrastructure here in San Diego where there’s several groups now that are organizing patrols, rapid response networks sort of pop-up protests. Also, there’s efforts to try to get organized labor to take a more active role in defending workers from ice attacks.

So there’s things happening, and this infrastructure needs to be built because we especially see that is what’s on offer now coming through the federal government is the dramatic expansion of ice, right? Billions more further declaration of war in our communities. We also see this is in conjunction with the building of cop cities around the United States. So this is again what I mean when I say that there’s no solutions in terms of widening inequality, declining material conditions, and there’s no solutions except for more authoritarian, more authoritarianism and more repression. So I think that’s what this is. Essentially what our tasks are today is building these kind of networks of solidarity, and especially trying to connect them to the larger class struggles and the larger needs for the working class. But factoring in that defensive immigrant communities is going to be essential and building on that to advocate for more labor, solidarity, collective action in the workplace to defend or demand on behalf of what the working class needs. So these are all factors in motion right now, I think under Trump.

Blanca Missé:

This was our episode on Mexico of solidarity without exception with our guest, Justin Chacon, who explained how the struggle for self-determination of Mexico is intrinsically linked to the defense of immigrant rights here in the US and also to the struggle of other peoples against debt mechanism and neoliberal policies. As we saw in our episode on Puerto Rico and also our episode and Ukraine and other episodes, I hope his analysis and his case for open borders made you rethink how immigration is usually presented. And as always, stay tuned for our next episode of Solidarity Without exception.