There is a mystifying absence of curiosity among Americans as to why masses of poor migrants from Latin America have been overwhelming the United States in recent decades. Migrants’ typical countries of origin did not become poor only in recent decades, and the United States did not become a wealthy country only in recent decades, either, so it can’t be that it’s inevitable but for aggressive border patrols. So one might think the question would naturally arise: what changed? Why are we dealing with this problem in the first place?

But not only do we not have a compelling answer to that question: it seems few in public life care to ask it at all. As is often the culprit in American politics, there is a yawning void where class analysis should be. Americans are impossibly obsessed with race, and especially with the status and validity of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic extrapolated from the history of white-black relations. Democrats tend to project that simple-and-simplistic binary onto any racial controversy, hearing in every episode little but an echo of the moral features and tasks of the Civil Rights Movement. Republicans, of course, tend to fixate on exonerating the white majority — protecting its prerogatives and defending its honor against excesses, real and imagined.

Where illegal immigration, ICE and its tactics, and prospects for legislation are concerned, we have such a deeply unfortunate situation first of all because of our inability to think beyond the racial paradigm. Republicans increasingly treat illegal immigrants as hostile invaders from an alien culture out to loot people they perceive as their historical oppressors, and think Democrats are out to enable this because they agree that the United States owes it to poor foreigners as a way to make up for our past sins, real and imagined. Democrats increasingly cannot name any significant steps they would take to secure the border at all, so eager are they to get on the other side of whatever Trump’s attitudes are on any racial controversy, and so narrowly focused are they on defending the dignity of migrants.

The common thread: a total absence of class analysis. It’s not true that racism is primarily just an expression of economic anxiety, but it’s also not true that racism is never primarily an expression of economic anxiety, or that economic anxiety plays no role in hostile racial attitudes. It is possible to say that poor conditions for American workers inflame or exacerbate racial resentment without insisting that those resentments would simply vanish upon attaining economic security.

Clearly, the racial attitude is heavily downstream from the class aspect in this particular case.

The end of the post-WWII golden era for the American worker did not take place, as many now like to believe, with NAFTA. American manufacturing had been in decline for a full generation by the middle of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, and NAFTA was as much effect as cause. American industry had already for some time been in pursuit of a shiny new cost-cutting measure. And oh, did they find it: the creation of a brand-new class of semi-visible de facto indentured servants from the developing world — people who would work for scraps because they came from nothing. And so, with the permission of both parties, the United States hung a gigantic ‘Help Wanted’ sign over the skies of Latin America. Once word got out that American businesses were hiring illegal migrant labor in droves, supply rapidly started meeting demand.

If the Republican Party really wanted to end illegal immigration overnight, President Donald Trump could direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to begin aggressively prosecuting businesses that have a systematic de facto policy of reliance on illegal migrant labor. After humiliating a few industry titans, it wouldn’t take long for everyone to re-orient their conduct, and migrants would simply stop coming to the United States en masse. But even Trump’s most credulous sycophants know that the likelihood of this happening is about the same as the likelihood of the Republican Party adopting Mao’s Little Red Book as their platform at their next convention. Trump himself is a business titan who profited from illegal migrant labor, of course — and he’s encouraged by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who push for an expansion of the H1B visa scam, through which businesses bring skilled foreigners in as proto-indentured servants, knowing they can pay them less and treat them worse, since their visas are dependent on winning their approval. Trump himself even said recently that he doesn’t think Americans have the talents businesses need — an abject lie spouted by business leaders like a magic incantation to win access to cheaper labor. Trump will never enforce the law so intently that it might affect a buddy’s bottom line. That is the mentality he brings to the table.

The latest round of ICE raids has sometimes been brutal, but the raids are also stupidly pointless. As long as American industry’s ‘Help Wanted’ sign hangs over the skies of Latin America, there will be three new illegal immigrants settling in for every one the government deports. Trying to deport everyone is the equivalent of using a mop bucket to empty a flooding road of water — cartoonishly absurd. And while the escalation of the harshness of both ICE’s tactics and Trump’s rhetoric may deter a small percentage of prospective migrants, the overwhelming majority will still be happy to take their chances and come to the United States, anyway. The worst that can happen to them is typically that they’ll end up right back in the same place they started, and the potential gains are enormous. Really, today’s illegal immigrants are motivated, fundamentally, by the same reasons immigrants have always come to the United States: for economic opportunity. If I were in their shoes, I’d do it too. (It’s not their fault we elect so many charlatans and sell-outs.)

In one sense, Republicans are correct: to solve the illegal immigration problem, we need to enforce the laws on the books. But the laws not being enforced are mostly the ones that apply to businesses — both large corporations and small businesses, especially in industries like agriculture, food and hospitality, and construction. For reasons unknown, I never hear anything about this from Republicans.

For reasons very much known, I also never hear anything like this from Democrats, who can always be counted on to drag us into the vortex of identity politics. They seem to not realize that the primary reason Republicans think the ICE raids are accomplishing anything is because the Democrats are monomaniacally fixated on them. They say to themselves: all the people I hate are outraged, so Trump must be doing something right. And the fact that Democrats are vastly more outraged by this than by mass illegal immigration in the first place only heightens the perception that the party’s main concern on this topic is protecting people who aren’t supposed to be here in the first place. It is very much possible to both condemn the excesses and abuses of ICE agents, freshly empowered to be Trump’s goon squad, and put forward a plan to both secure the border and deal with establish migrants humanely. But that’s not what is happening: instead, the necessary class aspect of this situation is totally ignored by Democrats, who also seem to look at the millions of illegal immigrants from Latin America with the attitude that these people just so happen to be here, with the primary question about their presence being simply how Americans ought to treat them.

Immigration can be a net economic benefit to a country, but it can also disproportionately harm certain workers and industries in that country, even along the way to what is overall beneficial. Going too far in either direction when seeking a balance results in primitive ‘nativism’ and naïve ‘globalism’. Right now, Democrats — with some notable exceptions, like Bernie Sanders, who has been remarkably consistent on this, owing to his ‘old left’ influences — cannot even admit out loud that importing masses of impoverished migrants has put downward pressure on American wages, especially among Americans who were already making very little. President Joe Biden felt compelled to apologize after referring to an illegal immigrant as an illegal immigrant after his last State of the Union address. This topic ought to be a slam dunk for Democrats against Donald Trump, but they are held hostage by people who get more upset at the president for calling an illegal immigrant an illegal immigrant than they do at businesses that cynically count on law enforcement ignoring their lawbreaking. As usual, the Trump Party is worse than the Democrats — but that doesn’t mean the Democrats don’t deserve a lot of blame for scolding anyone over the last 20 years who objected to mass illegal immigration as a racist or nativist. When Mitt Romney is called racist for wanting to remove the economic incentives for illegal immigration, it’s not hard to see why a lot of people had stopped taking the accusation seriously by the time an actual racial demagogue came around.

Mass illegal immigration is not inevitable. It does not have to be merely managed, rather than ended. It is the direct result of our policy choices — and non-choices— and whenever Republicans decide they care more about fixing the problem than about getting psychological revenge against Democrats, things will no longer have to be this way. But this will require them to stop avoiding reality and identify American corporations, not impoverished migrants, as the source of the crisis.