Ultimately, no doubt, the left in the United States will have to confront the fact that there is never likely to be an ‘American revolution’ as classically imagined by DeLeon, Debs or Cannon. If socialism is to arrive one day in North America, it is far more probable that it will be by virtue of a combined, hemispheric process of revolt that overlaps boundaries and interlaces movements.

— Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class¹

After two weeks of arduous travel from Honduras, passing through Guatemala, and into southern Mexico, members of the migrant caravan received an offer from the Mexican government: opt to stay in Chiapas or Oaxaca, the two southernmost states of Mexico, where they would be eligible for entry into a temporary work program, with a regularization of migration status that would allow access to other benefits like healthcare, education, and mobility within those states. The plan, called Estás en Tu Casa [You’re at Home], was part of a larger regime of Central American migration management that Mexico has carried out in recent years with the support of the United States. The caravan, which at its height comprised more than 7,000 travelers from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and southern Mexico itself, was only the most recent and visible instance of a larger process that we may read as a geographical displacement of the U.S. border to the south via the Mexican state. 

The people traveling in the caravan, however, rejected the offer with a collective vote. The organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which is providing support to the caravan, posted a statement on its Facebook page: “Today at 6:35 pm on October 26, 2018, an assembly of the majority of members of the Caminata Migrante [Migrant Caravan] gathered in the Central Park of Arraiga and responded to the ‘Estás en Tu Casa’ Plan that the [Mexican] President announced today.” After enumerating the reasons for rejecting it, including the geographical limitations of the plan, the fact that it does not address the root causes for the Central American exodus, and a pattern of harassment by Mexican immigration authorities, the document concludes: 

We call on the hospitality of the communities we pass through. The members of the Caminata Migrante depend on the support and solidarity of the Mexican population, since the Government’s response has been more repressive than humanitarian. We also call on civil society, on human rights organizations, and on people in general to be alert and watch our path to avoid, monitor and condemn any abuse or harassment against members of this exodus and those who accompany it.

And people are watching. Despite the fact that migrants have been making the same journey for years, with 41,760 Hondurans making the trek into Mexico between January and September of this year, the caravan appears to illustrate something novel. On the one hand, the caravan’s visibility is in part a product of its centrality to the Republican Party’s closing strategy in the U.S. midterm elections: Donald Trump seized on the caravan after news of its pressing through the Guatemalan and Mexican borders, evidently hoping to turn fears about migration into votes in a context when right-wing violence has been dominating the news. On the other hand, however, this visibility was part of the migrants’ strategy of forming a caravan in the first place, an act that spectacularized and collectivized what for many has been a very dangerous, expensive, and often solitary journey overland through Mexico to arrive at the United States. This strategy, incidentally, has already caught on, two more caravans of nearly 2,000 people having formed in its wake. As their announcement concludes, the caravan strategy is predicated on the hope that the attention of others – the populations of the world and not the governments – will ultimately provide a measure of safety.

In the United States, any public response will have to contend with Trump’s rhetoric of invasion, war, and border militarization. Also notable, however, is the lack of any substantive response by the Democratic Party. Having decided to focus on healthcare for the midterms, Democrats have apparently not even responded to Trump’s threats of emergency measures intended to prevent those traveling in the caravan from making entry. These include a Muslim Ban-style suspension of all entry at the U.S.–Mexico border; the deployment of more than 5,000 troops to the border already, with 2,000 or so planned in coming days, and a projected total of 15,000 (more than the United States has deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan); the potential violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (which restricts the use of military forces to enforce domestic policy); and a set of armed training exercises designed for media spectacle and to provide those pointlessly deployed troops with something to occupy their time. Yet even if these actions are more GOTV mobilizing devices than anything else, the Democratic silence is symptomatic of the fact that that party has little interest in an alternative position on immigration, since they live in fear of losing centrist voters who are supposed to have reasonable objections to the idea of an open border. Thus, even as the DHS Secretary says, “You will not get in” – disregarding the fact that, at a minimum, people in the caravan have claims to refugee status that the United States is bound by international law to entertain – the Democrats would rather avoid the topic. 

The response by the U.S. right is predictable; nativism, as both public policy and private violence, is a crowning feature of contemporary reaction. The response by the Democratic politicians, for anyone who has followed their positions on immigration over the last half-century, is also unsurprising. But that these policies are routine should not blunt urgency of radically different response to the caravan; what is utterly necessary is an internationalist position, a central feature of any strategy that hopes to rout the advance of barbarisms worldwide. 

If we step outside media narratives, think beyond the immediate electoral horizon, and train our sights on migrant organizing and solidarity, the basis for such a politics becomes demonstrably clearer. Just as the right’s strategy of white fear-mongering has highlighted new, more visible tactics among migrants in the form of the caravan, we propose to respond by centering migrant struggles, particularly from the perspective of “migrant autonomy” that was so well illustrated by the democratic decision-making of caravan members over their collective fate. With this perspective, it becomes evident that to consider class politics in the United States today means considering a working class whose composition crosses geographical borders and weaves together the exploited and the dispossessed from across a much broader region.

In the first place, migration requires us to adjust the scope of and displace our perspectives on the recent history of the U.S. left, in order to read its political make-up and the dynamic of its cycles of contention by following a different thread, seeking a different entry-point. The “New American Left” has indeed been given many beginnings: in Seattle 1999, the crestfallen streets at the start of the Iraq War, the crisis of 2008, the student movements of the following year, or Occupy in the autumn of 2011. This list would be incomplete, however, without any number of the powerful “border struggles” over the same period. 

The Day Without an Immigrant strikes, or el gran paro estadounidense, were the largest work-stoppages to date in U.S. history, initiating new organizational forms and processes that are still underway in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. When the Obama administration followed these actions with the largest sweep of deportations in the country’s history, migrant struggle didn’t recede, but took on new forms: it animated student protests, including those ostensibly about austerity and privatization; it became a reference point in shop floor organizing amongst migrants in diverse sectors; hunger strikes, riots, and work stoppages in detention centers have been an underreported but crucial part of the escalating fight against prison conditions. Even the two most spectacular and pointed direct actions during the Trump presidency have been border struggles: the airport protests (and accompanying taxi strike) of 2016, and the more recent ICE blockades and emerging sanctuary movement. And furthermore, the most successful of the many general strike calls that came in the first few months of the Trump administration was precisely the one that received the scantest coverage in even left media: the migrant-led actions in the Midwest and South, which reflected the changing geography of immigrant labor in the United States. Why are these actions so rarely foregrounded – or frankly, even mentioned – when we discuss the prospects for anti-capitalist politics? What would it mean to remap our latest political cycle with these struggles in the lead?

The key insight of the “autonomy of migration” theoretical perspective, which has emerged within academic literature through discussions and political collaborations between European theorists, U.S. sociologists, and scholar-activists from the global South, is to see migrants themselves as active subjects whose mobility has definite political implications. The point is not to romanticize migration – migration, we know, is often anything but beautiful – or to impute immediate revolutionary motives to all who take on such journeys. Instead, it’s to take some distance from a detached sociology which would make migrants mere objects of market forces being passively “pushed” from one country, the so-called sending country, and “pulled” to another, the so-called receiving country. 

It’s also distinct from a kind of liberal humanitarianism that might merely view migrants as symptoms of capitalism’s moral failings. While economic and moral factors may be at play, migration as a contemporary phenomenon is “paradigmatic” of capitalism’s relations of exploitation, and not only insofar as it illustrates the power of markets. Today’s migration points to the multiple forms of exploitation and dispossession that define the contemporary working class: from the corporate land grabs, climate change, and state violence that make subsistence farming impossible to the ways that the drug trade, finance, and the “migration industry” are able to extract surplus independently of the wage and, in the process, make life unliveable. Yet it also illustrates the active capacity of the working class to pose new forms of resistance to their subordination – or at least the conditions of their subordination – within and in relation to the labor process.² In other words, workers may move to avoid specific working conditions, or to avoid being part of the industrial reserve army that otherwise sets the conditions of exploitation in a place like Honduras. In this sense, migration is autonomous because it is something conceptually and logically prior to the emergence of the state’s ever more extensive biopolitical and disciplinary border and labor management techniques. These techniques don’t simply seek to stop migrant flows, but actually use migrant flows to further segment and structure labor markets along the migrant trail in the countries of origin, reception, and those crossed along the way. 

The regime of migrant “illegality,” for instance, segments the U.S. domestic labor market, and by extension, its workforce. Some workers are subjected to inferior labor contracts that are enforceable, at least in part, via a looming threat of deportation resulting from legal precarity by design. But ultimately the historical structuring of this category itself is a strategic response to the fact of a refusal by laborers in one context (the site of emigration) to accept their lot as what Michael Denning has called “the waste products of globalization.”³ It is, after all according to Marx, the double freedom of dispossession-cum-wage dependence which is the defining feature of the working class and in this sense these individuals partaking in “the yearly proletarian globe-hopping of seasonal workers by steamship, railroad, and automobile” or by “radical separation of airborne migration linked by years of remittances and phone calls,” should hold a pride of place as the very literal foot soldiers of the working class.⁴

In the case of Honduras, as in much of the history of modern Latin America, conditions of exploitation and class relations cannot be separated from the regional imperial power of American capital and the state. In a sense, then, the circuit of difficult working-class conditions abroad and U.S.-domestic “illegality” can be seen as a connected set of devices to handle mobility itself, a permanent feature of labor’s autonomy, which the exploited have used as a form of resistance even in the most repressive labor regimes like plantation slavery.⁵ This transnational circuit reaches its apex in the reciprocal re-structuring of Central American labor markets via the creation of employment in, for example, call centers specifically for deported and returned migrants who have lived in the United States. The border and migration regimes of the capitalist state work not simply to repel migrants or flex national sovereignty but to find new opportunities for cheap labor, whether migrants are coming or going. The point is that migrants are coming and going; their agency is the basis for capital’s continually multiplying regimes of capture, and their movement is thus part of a class struggle.

But although the conjunctural specificity of heightened awareness of the caravana de migrantes is an obvious impetus for us to seize on the autonomy of migration now, we must also note that the border spectacle of thousands of people physically crossing the space of the border only does half of the work to explain the autonomy of migration. We also have to grapple with the ways it highlights mutations to the practice of border enforcement. Increasingly, policing the nation’s boundaries is hardly restrained to the physical edges of a country but rather is also inscribed within it, as well as projected beyond it, into territory ostensibly governed by other states. “Illegality” has become a favorite technology of global capital in extending the border beyond its geographical confines. It points to a proliferation of rebordering negotiations in the physical space of the border as in the differential labor contracts that have come to define the segmentation of American labor, as manifested in ghettoized barrios, migrant detention centers, and policies like California’s Proposition 187 or Arizona’s SB 1070 or HR4437. Seen in this way, migrant autonomy is a concept which links the “border spectacle” with the powerful domestic “border struggles” by highlighting a repertoire of tactics which also include assimilation into traditional modes of organized labor like the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and AFSCME, the so-called new migrant workers’ centers, and other forms of working-class insurgence and sabotage. ⁶

The “autonomy of migration” perspective therefore poses a politics that stands at a remove from “the people” as a subject of electoral democracy, because migration is in itself a political challenge to state sovereignty, both in the act of border crossing and in the presence of those whom the state does not recognize or differentially includes. The partisan perspective within US politics can only seem to register the phenomenon of migration as a “border spectacle” in an instrumental way. This goes for both parties insofar as Democrats are only happy to respond when the most visibly repressive border control methods, like child-separation or blanket travel-bans, are posed by their political opponents. These spectacular moments of faux-compassion stand in contrast to the fact, much cited on the socialist left now, that among U.S. presidents Obama still holds the record for deportations. On the other hand, migration as an autonomous social movement, or a movement which poses a subject whose focus is obviously not—and cannot be—the electoral arena, suggests another political horizon altogether, in which mobility is a form of resistance and the basis for new subject positions within capitalism, considered in its global dimension.⁷ What Yann Moulier Boutang terms, in a pathbreaking work, the “anonymous, collective, continuous, and uncontainable force of defection” is thus not counterposed to class struggle, but a constitutive feature of it, with powerful structuring effects on class formation.⁸

The importance of this point is to say that today, in a similar way, we cannot view refugees and other migrants only through an apolitical lens, as their activity poses challenges for anyone interested in working-class politics in the United States. What horizon does this perspective on the autonomy of migration open? What lines of hemispheric revolt can be traced through it? How might it alter our understandings of the tense relation between socialism and electoralism? 

We would suggest that certain coordinates of socialist politics can and should be recalibrated by taking seriously a fact made clear by the caravan: that, sociologically, the American working class is not confined to the citizenry or geographical space of the United States, and that the politics of the unbound proletariat necessarily exceeds these spaces too. Class conflict as a political phenomenon, in other words, has valences that far exceed the model of the documented citizen, the electoral arena, and its conceptions of “the political” itself. To turn necessary attention to the challenge that the caravan poses to these forms requires that we think of collective proletarian mobility, mutual aid, and what could perhaps be called a kind of mobile social reproduction as themselves developing a politics that not only transgresses borders but exceeds their logic.⁹

To return to the mediated reception of border spectacles and migrant visibility in the United States., we see two prominent responses that have eclipsed autonomous migrant action as well as recent radical proposals like the call to abolish ICE: 

1) Trump and other prominent Republicans dismiss migrant agency outright by claiming conspiratorially that it was Democrats, that it was Venezuela, or any of their other usual suspects (like Soros) who were secretly paying migrants to come to the US. They furthermore suggest that, far from being part of a socio-economic network with many in the United States, the migrant caravan is so composed of “outsiders” that its existence is some kind of act of war. (Indeed, if one need further absurd proof of this beyond the repeated insistence that it included “Middle Easterners,” consider the fact that conservative commentators went so far as to claim that the caravan would bring an epidemic of smallpox – a disease that was globally eradicated in 1980. In the imaginaries it ramps up and deploys, the caravan is coded simultaneously as an invading horde and a bacteriological Trojan Horse that the libs are too foolish to see for what it is.) 

2) The liberal-Democratic option was, conversely, a kind of moralistic response, painting migrants as victims of circumstance and people without options, who were hoping to ameliorate the conditions that have compelled them to migrate: political corruption in Central America, lack of economic opportunity, the very real violence of gangs, etc. This latter view doesn’t call into question the inside/outside distinction that undergirds the frame of war guiding the Republican position; it only laments that this disparity is having its (predictable) effects of compelling migrants to come to the United States. Furthermore, this latter view assumes that what the migrants are making is what Anne McNevin describes as “a plea for inclusion, a magnanimous and token gesture by which the state reinscribes its legitimate powers of discretion.”¹⁰ Regarding the movement of sans-papiers migrants (those without papers) in France, she points to an alternative political demand: “a demand that entitlements be recognized. The Sans-Papiers claim a right of membership which exists prior to the formal allocation of citizenship and upon which basis they now insist on legal recognition.“¹¹

The case of the sans-papiers is actually instructive for a few reasons. First, the sans-papiers’ initial explosive public demonstrations and statements in 1996 were tied to sustained organizing efforts by undocumented migrants across the social field: in workers’ hostels, churches, neighborhoods, workplaces. Second, the participants involved, who hailed from several West African countries, the Maghreb, and also the Caribbean, framed their decision to go to the French metropole in relation to colonial history.¹² It is important to highlight that the Honduran economic and political situation is in fact a direct effect of U.S. foreign policy and the dispossessive operations of global capital (see for example the devastating consequences of environmental deregulation in the mining industry in Honduras, plus the severe rise in wealth inequality and cuts to social spending since the 2009 coup). This is one potential basis for a claim on the right of membership as part of a non-territorial collective in which both the United States. and many other parts of the world would have to be included. What the autonomy of migration upsets is the assumption that the agency of politics is legible only insofar as it is documented or territorially sanctioned, and therefore can be translated through representational forms. In short, the caravan forces us to contend with the political efficacy of these forms of self-activity that are indifferent or opposed to electoral contestation; that are registered instead in another terrain altogether; that measure their success by the degree that they cultivate political agency and construct organizational forms that point beyond the state and its apparatuses, beyond the nation, legal citizenship, and social partitions. 

In a context in which a humanitarian response has been the only obvious alternative to nativism and militarization, the former is obviously preferable. The faith-inspired movements for migrant “Sanctuary” are one such example of valuable, if insufficient, work taking place within this frame. And yet one feature of the recent struggles around Sanctuary, compared to the movements of the 1980s which featured coalitions of anti-imperialist-focused groups like CISPES and the Nicaragua Solidarity Network with faith-based initiatives, has been the lack of any clear connection to a political alternative that could go beyond defense and offer a link between the issue of migration and a more expansive radical horizon. The political counterpoint necessary to break with both Republican violence and Democratic inaction cannot rely on the notion that “we” Americans welcome “them,” foreign migrants; rather, we simply recognize our common membership in something that already exists, economically and historically. 

What is necessary then is a political response, based not just on moral commitment, but on an understanding of how migration itself, especially in the caravan’s notable collective and democratic form, is a political challenge to the capitalist state and a refusal to accept the conditions of exploitation offered in the capitalist system. Already, by choosing to migrate collectively, by determining its own route, the caravan evades and defies the migration industry – the coyotes, police, gang leaders, etc. who directly profit from this mobility – and instead relies on the self-organized support of the communities it encounters on the way. The caravan form itself, by turning a very everyday and quotidian occurrence of migration into a spectacle, is directly staking a political claim by making the invisible or ignored into the visible. A political response would thus have to recognize the caravan as both a concrete act of refusal and as a movement of politicization. And such a response would require looking more incisively at political conceptions shared across nominal divides. Because while the alarmist fixations of Trump and the hardening far-right fractions of the GOP are both atrocious and predictable, fixating too closely on their fascistic hyperbole can cover over something else: the fact that their basic oppositions of inside/outside and inclusion/exclusion, which underlie citizenship and give sovereign territorial legitimation of law, are ones with far deeper and wider roots than a history of American conservatism.

But the autonomy of migration does not mean that the migrants must march alone. On the contrary, the caravan, as an exposure and reminder of migration as a constant feature of global capitalism, is an opportunity to develop new practices of political translation. Those within geographically defined borders of the U.S. state must seek to amplify the point that is already suggested by the very existence and visibility of the caravan: that the people migrating have a claim to justice, have a claim to solidarity, and that they are already part of a broader American community insofar as their political and economic existence is inseparable from the political and economic operations of U.S. imperialism. As Mike Davis writes, “It is necessary to begin to imagine more audacious projects of coordinated action among the popular lefts in all the countries of the Americas. We are all, finally, prisoners of the same malign ‘American dream.’”¹³

The struggle of migrants thus marks the reality and more expansive possibility of what McNevin calls greater political belonging, and so it is our job to boost this possibility by offering a “domestic” alternative to the commonsense notions of sovereignty, war, patronizing sympathy, etc. This means making even more visible the possibility of entry, inclusion, and safety, for migrants, i.e., offering what Katharyne Mitchell and Matthew Sparke call “geosocial solidarity.” It means a refusal to process this event through a looking glass of fear or violent repulsion, but also a refusal to relegate this event as a footnote to the supposed strategic core of electoral work. Instead, a true “domestic” alternative insists on considering that maybe “we” are not who we thought.¹⁴

After all, the genealogy of communist or revolutionary socialist politics in the United States discloses a hybrid, dispersed history of migrant radicalisms. One need only to reflect here on the enduring impact of veteran ‘48ers, the immigrant newspapers, trade unionist traditions, and socialist networks that circulated between urban neighborhoods and manufacturing centers. The transnational diffusion of revolutionary syndicalism in the 1900s and 1910s, which led to groups like the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States, itself coalesced through the international migration of working classes, internationalization of labor processes, and the border-crossing activities of militants.¹⁵ The Mexican and Chicanx working classes in the United States, integral to the history of the Wobblies, carried and reactivated diverse methods and experiences of struggle.¹⁶ And then there are the waves of internal migration made by African Americans outside the South, which germinated in the same kinship networks and arose from the same organizations that had experimented with the powers of distinctive imaginaries and practices of self-determination.¹⁷ Their migrations were of course often understood as a political act – a line of flight, a search for more propitious conditions, not simply the inexorable effect of capitalist development. The political formations of the late 1960s – most notably the Black Panthers and their various local alliances – resulted from, and recast, these diasporic routes and the movements of other populations.¹⁸ As we re-examine the outlines and challenges of an effective proletarian internationalism today, the ways that past struggles have constructed encounters across borders, through unexpected but open-ended combinations and associations, will doubtless inform our organizing, our strategies, our communist practice. The migrant caravan sets out a new point of departure.