Amidst the tsunami of proto-fascist measures unleashed by the Trump-Vance-Musk regime’s ‘carnival of reaction’, a central place is taken by the threats to deport millions of migrant workers and their families – a threat that has already become grim reality for thousands arrested, terrorised, humiliated, and flown, shackled and handcuffed, in military planes to their countries of origin. This obscene spectacle of performative sadism has also already been aped in Britain by the Starmer ‘Labour’ government.
Trailing this policy during the election campaign, Trump claimed that tens of thousands of undocumented Chinese migrants had recently entered the US, warning his audience that “they’re all military age and they are mostly men.” Trump accused these immigrants of “trying to build a little army in our country.”
In a historical essay, published by the World Socialist Website eight days before Trump’s inauguration, and which we reprint below, Paul Montgomery notes:
“In portraying Chinese immigrants as an invading army, Trump and [his ‘border czar’ Tom] Homan echo the worst rhetoric of the Yellow Peril and Chinese Exclusion era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is an escalation of the anti-Chinese rhetoric Trump used throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and it seeks to place the US ever more openly on a war footing against China.”
Drawing critically, in the first instance, on recent material produced by the National Public Radio (NPR), the author outlines the history of the Chinese Exclusion era, which lasted from the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to its repeal in 1943. During this period, federal law prevented Chinese immigrants from entering the United States.
However, he correctly points out that: “To understand Chinese Exclusion, it must be placed in the context of the development of capitalism in the United States and the early development of US imperialism in the Pacific and East Asia.” And goes on to quote Karl Marx writing to Friedrich Engels in 1858:
“The real task of bourgeois society is the creation, at least in outline, of a world market, and of a type of production resting on this basis. Since the world is round, this task seems to have been brought to a conclusion with the colonisation of California and Australia and the inclusion of China and Japan.”
Montgomery quotes the late Asian-American historian Ronald Takaki: “Capital used Chinese laborers as a transnational industrial reserve army to weigh down white workers during periods of economic expansion and to hold white labor in check during periods of overproduction.” By recruiting Chinese laborers, employers could “boost the supply of labor and drive down the wages of both Chinese and white workers. The resulting racial antagonism generated between the two groups helped to ensure a divided working class and a dominant employer class.”
This accords with the similar observation of Karl Marx writing to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt in April 1870:
And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.
In this regard, the article highlights the reactionary role of the early labour aristocratic trade union movement in fuelling and perpetuating anti-Chinese racism:
“Leading labor organizations of this period, formed by craft unions and claiming hundreds of thousands of members, also directed workers toward the anti-Chinese position. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Knights of Labor both called for the exclusion of Chinese workers. At its founding conference in Pittsburgh in 1881, the AFL, then known as the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, adopted a resolution that declared ‘the presence of Chinese, and their competition with free white labor’ to be ‘one of the greatest evils with which any country can be afflicted.’ The AFL pledged to use its ‘best efforts to get rid of this monstrous evil.’”
One important criticism made by Montgomery of the NPR material is its ignoring of the anti-Chinese and racist positions taken by the Democratic Party in California in the period under review.
He writes: “Absent from NPR’s analysis is the Democratic Party, which championed anti-Chinese policies from the moment California became a state. Portraying the apparent cowardice of the Republican Party before anti-Chinese mobs while ignoring the reactionary politics of the Democratic Party is more convenient for the political aims and assumptions of NPR writers and podcasters. But the Republican Party of the 1870s and 1880s was only adapting itself to positions held by the Democratic Party since the 1850s.”
Drawing on the work of a respected Chinese American historian, he continues: “The Chinese Question, writes historian Mae Ngai, ‘became a bedrock principle of the Democratic Party in California.’ Among the major early advocates for exclusion was Democrat John Bigler, an attorney whose political ambitions led him to become California’s third governor. In an 1852 address to the California legislature, Bigler called for ‘measures to be adopted’ that would halt the ‘tide of Asiatic immigration.’ Insisting that the ‘Chinese Question’ required a national solution, Bigler called on the United States Congress to use its power to ‘entirely exclude this class of Asiatic immigrants.’”
The article concludes:
The anti-Chinese positions now expressed by Donald Trump and Tom Homan, like those of the exclusion era, are clearly racist and xenophobic. But that is not all they are. They come in the midst of growing class struggles and in the context of escalating conflict between US imperialism and the Chinese state. That Trump now claims a Chinese threat lurks behind the Panama Canal, which he proposes to annex by force, if necessary, is enough to demonstrate that the anti-Chinese rhetoric of his past and future administration, just as in the exclusion era, is significant for reasons that extend far beyond the question of racism in the United States. The attempt to portray Chinese immigrants, once again, as an invading army is the domestic expression of the Trump administration’s drive to reassert US global hegemony through a direct confrontation with China.
