This spring, the prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes believes the war on immigrants is a lost cause. “Country’s over,” he said on his Rumble show. “We’re already a nonwhite country.” Earlier this year, he declared immigration a “dead issue,” arguing that President Trump “blew it” by linking arms with oligarchs and waging war on Iran.
“Immigration is becoming one of these issues that is used almost exclusively just to trick white people,” he said, a rare display of clarity for a man whose many bigotries tend to orient him toward confusion. In an antisemitic post on X, he argued that anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric was a distraction. “Probably the best way to prevent Muslim immigrants from coming here or attacking us is to stop killing them and destroying their countries for Israel,” he wrote. And last month, he wrote on X: “The populist Left has all the energy now. Trump’s broken promises over immigration, Iran & Epstein have completely deflated any enthusiasm on the Right.”
Mr. Fuentes is just one of the influential figures in the anti-immigrant movement who are criticizing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, which has set in motion a refugee crisis within Iran as his interventions in Latin America create the conditions for a long-term increase in mass migration to the United States from that region.
The discontent among immigration restrictionists emerged despite Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigrants living in the United States. The administration muted the performative cruelty of its mass deportations after its deadly, unpopular actions in Minneapolis; however, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surged to nearly 50,000 in July, the highest single monthly arrest total of Mr. Trump’s second term. Pundits and provocateurs who dread demographic change have spotlighted the contradiction with his foreign policy.
The disillusionment of immigration restrictionists can be traced to late last year when Mr. Trump began blowing up boats in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, a performance of cartel warfare that was a prelude to his capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. He endorsed a Honduran candidate whose party has been tied to cartels, protecting a start-up city there for tech billionaires. “Efforts to transform other societies end up remaking our own,” warned Mark Krikorian, an immigration restrictionist, in an article for Compact magazine, “Intervention Leads to Immigration.” Mr. Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that appeared to have influenced Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration policies. He cited examples such as the Vietnam War and years of U.S. interference in Central America that drove a million people to leave.
The anxiety from leaders in the anti-immigrant movement has received less attention than the outcry from Mr. Trump’s isolationist voters. But it could be more consequential because immigration is the president’s signature issue — the one he relies on to divide and conquer. The disillusionment reveals an extraordinary, if uneasy, window of possibility: working-class white Americans who are anxious about immigration could awaken to the fact that their interests are aligned with those of people of color across the world who want to stay in their homelands. They share an enemy: corporate and political elites who extract, exploit and expel across borders.
There have been moments in American political history when working-class solidarity briefly cut across racial and national lines. There was the Rainbow Coalition, a class-based multiracial alliance that the Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton created in Chicago in 1969, the year he was assassinated. It included white Appalachian migrants and other white workers from the Young Patriot Organization, who renounced racism to unite with Black and Latino activists against their shared economic oppression and who wore Confederate flag patches with Black power symbols.
In the late 1970s, labor organizers in Arizona split with the United Farm Workers over its attacks on undocumented immigrants, and established a more radical, transnational model of labor organizing that refused to distinguish between documented and undocumented farmworkers and built solidarity across the U.S.-Mexico border. “We are all subject to the same underlying disease: the inhumane and ethereal transnational corporation that has regard only for profit,” wrote union organizers in 1981.
People like Mr. Fuentes are too racist to embrace cross-border or multiracial organizing. But his declaration that immigration is a “dead issue” is a sign that Trump’s most powerful spell could be breaking. If working-class white Americans can be persuaded that their real enemies are the oligarchs and warmongers enriching themselves at everyone’s expense, not the migrants fleeing the chaos those oligarchs create, a different kind of politics could become possible. And Mr. Fuentes, like others on the right, are beginning to point the finger at the transnational tech billionaires behind Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, like Peter Thiel. Mr. Fuentes often uses the term “globalist“ to advance antisemitic, racist and false propaganda about Jewish people controlling everything and replacing white populations with immigrants of color. In fact, transnational oligarchy benefits from race-based divisions that distract everyone from the oligarchs’ exploitation of all people. Americans all along the political spectrum are beginning to turn against parts of that oligarchy. In an era of extreme polarization, opposition to A.I. and protests against data centers are strongly bipartisan.
If anything can heal the rupturing body politic, it may be opposition to what the journalist Gil Durán details in his new book, “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.” He writes: “All around the world, Silicon Valley oligarchs are scheming to acquire land, resources and power. They see a world in decline and seek to profit by hastening its collapse — and remaking it in their own image.”
The Trump administration has already revealed that the goal is not a strong American work force, but a forever exploitable one in service of transnational elites — which requires unregulated expansion of extractive technologies like artificial intelligence and locking immigrant laborers into a vulnerable state. Mr. Trump’s Labor Department has quietly restructured the H-2A guest worker program to make foreign farmworkers cheaper to hire, cutting hourly wages by up to $7 and allowing employers to count housing in their compensation. The United Farm Workers has sued, arguing the rule will depress wages for American farmworkers and push them out of the labor pool. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the changes were illegal, and ordered the Labor Department to redraft them.
Congress has also tried to expand this architecture of exploitation. A bipartisan bill would broaden H-2A eligibility to year-round employers currently excluded, like dairy farms. Other policies reveal the shift: his effort to revoke birthright citizenship would help create a hereditary underclass with fewer constitutional protections.
Mr. Trump’s immigration policies are not intended to eliminate immigrant labor; they are intended to strip that labor of bargaining power and rights. Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is perniciously symbiotic with that system. As he deports immigrants with jobs, homes and children who are American citizens, he is laying the foundations for the long-term displacement of newly marginalized people who will be more exploitable because they have no roots here.
What began as a push to expel and exclude dark-skinned immigrants from the United States has become something more sprawling and sinister: a transnational project of population control in service of elites. Call it transnational oligarchy — the strategic use of immigration policy and foreign interventions to manufacture and maintain an exploitable labor force. This is not compatible with white nationalism or any nationalism. It does not believe in borders. It believes in constraining the political and economic power of an ever-expanding category of undesirables.
“Various societies have tried sourcing cheap labor from non-functioning states,” wrote Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and one of his most powerful advisers, in February on X. “The West is the first to import failed-state labor with full political rights: welfare, voting, and citizenship for the migrants and their families. When citizenship is global, self-rule is impossible.” It was one of his most revealing posts to date; the main problem, according to Mr. Miller, isn’t the sourcing of cheap labor. It’s the extension of rights to that labor.
Why would Stephen Miller defend Mr. Trump’s machinery of cross-border displacement? Mr. Miller is arguably the most radical anti-immigrant ideologue in U.S. history, but he has also been passionately defending Mr. Trump’s destruction overseas. “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he told Jake Tapper of CNN in January.
As I documented in “Hatemonger,” my 2020 biography of Mr. Miller, he has long worked to strangle legal pathways into this country for nonwhite people. He is one of the main reasons federal agents are rounding up people of color with no criminal records, and it is his aggressive enforcement strategy that has led to anti-ICE protesters being shot in the streets. He is a longtime ally of Mr. Krikorian’s center, which influenced his views. For years, he has argued that mass migration hurts American workers, while benefiting corporate elites. Now his boss is embracing a foreign policy that is the fondest wish of those elites.
The administration’s war on immigrants is a Trojan horse for the eradication of equal protection under the law to create a permanent caste of laborers without rights .
Both Democratic and Republican leaders have pursued transnational oligarchy at the expense of immigrants and working-class Americans; it is not a one-sided evil. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller have mastered it in one of the most perverse acts of political gaslighting, convincing working-class Americans to see them as the opposite of what they are.
“Mass migration is a wealth (and political power) transfer from the American working class to migrants and to corporations,” Mr. Miller said in a post on X last year, conflating immigrant rights and corporate profits, as he often does, when in fact the inverse is true: corporations increase profits by offering low wages. It’s the war on immigrant rights, which Mr. Miller has pursued with zeal, that harms working-class Americans and entrenches inequality.
When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was organizing his Poor People’s Campaign and fighting for an economic bill of rights, which sought to amend the Constitution to establish a natural human right to be free from poverty and involuntary servitude. He wrote that it would help poor whites, whom he called “derivative” victims of slavery. “As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the Black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth,” he wrote. “It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market.”
Now, the subjugation of immigrants has taken the place of slavery in depressing the base of the labor market. Mr. Miller wants us to blame immigrants and those who advocate a pathway to citizenship — as if slavery were the fault of the enslaved and abolitionists.
It is time for a political movement that rebuilds economic dignity across borders — one that unites the white worker in Appalachia and the Indigenous land defender in Honduras, and exposes the war on immigrants for what it is: a war on labor here and across the world.
Jean Guerrero is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda” and “Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir,” which won a PEN Literary Award. She is a senior journalism fellow at the U.C.L.A. Latina Futures 2050 Lab.
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