Divide and Control: The Discriminatory Origins and Enduring Legacy of U.S. Immigration Law

U.S. immigration law has never been a neutral tool for managing borders. From the outset, it has protected wealth and power, using fear of “the other,” to justify discriminatory policies. By framing immigrants as threats, elites have long capitalized on dividing working-class people, along racial, religious, and ethnic lines, to maintain control and suppress challenges to the status quo.

When poor whites, Black laborers, and immigrant workers are pitted against one another, they lose sight of the real beneficiaries: landowners, corporations, and political elites. This “divide and conquer” tactic disrupts worker solidarity, guarantees a cheap labor pool, and keeps economic and political power with those at the top. Public anger is redirected toward marginalized groups rather than the structural inequalities that create hardship in the first place.

This is an old playbook. We have seen this play out repeatedly, starting as far back as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676; sowing the seeds of racial discrimination in the first immigration law (the Naturalization Act of 1790 which granted U.S. citizenship to free white person), again evident in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and again codified in the 1924 Immigration Act with its racial quotas. It continued with the deportation of Mexican farmworkers during the Great Depression and the creation of modern-day immigrant detention centers. The supposed threats change from Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Muslims, to “undocumented,” but the underlying logic remains –stoke fear, blame the outsider, and protect elite interests.

Bacon’s Rebellion clearly shows the power of worker unity—and how quickly elites suppressed it. In 1676, poor white indentured servants and Black enslaved workers joined forces against Virginia’s wealthy planters. Threatened, the elites offered poor white workers small perks, like the right to own marginal land, while relegating Black laborers to hereditary slavery. This calculated racial wedge broke a potentially powerful alliance, establishing a pattern of dividing workers along racial lines to neutralize collective action.

This tactic of racial division was so successful that it would be repeated over and over in U.S. history. Fast forward to the 1800s. Chinese immigrants arrived to fill labor shortages, particularly on the Transcontinental Railroad. They earned far less than white workers, but instead of confronting employers who set low wages, white workers were encouraged to blame Chinese laborers. Politicians played up fears of a “Chinese menace” taking jobs and undermining “American culture.” This climate paved the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first federal law to exclude an entire ethnic group. Chinese immigrants already in the U.S. had to carry residency certificates or risk deportation, and they were barred from citizenship. Employers, meanwhile, benefited from keeping Chinese workers vulnerable and exploitable, as white laborers were led to believe they had been “protected.”

By the early 1900s, elites shifted their focus to Southern and Eastern Europeans. Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were denounced as racially inferior or criminal. The Immigration Act of 1924—shaped by eugenics theories—created strict national origin quotas favoring Northern and Western Europeans. Numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans were drastically reduced, and Asian immigrants were banned altogether. Again, labeling these newcomers as dangerous or subversive served to justify low wages, as corporations controlled labor flows in much the same way they had when excluding Chinese workers decades before.

During the Great Depression, as jobs became scarce, Mexican and Mexican-American workers became the scapegoat. From 1929 to 1936, over a million people of Mexican descent, many of them U.S. citizens, were deported. Though politicians claimed these expulsions would open jobs for Americans, wages remained low because employers refused to increase pay. Removing Mexican laborers also bred fear among those who stayed, deterring demands for better working conditions. The same elite interests continued to profit, while the public was misled into believing that deportations were about protecting jobs.

When labor shortages returned, the government changed course. The Bracero Program (1942–1964) recruited Mexican farmworkers as temporary “guest workers,” offering no pathway to citizenship. Like Chinese laborers, braceros risked deportation if they spoke out against unfair treatment. Corporations gained from cheap, disposable labor, ensuring low wages and discouraging collective organizing. The cycle of recruitment, exploitation, and scapegoating persisted under different names and with different groups.

In the 1990s and 2000s, deporting undocumented workers was again sold as a way to protect American jobs. Immigration raids in meatpacking plants briefly created labor shortages. Rather than raising wages, employers turned to automation or legal immigrant labor under restrictive visas. Industries like construction and farming also rely on undocumented or temporary workers to avoid raising pay.

In the modern era, private corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group run immigrant detention centers for profit, charging the federal government per detainee. To keep profits flowing, these companies lobby for tougher immigration laws and heightened enforcement. Politicians promote anti-immigrant rhetoric about “invasions” or “border crises,” fueling public support for crackdowns that funnel more detainees into for-profit centers. Meanwhile, immigrants are cast as criminals, although the real winners are the corporations collecting daily fees.

Fast forward to 2024, and Trump administration’s proposals and actions echo historic strategies. They blame immigrants for economic decline, promising mass deportations and an end to birthright citizenship. Such measures inevitably expand governmental surveillance, policing, and detention powers. Ending birthright citizenship forces everyone to prove their legitimacy, handing the state unprecedented authority over individuals’ lives. None of these policies truly addresses economic inequality; they merely channel discontent toward already vulnerable communities.

By painting immigrants as the cause of economic woes, these approaches divert attention from corporate power and wealth concentration—the true roots of systemic inequality. Dividing people along racial or ethnic lines ensures that workers remain fragmented, never uniting to challenge the structures that drive low wages and insecure jobs. This deflection has worked for centuries: demonize the “outsider,” promise job security, and obscure the ongoing exploitation by corporate and political elites.

Despite this long history, there is hope if individuals look past scapegoating and see how policies are designed to preserve power for the few, they can begin to form meaningful alliances. Genuine solutions to inequality—like fair wages, worker protections, and corporate accountability—require broad solidarity, not more policing of the vulnerable.

Confronting these divisive tactics involves acknowledging that immigration policies are frequently motivated by profit and power, not by genuine national interest. Rather than accepting propaganda that immigrants undercut wages, the public would do well to focus on who sets those wages, who benefits from mass detention, and how discriminatory laws keep the working class splintered. Recognizing the common interests of all workers—native-born, immigrant, documented, or undocumented—is a prerequisite to dismantling exploitation. Only by challenging the economic and political forces that orchestrate this scapegoating can we hope to build a society where no group is criminalized for the benefit of the few.