America is a nation of immigrants (re:settlers) and requires constant immigration or it becomes deeply unsettled. America requires some sort of slave/indentured class to generate surplus profits, and it has to demonize those people to exploit them properly. This is the simple logic of a whip cracking on the back of a slave, with the sound reverberating through the body politic.

America will never 'solve' its made-up immigration problem because that would be an actual problem. If they were to legalize such labor, they'd have to pay more, but if they were to actually eliminate it, they wouldn't have it. So they maintain this charade of both using and abusing migrants to maximize the rate of profit, while keeping the 'legal' population distracted with the only people worse off than them. This is how American capitalists get away with the #1 crime in America (wage theft), while piously blaming it on thoughtcrime (racism) among the podunk proletariat. It's the perfect crime, really. Pit the poor against each other and profit.

Energy Economics

Understanding America from within American thought is like understanding a drunk by drinking, so let's zoom out a bit (re: a lot). People forget that labor itself is an energy source (read Vaclav Smil) and that wealth is just stored/stolen energy of others (read Marx). Let's go into these axioms otherwise we're missing the plot entirely.

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization: A History looks widely and objectively at energy, and he makes no partciular distinction between calories and carbon. As Smil illustrates, for the vast majority of human history, the prime mover was human energy, the sweat of our brow. Even today, even to operate energy slaves like oil and gas, there has to be a human somewhere in the process. It's not that labor creates value, but labor is the only way value can be captured by the social organism. Labor is the mouth of the social animal called capital, it cannot digest nature otherwise. As Karl Marx said,

When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e. he can only change the form of the materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.

We are all, including Marxists, motherfuckers, so we'll ignore that unpayable debt (for now). The only way the any civilization can consume the earth is through human labor, so that's all that's accounted for even under heterodox economics. As Marx said quite beautifully, “Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of the functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the process, they are indeed consumed.”

Analyzing just the human side of the equation (and finding that the capitalists were getting away with literal daylight robbery) Marx divided the working man's working day into two parts, one of necessary labor to 'pay' himself and another part 'earning' for his owner.

I call the portion of the working day during which this reproduction takes place necessary labour-time, and the labour expended during that time necessary labour; necessary for the worker, because independent of the particular social form of his labour; necessary for capital and the capitalist world, because the continued existence of the worker is the basis of that world.

During the second period of the labour process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the worker does indeed expend labour-power, he does work, but his labour is no longer necessary labour, and he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing. This part of the working day I call surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time I give the name of surplus labour.

I won't go into it too much (you should just read Capital), but this is broadly agreed upon by any capitalist. You hire someone to make more money than you get from paying them, duh. In the past, this capture of labor was more obvious as kings captured corvée labor to build stuff, or debtors took your wife and children as slaves for payment. But it's still the same phenomenon in modern times, with more rhetorical flourishes. As Marx said, what differs is how labor is extorted, but the extortion is constant.

Energy History

Uncle Karl said, “What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour – is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.” Again, read Capital for detail, but for our purposes it suffices to say that such distinctions are bullshit.

Understanding that labor is energy, indeed, the father energy required to unlock all other energy sources, you can get a better understanding of immigration. Immigration is a net flow of energy into a country. This was well understood in ancient times and is well obscured in the modern. In ancient China, for example, it was understood that a good king attracted subjects and a bad king repelled them. As whoever wrote the footnotes to Confucius' Analects wrote,

Having a large population was desirable at this period of Chinese history, when China was relatively under-populated and the main source of state wealth and strength were taxes on peasant agricultural production and levying of peasant armies. Peasant populations were also mobile (they were not tied to the land like serfs in medieval Europe), and thus the common people could essentially “vote with their feet”—leaving states that were poorly governed and taking up residence in well-governed states. The ability to attract a large peasant population was thus an important sign of good rulership (13.4, 13.6).

In Sri Lanka, also, the quality of ancient kingship was measured the same way. The measure of ancient kings was A) did they build stupas/support Buddhism and B) did they built irrigation works. The population literally lived and died these metrics, covering afterlife and life, respectively. The metaphysical deal across primordial politics was that rulers provided solar and water energy (through religion and irrigation) and the peasants did the labor to unlock it. Ancient grain-based economies were not complicated equations. The peasants made grain and the grain fed peasants (and livestock, same thing), that was the only way you got growth. You could scribble the entire economy as

(sun + water) X energy = calories

The calories were then stored (as grain) or reinvested as labor-intensive agricultural or religious works. Measuring calories is still basically impossible, so wealth was measured directly by how much grain you had and indirectly by the mining rate of silver and gold (like proto-crypto lol). How much useless mining you did indirectly showed how much surplus energy you had. And gold is also shiny, so shiny. We are just apes after all.

The truth is that we're just jumped up apes and—like the Monkey King jumping from the Buddha's palm—we haven't jumped very far. In Wolfgang Dittus's studies of toque macaques (monkeys) in Polonnaruwa (Sri Lanka), he shows how populations are broadly limited by food (ie, energy) supply. Any Sri Lankan can see this by looking out the window and seeing the stray dog populations that live off our excess energy (ie, rice that we leave out, Sri Lankan dogs are basically Buddhist). This is the law for any organism, and the giant social organism we call society doesn't break it, just bends it to the earth's breaking point. When we started storing solar energy as grain and burning even denser energy like fossil fuels, this changed the quantity of energy available, but not the equation. We are still multiplying natural resources by energy (human or otherwise), of which the surplus can be captured and stored as profit. This is all a fraud against the environment, but that's another story.

The Immigration 'Problem'

With this context, we can return to the American immigration problem, which isn't even original.

America is built on slave labor and still operates by slavery under other names. America never fully outlawed slavery and prisoners (who, America, not coincidentally, has the largest population of) are still slaves. America also has an entire outlaw class of immigrants called 'illegal' immigrants which are entirely exploitable (also not coincidentally). Early America also functioned based on indentured servitude (working for your freedom over say 7 years) which has now become indebted servitude. Americans pay off student loans, credit card loans, home loans, and medical loans their entire lives. The current system makes indentured servitude look good, you often got out in less time than a higher education takes. Today the average American household debt is $100,000 and they never get out from under it. The land of my free my ass. It's always been the land of slavery, just in different permutations.

Thus to understand America, one can look at the slave empire they're most directly modelled after, the Roman Empire. And, indeed, Rome had the same tension between slave and peasant labor. As Cornell and Mathews said in The Roman World:

Peasant families were driven out in large numbers by rich investors and were replaced on the land by slave labor. Slaves were in plentiful supply thanks to military victories and the resulting mass enslavement of defeated populations; they could be organized in gangs to provide the necessary labor for large-scale agricultural enterprises, they were relatively cheap and had the additional advantage of being exempt from conscription. Thus the development of the latifundia was facilitated by the influx of wealth and slaves, the products of victories which had been won by the efforts and sacrifice of Italian peasants who served in the army. As Keith Hopkins puts it, “Roman peasant soldiers were fighting for their own displacement.”

In the same way today, America—once a nation of small farms and cottage industries—is now a land of mega-farms and mega-corporations highly dependent on slave labor in the form of 'illegal' human beings, as in prisoners and migrants. These slaves remain in plentiful supply since America is constantly destabilizing South America, to make the slaves march themselves north. This leads to the same tension between American peasantry and the land-holding class. Any debt-slave soldier in the American army is effectively fighting for their own displacement, only the American Empire does this by losing every war rather than winning. For them chaos is a ladder, full of desperate migrants clambering 'up' to America.

This is not a problem. This is the system working as intended. Even the incoherent objections of citizens are exploited to drive wages down even further. As an American Marie Antoinette would say, let them eat hate. Remember that citizens have no real power in America. America was founded on the rights of property owners, and so it remains. Marx described capitalists as merely “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will,” and said, “Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them.” American property owners are just stand-ins for the Corporate AI that rules actually the place, but that's another another story yet again.

This invisible hand which visibly rules America does not actually see color or very much care. Darkness is really a measure of how much solar energy someone's homeland has, and how much surplus energy could be drained out them (via slavery or colonization). Humans are just another energy source to the greed Europeans incarnated as corporations and gave continents to munch on. The Corporate AI running the place will exploit anybody (and everybody, eventually), just at different rates. Immigration is not a problem for America, it is a solution for the only problem the machine cares about, which is making money.

So remember that America has always relied on slave/indentured labor and still does. That modern slaves are 'illegals' and prisoners and modern indentured servants are 'legal' migrants or student debtors. People literally outside the law (as illegal or incarcerated) are still picking food and picking up after colonizers, and debt slavery has been extended from 7 years to entire lifetimes. Why does America economically demand immigrant labor and then politically reject it? If you do some napkin math this contradiction is not, in fact, a contradiction at all. It's a calculation. Maximize the amount of immigration to provide labor, then maximize the hate against them, to keep the labor as close to slave as possible.