Ekim Kılıç
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Just before the U.S. and Israel launched attacks against Iran on February 28, one of the most controversial issues in the country was the deployment of ICE agents, border patrol officers, to cities to engage in a sort of “hunt for immigrants,” and their response to protesters with intense violence, including executions. This issue has not yet been put to rest.

 We spoke with Prof. Alex Vitale from the Sociology Department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, about the Trump administration’s immigration policies in the U.S.

“A political theater designed to distract us from the wealth grab"

Right now, all America and across the world that we are watching closely what's happening in the United States, especially immigration policies wise. So we are in a period where the federal immigration police, ICE, is terrorizing the streets. Especially when considering recent events in Minneapolis alongside Trump-era policies, it appears to have caused widespread public anger. I would like to ask.. What are we experiencing? In broad terms, what kind of period do you think we are going through?

Okay, so I think the way I would think about this is, you know, what is behind the kind of the theater of anti migrant policing? And so basically it is one part of the Trump administration's efforts to deflect blame away from the ruling class for the declining living standards of working class Americans. So over the last 40 or 50 years, we've seen this broad economic reorganization that has outsourced jobs, working class jobs outside of the United States, and then use government policy to push wealth up the economic ladder through subsidies and deregulation, while cutting essential services and protections for working people. And so rather than have an actual plan to improve the lives and working conditions of working people, they are trying to blame immigrants and are carrying out a theater of retribution and scapegoating against immigrant communities through both the actions of ICE and Customs and Border protection along the border. So this is political theater designed to distract us from the failures of neoliberalism as a kind of a guiding economic principle and the just wealth grab that's been going on by the billionaire class and multinational corporations.

You characterize this new period. Although a significant portion of the American society consists of immigrants, the United States is not in a very good position globally when it comes to the immigrant rights. It has never been, though. On the other hand, it's known that certain immigrant groups have been targeted at various times in the country's history. So recently, primarily maybe Hispanic populations, Hispanic communities are being targeted, but previously it was Chinese, Japanese, and all the others we cannot count right now their names, though. What are the historical similarities and the difference of this period? What makes this period unique?

So I think for the United States, border policing has two primary functions historically. One is the production of whiteness, of the othering, of populations who are deemed as non-white and thus less suitable for the label of Americanness. And the other is as a system of labor control. So we have never had closed borders. We have just had changing regimes of labor control for immigrant and low wage labor. And so farm labor, other kinds of labor that is often performed by migrants has to be managed. And border policing is one of the ways that, that the state limits the power of those workers.

So could you elaborate a bit on the Americaness and whiteness first? From outside American society is a multi racial, multi ethnic society, as people see. But to what extent does it play out with Americanness, to what extent does it play out with the whiteness though?

So if we look historically right, we can see that whenever there's like a more restrictive border, that policy emerges out of a racist or racializing discourse. So it is true that they have, they imported Africans to be enslaved labor and they have allowed migrants from Latin America, but they've always attempted to give them a kind of second class citizenship that is enforced along racialized lines. And border restrictions on the border is one of the ways that the United States has reinforced these racial categories. For instance, our Supreme Court said that the only circumstance in which police in the United States can engage in open racial profiling is when they are policing the border. And many of our border restrictions have been expressed in explicitly racialized terms like the Chinese Exclusion act of the late 1800s or Operation Wetback of the 1950s that use this derogatory language to describe migrants from Mexico into the U.S. 

The status of the border is constantly being adjusted based on current labor control needs

You mentioned also labor control, and you say that basically that the border never closed, but the regime changed. What was it? What has it become?

So the regime is constantly changing and border policing in the US has constantly changed. You know, when I was growing up in Texas in the 1970s, we largely had an open border. You know, there were restrictions at border crossings, but it was very easy to evade them. Many people came and went back and forth across the border on a regular basis. And there was a labor regime that assumed that there would be a large number of workers who were unable to work legally. And this allowed them to engage in some super exploitation of those workers. Because they could not complain about their conditions, they could not form a union, they could not bring litigation against the employers because of their lack of legal status. In other cases, we've seen the implementation of special migrant work permits like the Bracero program in which migrants were allowed. This was like during World War II. Migrants were allowed to come more freely, but with strict labor contracts, so that if they made trouble in the workplace, complained, etcetera, they could be easily deported back to their home country. So it is in either case, right? These are not true freedoms that are being offered. They're just changing regimes of status that fit into the needs for labor control at that historical moment.

“There are signs that the American public are not going to accept this”

Basically, the change in the border regime basically depends on the needs of the United States capital, as you say. So you mentioned also the last summer, the Supreme Court made a decision that experts also interpreted as a return to legalized racism or legal racism, like, basically return back to the times before civil rights, though. It paved the way for security forces to stop and check people who look like Hispanic. Where is this process headed? What are the possibilities for the reversing it? 

Well, I think there are some fundamental contradictions at work here. The Trump regime believes that if they sufficiently mobilize this theater of repression against migrants, that this will convince the working class that they're better off. The problem is that they can't actually improve people's labor market conditions without engaging in the kind of wholesale removal of migrant populations that would prove to be both economically destabilizing and politically undesirable to the majority of Americans. And so what we're seeing already is a significant political backlash against the Trump deportation regime, especially this invasive use of ICE agents in American cities. So Trump has already been forced to dial down ICE enforcement in Minneapolis, where there was a general strike and widespread protests and negative media coverage. And his approval rating among Latino voters has been falling significantly because they believed that they were voting for the deportation of a very small number of criminal migrants engaged in serious criminality. And what they're seeing instead is the wholesale rounding up of migrant communities, and that is not what they voted for, and they're not happy about it. So while Trump may, you know, Trump is creating this massive federal police force, which he may well attempt to utilize to subvert the elections to intimidate his political enemies, there are signs that the American public are not going to accept this.

So there is a pushback. Considering all these events, the United States appears to be more repressive internally and more aggressive externally also, too, as seen in the cases of Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. Do you think…

Don't forget Greenland!

“Trump feels the need to engage in more and more militaristic activity to protect America's market share”

And Greenland. Correct. Do you think these events are connected? Or is this solely Trump's doing, though? 

Well, I think that it's quite possible that part of the reason that Trump has emerged as a powerful political figure is, is tied to some crises at the center of the American project, among them the loss of imperial power or hegemonic power. The US role economically seems to be in decline relative to China and to some extent, Europe. And their ability to mobilize mass support for militarism abroad also seems to be in decline. Again, a fundamental contradiction of Trump is that he campaigned on a platform of less war, less military adventurism, less imperial intervention, and yet he feels the need to engage in more and more militaristic activity to protect America's market share, essentially, and its prestige internationally, which he thinks is essential for the interests of the billionaire class that he represents. And this is another area where voters are feeling very disaffected because they voted for less military adventurism, but they appear to be getting more short. 

Two areas of pushback from the Capital: Interference with the management of the Federal Reserve bank and tariffs

Follow up question to that. Do you think the American millionaire class, the capitalist class, do they have a full agreement on how Trump is trying to basically resolve the problems of the empire?

It's hard to say, except that there does not appear to be any public opposition from the billionaire class or the multinational corporations to what he's doing beyond some very thin symbolic measures. So so far, it does appear that, you know, these corporations and billionaires have accepted the Trump approach, though, you know, the one or two areas where he got tremendous pushback was trying to interfere with the management of the Federal Reserve bank, which is supposed to be politically independent. And the other was when he went too far on tariffs. And this caused both a crash in American bond markets and litigation by powerful economic actors who defeated Trump in the Supreme Court. But in terms of interventionist policies, even our Democratic Party seems mostly quiet about threats against Iran, Venezuela, etc. 

So you mean that there's a silent support basically? 

Yes. Among the ruling elites there, you know, that support, both parties, there seems to be at least tacit approval.

On the bright side of the news in the United States also, there are developments that basically made people across the world excited. One of them was that Social Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani's election. And you were, as in our knowledge, one of the leading person of the Public Safety Transitional Committee of the newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani. And from what we have seen in the press, from what you write, you take an abolitionist stance towards ICE and NYPD, which is, as in my knowledge, the biggest police institution. Could you elaborate on your stance? How will you produce a solution to the problems encountered in ensuring public safety?

Alright, so if we look concretely at the vast majority of the public safety issues on the minds of the public, these are tied to the fact that we have a massive population of people who've basically been failed by these neoliberal arrangements and have become either unhoused, suffering mental health and substance use problems without adequate treatment. They have turned to black market activities because of economic precarity like drugs and sex work and stolen goods. And our police departments basically spend the vast majority of time managing those populations, criminalizing them, harassing them, moving them about in space. And there's no justice in those arrangements. And there are better ways to manage them that are in keeping with a kind of broader notion of justice, both economically, politically, socially, etc. 

So what is being proposed is the creation in New York City of a Department of Community Safety that would begin to expand targeted services and supports for those most vulnerable populations that have been on the losing end of neoliberal arrangements to try to create some social stability for them, which at the same time will reduce the potential negative impacts that they have enacted on the rest of us. And it's my hope that as we achieve some level of stabilization, that this will make it easier to produce broader solidarities among working people, to try to build political power to bring about some of the more fundamental economic changes that are needed to provide real long term security for working people.

Could you give a couple of examples? What are these services?

In New York City, we have a very inadequate mental health infrastructure and the New York police go on about 200,000 mental health crisis calls every year. They've already shot two or three people this year on those calls, killing one of them. And this is hugely expensive and counterproductive. And so the mayor's plan is to create a civilian mental health crisis response capacity that would be built into our emergency response system so that if a family calls about someone in their house having a mental health crisis, they get a mental health professional, not an armed police officer, to respond. Another example would be significantly expanding our community based anti-violence initiatives. We currently have a number of organizations based in the most high violent communities that have made good progress in reducing gun violence, but they lack critical resources to create real long term stability. And we need greater capacity to place them in more neighborhoods where gun violence is a problem. And our hope is that by expanding and improving those services, we could further reduce violence rates in the city.

In that way you can lessen the role of the NYPD and it can abolish these institutions, as I said…

Yeah, the Mayor has already said that he's not going to be hiring additional police officers, despite the fact that there continue to be constant retirements and resignations from the police. And over time this will produce cost savings, reduce the scope of police operations, and hopefully we'll be able to pick up the slack on that, so to speak, by providing people with essential services instead.

The most urgent situation is solidarity with working class movements in those countries directly targeted by Trump’s aggression

I see alright, so a couple of more. Given all these events, ICE’s murders, the Trump administration's increased repression at home and aggression abroad, the growing support for social democrats among the people, their significant electoral victories, and the rise of other leftist and socialist groups—as an intellectual in an America where these forces are gaining strength, what do you suggest progressive and revolutionary popular forces in the US should do internationally?

 So I think the most urgent situation is that we need to increase our solidarity with working class movements in those countries directly targeted by Trump's aggression. I'm thinking especially of Venezuela and Cuba, where we need worker to worker solidarity across borders against a common enemy. And I think we need our American labor movement to do a much better job of thinking in international terms. The international flows of capital, of corporate decision making, really require that we embrace international strategies for fighting the billionaire class.

I'm aware of the American labor movement and its grand struggles for the economic demands, but when it comes to the international solidarity, especially at least last two decades, it didn't give a very successful test. So do you think there are opportunities among the unions and especially among the industrial working class regarding such international solidarity? 

Well, we don't have much of an industrial working class anymore. You know, the United Auto World Workers represents lawyers and academics now as much as they do auto workers. So, you know, our working class is involved in service work, is underemployed, and is less likely to be in a union than was historically the case. Our most unionized sector is state employment. So, I think, you know, the larger overall challenge of the American labor movement is to fully embrace a more radical social unionism rather than a kind of narrow business unionism, which has dominated our labor movement in the wake of the McCarthyist purges of the 1930s, 50s, and 60s.