In an attempt to “Make America Great Again”(MAGA), Trump deported 104 “illegal” migrants to India on 5th February 2025, handcuffed and with ankles chained in a military aircraft. Colombia condemned similar action towards their citizens but the right-wing government in India, in its subservience to US imperialism, has not uttered a word to condemn the disgusting spectacle enacted by Trump to project himself as a tough leader to satisfy his right-wing voter base, to make up for the fact that he is merely a puppet in the hands of monopoly capitalists. The attempt to MAGA has exposed the failure of globalisation. The left had always maintained that globalisation is the infinite freedom of movement of capital alongside restrictions on the mobility of labour.
To begin with, America became “great” only because of migration (millions by slavery in the case of Africa or otherwise): between 1800 and 1860, 66% of migrants were from Britain and 22% from Germany; between 1860 and 1920 most of the 30 million migrants were from Scandinavian countries, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe. It is a great irony to restrict migration in an attempt to MAGA.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say that “the history of all either to existing society is the history of class struggle”. But what could be the history of homo sapiens before class society? It could be the history of human migration, of a small group from Africa to go on to populate the whole planet, for survival and to escape extinction.
A banner in a protest in the UK against discrimination towards migrants read: “I am here because you were there”. It is not possible to stop migration without eliminating the cause (colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism and the climate crisis). The neo-liberal policies designed by developed nations to exploit under-developed nations have caused poverty, joblessness and income inequality in the latter. The victims of neo-liberalism use legal and illegal means to migrate to other countries to make a better living. Imperial intervention in other countries’ affairs creates waves of migration to escape civil wars and political instability.
To humiliate the victims of neo-liberal policies by binding them with handcuffs and chains is a disgusting exhibition of imperial heavy-handedness. The biggest reason for migration in the future will likely be climate change, to which the developed nations are the largest contributors. It is projected that billions of people will lose their habitats due to rising sea levels and natural calamities. The World Bank estimates that between 44 million to 216 million will be the number of climate refugees by the year 2050.
It is an irony that, at a time when we dream about interstellar migration to prevent extinction, we are restricting the migration from one part of the world to the other.
The handling of migrants and exhibition of power is an indication of the capitalist crisis at its core and the dwindling of US hegemony. The depression in the 1870s in the US caused the scape-goating of vulnerable migrants for job losses and shortages. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was the first instance of racial profiling, which discriminated against the Chinese migrants who were forcibly moved into the US to build roads and railways; this method was later used by the Nazis for racial profiling of the Jews.
Human survival has always depended on migration: as in the past so will it be in the future. To humiliate the migrants is to be oblivious to the past. The World Bank has data that shows the correlation between migration and global income: increasing international migration by one third will increase global income by $1.4 trillion.[1]
So migration is a solution not the problem.
[1]Goldin, Ian (2024) The Shortest History of Migration, Old Street Publishing, Essex, UK.
