The Mexican-American border is one of the most politicized social issues in modern America due to a growing right wing movement that has permeated every aspect of American society. Despite the hard facts that immigration from the southern border has actually been at a net-negative for over a decade, (2007-2017) where over a million less folks are immigrating from the Mexican border [1], we have seen an increase in violent rhetoric and policies in attempt to stop "illegal immigration," which has resulted in a crackdown on all forms of immigration legal and not, particulalry of people of color. Despite this crackdown on human beings ability to live and move freely, business and big capital (particularly American) has had the ability to nearly ignore the border completely. The North American Free Trade Agreement marked a neoliberal disaster for Mexico, giving American capital power and tying the Mexican economy to American businesses creating a new client state [2]. This act, transforms the border from a tool of nation state building into a tool of imperialism, one that mercilessly dominates the global south, and in particular creates economic refugees, further perpetuating the cycle of immigration and right wing reaction. In order to better understand imperialism and the Mexican-American border it must first examine how capital interacts with the border, how labor interacts with the border., and finally the economic incentive behind incarceration of immigrants.

American forign policy has been one of imperialism and expansionism since its formation. As capitalism developed steadily from the settler-bourgeois revolution it became clear that to sustain the market, new markets and resources needed to be acquired and exploited. Vladimir Lenin explains how imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, monopoly capitalism. This is when instead of wide small scale competition, monopolies naturally begin to form as corporations can dominate a certain market, particularly in client state economies. As these cartels (mixture of commodity production, resource extraction, and finance capital) form, the capital they produce gives them an uneven ability to dominate a market. [3] This transformation of Mexico from a neighbor to a client state to American capitalism from NAFTA literally created open borders, with an exception, no open borders for people. Tariffs were eliminated between NAFTA countries upon its creation, making the barrier for trading much lower, and by 2008 non-tariff barriers were eliminated by literally opening the border to trucking and commodity movement. [4] This coupled with the transition of american businesses like Ford and Chevy to producing products in Mexico provided an immigration of american business south, and resources, money, and commodities up north. Open borders exist for capital, it's called imperialism.

In Mexico there were strikes for higher wages and better working conditions in Coca-Cola factories, showing the fact they are still under influence of transnational corporations. They have no borders. For the laborer however, the economic refugees, the border is a barrier nearly, and in some places literally, physical. [5] This contradiction between who has open borders creates a system where US production companies will immigrate for cheap labor which is nearly guaranteed when immigration north is becoming harder and harder. This is compounded when real wealth for the average Mexican citizen has shrunk, and poverty wracks the country. Neoliberalism has failed these people. [6]

The United States has a private prison problem, and not only in mass incarceration of its people of color citizens. ICE puts a dollar sign on immigrants causing an incentive to detain more people and create a space of dehumanization. The DHS has created a large network of carceral areas to indefinitely hold immigrants before they are deported, and this has left ICE in charge of the largest detention operation in the United States. For profit prisons actually play a huge role in the detention and holding of immigrants. ICE pays these private prisons around 120$ a day for each prisoner, making immigrants a way to make a lot of money, further incentivising more detentions and for longer. [7] This criminalization of immigrants dehumanizes them on multiple levels, not only in the obvious way of separating them from family and throwing them into a cell indefinitely, but also that the act of criminalizing someone on an ontological level reduces their value to life as at any moment they can have violence enacted on them in a legally justified manner. [8]

American imperialism is a beast that creates economic hardships around the globe, but makes a few people very wealthy. This process has happened in the opening up of Mexico's economy under NAFTA which at its core is open borders for business, while the average citizen is massively restricted and in current political climate literally locked into private prisons. This is abhorrent, we should reject United States Imperialism, especially as it relates to immigration.

[1] Pew Research Center https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2018/11/27/u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-total-dips-to-lowest-level-in-a-decade/

[2] The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/04/nafta-20-years-mexico-regret

[3] Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism section 7 by Vladimir Lenin

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm

[4] Inc Encyclopedia

https://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/north-american-free-trade-agreement-nafta.html

[5] Vox https://www.vox.com/world/2019/3/28/18251583/mexico-matamoros-factory-worker-labor-strikes

[6] Foriegn Policy in Focus

https://fpif.org/5-reasons-mexican-workers-cheer-demise-nafta/

[7] Inda et. al

Inda et. al '13 – Chair and Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies, Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. His research areas include the politics of immigration, governmentality and life politics, the critical study of race and medicine, the anthropology of globalization, and Latino populations in the United States. Dr. Inda is currently Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Criticism and Interpretive Theory. (Jonathan Xavier Inda & Julie A. Dowling, "Governing Immigration through Crime", pg. 16, TS)

To facilitate the current deportation drive, the DHS has developed, over the past decade and a half or so, a vast complex of carceral spaces in which to detain immigrants pending their removal from the United States. The growth of the carceral complex has been such that ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) directorate now runs the largest detention operation in the nation (Schriro 2009). In 2011, ICE detained 429,247 foreign nationals, more than five times the number of people held in 1994 (81,707) and about a 105 percent increase from 2001 (209,000) (US DHS 2012a, 4; Taylor 1995, 1107; Kerwin and Lin 2009, 7). Meanwhile, the number of INS/ICE detainees per day has risen from 6,785 in 1994 to 20,429 in 2001, and all the way up to 33,384 in 2011 (Kerwin and Lin 2009, 6; US ICE 2012). The average length of stay for immigrants in ICE custody is twenty-nine days (US ICE 2012). However, there is considerable variation between individual cases. Many of those detained are released within one day of admission, but it is not uncommon for some to be held for a year or longer (Schriro 2009, 6). Generally, detainees who agree to voluntary removal have shorter stays than those who challenge their deportation or file an asylum claim. ICE houses its detainee population in a variety of facilities. These include six ICE-owned Service Processing Centers (SPCs), seven private prisons known as Contract Detention Facilities (CDFs), and more than two hundred forty Intergovernmental Service Agreement facilities—basically local and county jails (both public and private) that contract with ICE to hold immigrant detainees (National Immigration Forum 2012b; US ICE 2012).24 Notably, for-profit prison corporations play a huge role in managing the immigrant detention complex. They not only own and operate the seven CDFs, but also manage all but one of ICE's SPCs and most of the largest local and county jails with which ICE contracts (Kerwin 2009). Given the control that private entities have gained over immigration detention facilities, Judy Greene and Sunita Patel (2007, 48) suggest that "immigrants are fast becoming the modern day cash crop of the prison industry?' Indeed, with ICE paying its contractees an estimated average of one hundred twenty-two dollars per day for each immigrant detained, there is a lot of money to be made in the immigration detention business (National Immigration Forum 2012b, 2).Ultimately, the delegation of immigrant confinement to organizations whose main purpose is to generate profits inevitably produces pressure to increase detentions: the more immigrants confined, the higher the profits. Immigrant bodies have thus become valuable commodities whose worth lies in being placed and kept behind bars.25

[8] Kurbin et al.

Kubrin et al. '12 (Charis Elizabeth Kubrin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and (by courtesy) Sociology. Professor Kubrin's research focuses on neighborhoods, race, and violence as central to social disorganization theory, Marjorie Sue Zatz, Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in ASU's School of Social Transformation. She is currently on leave, serving as director of the Law and Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation. Her research and teaching interests address the ways in which race, ethnicity, and gender impact juvenile and criminal court processing and sanctioning, immigration policy, Chicano/a gangs, and comparative justice, particularly Latin American legal systems, Ramiro Martinez, Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, "Punishing Immigrants Policy, Politics, and Injustice", pp. 8-9)//HW

Some of these consequences can be anticipated. For example, individuals who immigrate without proper authorization may be deported and employ¬ers who hire undocumented workers may be sanctioned. Individuals make choices in light of these risks. A second set of consequences, while readily apparent, is less likely to be anticipated. These include, for example, the dev¬astating effects of parents' deportation on children and other family mem¬bers, some of whom may be citizens. And, because attorneys practicing in criminal or family law may not have a complete understanding of immigra¬tion law, they may unknowingly recommend actions that have devastating ramifications for their client's immigration status.¶ Yet a third group of consequences are what we call hidden, state-created vulnerabilities. These include harms to individuals (e.g., increased victim¬ization by unscrupulous employers, fear of reporting violence in the home, risks from human traffickers, etc.) and to communities (e.g., reduced willing¬ness of victims and witnesses to report crime, reduced efficacy of the public health sector and school systems because immigrants fear interacting with government employees). In other contexts, these state-created vulnerabili¬ties may include forced relocations and displacement of refugees, rape and other assaults against displaced persons, or finding oneself in unfamiliar and unsafe settings following deportation or relocation. The chapters included in this section of the volume exemplify some of these anticipated and unanticipated collateral consequences. As a set, they help us understand the myriad ways in which our policies and practices cre¬ate new dilemmas even as they seek, often unsuccessfully, to resolve other problems confronting societies today. Evelyn Cruz's chapter, Unearthing and Confronting the Social Skeletons of Immigration Status in our Crimi¬nal Justice System, examines the breach of trust that can arise when crimi¬nal defense attorneys are unaware of the immigration consequences of the advice they offer to clients. Without such knowledge, attorneys may unwit¬tingly recommend legal actions that result in deportation and permanent bars against re-entering the country. Examining just such a situation in the case of the Postville workers, Cruz takes us beyond the consequences for individuals to help us confront the ramifications for our legal order when cli¬ents cannot trust that their attorneys will give them competent legal advice. ¶ Workplace and community raids may result in the arrest and deportation of persons who have lived in the host country for many years. Also, lawful permanent residents convicted of "aggravated felonies" are subject to man¬datory deportation. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), in combination, expanded the category of aggravated felonies to include a range of minor and nonviolent offenses and made deportation mandatory even for persons who had already, served their criminal sentence or when the offense did not fit the criteria for mandatory deportation at the time of conviction. The 1996 immigration laws also eliminated immigration hearings for legal permanent residents facing deportation based on aggra¬vated felony convictions (International Human Rights Law Clinic 2010: 3). If these individuals come into contact with the criminal justice system or immigration officials for any reason, they risk immediate deportation. This broader net includes many immigrants who have lived in the United States for years and have raised families here.