America, like their flagship Boeing 737-MAX, has two engines of growth. As a colony, America requires constant immigration to suck in labor, ie colonization. As an empire, they require global immiseration to suck in labor and resources, ie imperialism. America's two engines of growth are colonization and imperialism, but now it's sucking bald eagles into both and going down in flames.

Colonization

As much shit as Americans talk about immigration, they're still a colony founded on the concept. ‘A nation of immigrants,’ as politicians used to proudly say. Ye olde colonization was driven by Europeans fucking up their own countries and labor fleeing, and modern colonization is driven by them fucking up ours and the same sort of fleedom. Things always have to be bad over ‘there’ to drive people over ‘here’, that's the entire energy gradient of colonization. Colonization is a global battery which requires negative and positive poles for power and energy to flow correctly (up and to the right).

Remember that America is still stolen and unceded land and immigrant is just the new word for colonist. Indic people like me are just among the latest people taking ‘Indian’ land, turning Christopher Columbus's ignorance into reality. Immigrants are just the latest people colonizing America, that's all this is. The idea that immigration is neutral or a favor to the migrant is part of the erasure of any history beyond colonization, which continues the ongoing genocide of Native Americans and the erasure of that even happening or mattering. Immigrants, like colonists, are complicit in this historical process, albeit quite ignorantly.

As part of the tyranny of names, calling modern colonists ‘immigrants’ is a liberal hand-washing of all this but, historically speaking, 300 years is not enough to wash the blood off. As Lady Macbeth said, “Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes [re:oil] of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” It is what it was, if you zoom out a little. Immigrants are just the latest labor colonizing America, which is an ongoing process. If we understand that America is in a process of ongoing colonization we can see things as they are, infinitely awful. Colonies require colonists, most of them indentured servants and slaves. America keeps recreating these basic categories with different branding but it is—as my historical thesis goes—same shit, different day.

Indentured Servants/Legal Immigrants

Legal immigrants are the modern indentured servants, usually bound to a corporation to reach their destination. These immigrants still have to work off their foreignness to become American and get full rights. Remember that ‘legal immigration’ wasn't a concept for most of American history, (European) colonists just showed up unless they couldn't pay the passage, in which case they worked it off through indentured servitude. Now passage is cheaper, but the same indenturing process is replicated through the ‘immigration system.’ Remember that ICE only started in 2003, for example.

Thus the new indentured servants are legal immigrants. They have some rights, but those rights are usually tied to work, and they have to work their second-classness off for roughly the same period as the old days. Ye olde indentured servitude was about seven years, and today you have to hold a Green Card (second-class citizenship) for five years, plus wait 8–14 months for a decision. So, weirdly enough, about seven years, if you're lucky. I repeat myself because history does, same shit, different day.

Once you get in you can bring your family through another category, like ye olde unindentured servant that made it and could afford to pay passage. As you can see, the same system is replicated through laws as was once regulated through poverty alone. The rule of colonization for the vast majority of colonists is that you've got to sing for your supper, ie be part of an exploitable class of labor, albeit with more rights than the next category, who are basically just slaves.

Illegal Immigrants/Slaves

Via David Galenson (1995), “Abbot Emerson Smith, estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies between the Puritan migration of the 1630s and the Revolution came under indenture.” What they elide here is that Black ‘immigrants’ came as slaves and remained as chattel for generations. This category still remains enslaved under the 13th Amendment, with Black people disproportionately imprisoned and used for slave labor (like many of the firefighters in California). America requires slavery for its most essential labor and since you can't just do that anymore, they categorize native Central and South Americans as ‘illegal’ and use them accordingly.

American politics makes a big show of how they can't support all these illegal immigrants, but illegal immigrants support them. These people pick their food, butcher their meat, build their homes, tend their gardens, clean up after them, and care for their elders and children. Just like slaves did, and also in an exploitable, extra-legal condition. You can broadly do whatever you want with an 'illegal' and deport them afterwards, just as you could with a slave (and sell them). America has always needed a class of completely exploitable labor, and illegal immigrants are just the latest marketing phrase for the same dirty business model.

American politics is full of this sort of posturing, rejecting the things they're violently demanding. Illegal immigration, drugs, fentanyl, whatever it is that they're sucking up, American elites (ie, corporations) blame other countries for it, while the suckers in the American lower-class fall for it. They attack the slaves and not the masters, as intended. This is not new, in the Roman Empire elites would send peasants to die in wars of conquest and then take over their fields with the captured slaves. The peasants could let off steam by spitting or beating on the slaves, but the play remains the same. The only difference is that rather than overt conquest abroad, America just spreads chaos (especially through the Americas) and the slaves walk themselves in. It's the perfect crime, hidden by a veil of historical ignorance and class unconsciousness.

Energy

It's important to understand that this net flow of humans into the colony is a net flow of energy, as much as oil into an engine. Immigration is a battery with a negative pole ‘there’ and a positive pole ‘here,’ driving physical energy into America. If you go back a bit more historically (via Vaclav Smil, for example) you can see that, for the vast majority of human history, ‘the sweat of our brow’ (and ass) was the only energy source (besides fire). Fire always needed a person to tend, and still does. As Smil said, “Most people in preindustrial societies had to spend their lives as peasants, laboring in ways that in some societies remained largely unchanged for millennia. But the inconsistent food surpluses that they produced with the aid of a few simple tools and the exertion of their muscles and the draft of their animals sufficed to support the unevenly advancing complexity of urban societies.”

Even today, human energy has to be applied to any industrial machine in order to make it work. All industrial machinery must be lubricated with the blood of labor, to channel Marx. Capitalists maximize profit by squeezing the most labor out of workers and pocketing the surplus as profit. Out of citizen labor you can squeeze a little, out of indentured labor/immigrants you can squeeze a lot, and out of slaves/illegal immigrants you can squeeze everything above a subsistence level, or just work them to death if you want (though that would be a capital loss). Remember that America is fundamentally a business run by corporations and that everything else is just marketing. At founding only property owners could vote, and this is still how it works. The cruelty and disrespect towards migrants is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to squeeze the most surplus value out.

America is a colonization engine, by default, and colonists are its primordial energy source. This is all immigrants are, and by at least trying to discourage and cut immigration, Trump is throwing a patriotic bald eagle into the main engine of American growth. I use this metaphor because 737 MAXes actually (don't) work like this. In 2023, a MAX ingested a bald eagle and their shitty design gassed the pilots and almost killed everyone. But neither abomination plane nor abominable nation can survive two bird strikes of this sort, which is what they're going through under Trump (mashallah). We'll discuss the second flaming engine next time, imperialism. I'm tired of writing this and the kids have a concert.