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Anti-immigrant racism leads fascism’s resurgence in the US. Today, amid a capitalist crisis of accumulation, the owners of production are forced to defend and preserve their rule over the working class. These elite owners do so by combining racism and xenophobia with state and vigilante violence, so as to repress and divide rising workers’ movements that challenge the capitalist system. And this is the definition of fascism.
This is not the first time capitalist elites have deployed antimigrant racism to defend their interests. The prototype of fascists allied with big capital was a century ago, with the smashing of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) between 1917 and 1920.
Composed mostly of migrants, the IWW was America’s first significant revolutionary workers movement. Founded in 1905, the movement included many who had immigrated from southern and eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Its estimated 150,000 members—known as “Wobblies”—belonged to over 900 locals in more than 350 cities and towns across many US states (and parts of Canada and Latin America). With these tens of thousands of international workers, the IWW directed relentless class struggle against the capitalist class of their day, known as the “robber barons.” Between 1905 and 1920, the IWW organized more than 400 specific strike actions and free speech fights—including mass strikes like the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike in Massachusetts and the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike in New Jersey—and played a significant role in the 1919 Seattle General Strike. The IWW also agitated against World War I, which they decried as a capitalist war for profit and colonies: organizing strikes, promoting sabotage of war production, and encouraging workers to refuse the draft.
The IWW’s success in mobilizing such large-scale, worker-led militancy led the capitalist state to crush the movement. To do so, the state weaponized immigration policy to exclude and deport immigrant radicals. And it redirected the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) to unleash a nationwide political police force targeting radical immigrant workers for deportation. While the federal government passed the 1918 Immigration Act, 35 states passed some form of antianarchist and antiradical legislation.1 This coordinated effort expanded federal and state power to arrest and deport those identified as anarchists, antiwar activists, and radical labor activists.
All this culminated in 1919, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led the BOI to carry out nationwide crackdowns. Known as the Palmer Raids, this three-month law enforcement surge rounded up 10,000 people, mostly without warrants. Many were beaten and tortured in confinement; ultimately, more than 550 were deported.
Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan was unofficially enabled by the state to enforce anti-immigrant and antiradical violence. These fascist paramilitaries conducted terror operations, whereas immigrant workers conducted strikes and political activity. As an IWW-sympathetic writer observed:
The capitalist class decided to revive and reorganize the Klan for the purpose of fighting the organized toilers and in order to spread fear, violence and hatred among the workers of different nationalities, so that a unified moneyed class might continue to hold the awakened progressive but divided toilers in check. … Should you be recalcitrant against organized capital, then the final lesson concerning 100 per cent Americanism will be imparted by hanging or burning alive.2
The Klan’s terror campaign took a bloody toll. Between 1917 and 1920, 170 Wobblies were lynched or murdered in extrajudicial killings. This terror aligned with state violence: in more than 300 incidents, thousands of IWW members were subjected to arrest, show trials, physical assault, and deportation, among other forms of political violence. The smashing of the IWW was complete.
One hundred years after the launch of the IWW, a similar configuration—of the capitalist class, the state, and activated middle-class fascists—has taken shape. The criminalization, repression, and mass deportation of migrant workers that fully began in 2005 has spawned a new alliance: big capitalists operating through the state against immigrant-led worker movements, partnering with fascist movements.
Resurgent Anti-Immigrant Fascism
From the inception of the US, the founders envisioned a white, capitalist nation-state that would establish its dictatorial rule over not only the continent but also its colonized peoples. The first immigration and citizenship policy, written into the Constitution in 1790, restricted citizenship to only “free and white men of good moral character.” This enabled systematic land dispossession and privatization, forced labor, and genocide. Subsequent immigration policy through the 20th century was developed through a eugenic framework, restricting and excluding “disabled” migrants, racialized and criminalized populations deemed “unassimilable” and “predisposed” to commit crime, and political radicals linked to labor unionism and anticapitalist ideologies.
Yet such “immigration policy” failed to prevent surges in immigrant-led class struggle and anticapitalist radicalism. This is why the capitalist class deployed state- and nonstate violence against working-class movements.
A US-based fascist organization and movement took its initial form in the Ku Klux Klan, especially the second iteration, which reached its greatest extent in size and power in the 1920s. Leaders of the KKK at this time generally belonged to the middle class, comprising local businessmen, members of the clergy, civic leaders, law enforcement officers, and municipal and state government officials. These social forces, aligned with the dominant sections of the capitalist class of the period, were weaponized into a fascist movement for attacking and smashing immigrant-led labor movements.
Then, in 1996, the Democratic and Republican parties collaborated on an anti-immigrant legislative offensive, passing the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Together, these laws ushered in a concerted and state-led criminalization of immigrants. They significantly expanded the range of deportable offenses and funding for Border Patrol agents, greatly increased detention capacity with mandatory detention required for both temporary residents and undocumented people for minor and petty offenses, funded the creation of surveillance and tracking systems for expedited removal procedures, banned reentry of deportees, and initiated the 287(g) program, which allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to delegate authority to state and local law enforcement agencies. These acts also carved all immigrants out of the social welfare system almost entirely.
The new laws centralized imprisonment, punishment, and deportation “as core components of the nation’s immigration system” and spawned a “shadowy network of detention facilities” that grew “into what today is the largest immigration detention system in the world.” Together, these bipartisan acts established the framework for the mass criminalization of immigrants that paved the way for the resurgent fascist movement today.
The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks opened a new and more extreme period of anti-immigrant attacks. In 2003, President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which significantly expanded the state repressive apparatus so as to police immigrants throughout the interior of the country. The Border Patrol was also greatly expanded, and ICE was created as an internal immigrant policing agency tasked with tracking, detaining, and deporting targeted noncitizen groups and communities.
In 2003 ICE began paramilitary operations throughout the country, referred to as National Fugitive Recovery Operations, to track, detain, and deport thousands of targeted Muslims, Arab, and Middle Eastern immigrants. The purview of this mission was later expanded to include all undocumented persons. This established ICE as the primary state repressive force that would be deployed against immigrants, especially against the immigrant-led workers movement that developed in early 2006.
In 2005 the growing far-right and anti-immigrant wing of the Republican Party united behind the passage of the Sensenbrenner-King Bill (HR-4437), officially the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, which would have made being undocumented in the US a felony. Sponsored by one of the richest members of Congress at the time, it would have criminalized providing any assistance to undocumented immigrants. The bill was not designed to remove immigrant workers, who composed 15 percent of the labor force. Rather, the capitalist class intended to criminalize their presence, thus making them less likely to organize or join unions and more vulnerable, isolated, and exploitable.
After the bill passed the House of Representatives, state politicians crafted and passed anti-immigrant legislation across the country. Racist rhetoric and the state repressive action against immigrants energized far right and fascist sentiment. Aligned with this coordinated Republican offensive, white supremacist groups spiraled in number, from 602 in 2000 to 888 by 2007, a 48 percent increase, and to 1,020 during Trump’s first term, a 60 percent increase from 2000.
By 2012, the right-wing Tea Party movement acted to oppose immigration. The anti-immigrant turn in electoral politics catalyzed the merging of far-right and fascist groups into new formations, representing a broad array of different factions that found common cause against immigrants.
Street-level anti-immigrant groups like the National Socialist Movement, the Council of Conservative Citizens (successor to the KKK-aligned Council of White Citizens), the White Revolution, skinhead gangs, and a host of other aligned forces launched their own campaigns in the shadows of the government-led crackdown.
These groups’ more aggressive and violent actions revealed their fascist character. They went into immigrant communities to harass families, day laborers, and others racially profiled as “undocumented immigrants.” Racist violence against Latinos increased by 40 percent just between 2004 and 2007. During Trump’s first year in office in 2017, racist violence against Latinos increased by 24 percent, and it has continued on an upward trajectory, in conjunction with immigrant repression.
Other groups, like the Minutemen Project, carried out armed incursions into southern border towns to engage in “migrant hunts,” a terror tactic adapted from the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. One of these hunts, in 2009, led to the brutal murder of a nine-year-old girl named Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul Flores Jr.
Immigrant Workers Rise Up, and the State Counterattacks
The Sensenbrenner-King Bill also provoked the largest uprising of immigrant workers in US history. Between January and May 2006, over 3 million immigrant workers and their supporters organized strikes, walkouts, boycotts, and other actions in the “Day without an Immigrant” mass movement. This mass protest killed the bill and significantly shifted US politics, as most people nationwide supported immigrant legalization, not criminalization.
Nevertheless, with both political parties embracing an enforcement-only approach, components of the bill have since been implemented. They includes mandatory detention of asylum seekers at the border, prohibition of asylum for certain migrants, and the authorization of use of force against citizens assisting undocumented people.
The state also counterattacked, carrying out nationwide paramilitary workplace raids. Operation Wagon Train was the single largest worksite enforcement action in US history at the time, targeting Swift & Co. meat processing plants in six states. Many immigrant workers at the sites had joined or organized unions and participated in the May Day 2006 action.
ICE invaded other workplaces across the country, arresting and deporting thousands of workers participating in the immigrant-led movement. Like the repression of the IWW a century earlier, this state attack decimated the emerging leadership of the immigrant worker-led class struggle.
At the same time, the Democratic Party capitalized on the mass discontent with the Republican Party. By campaigning for immigrant legalization, the Democrats routed the Republicans in the subsequent elections: taking control of both houses of Congress in 2006, winning the presidency in 2008, and even obtaining an electoral supermajority. Yet rather than fulfill this campaign pledge, Democrats took up the anti-immigration mantle and proceeded to increase funding for ICE, build up the apparatus of immigrant surveillance, and expand detention and the deportation machine. This opened the door to Trump.
Trumpism and Fascist Convergence
As the quintessential US political chameleon and opportunist, 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump latched onto anti-immigrant politics to launch his political career. Since demonizing immigrants as criminals and rapists during his first term, Trump has gone further in promoting violent racist vitriol against immigrants in his second term. Echoing the rhetoric of the Nazi regime, he declared immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The violent rhetoric has been matched by the unleashing of state violence against immigrants and corresponding fascist violence in general, reflecting earlier moments of capitalist crisis and heightened class struggle. Today, again, radicalized white nationalism is being weaponized into fascist movements, with the goal of smashing working-class struggle and left-wing movements that challenge the absolute rule of capital over workers.
Today, again, anti-immigration is a focused rallying point, uniting disparate far-right and fascist groups and movements behind a venal white nationalism with mass appeal to downwardly mobile sections of the middle class. An assortment of groups, ideologues, militias, and street-fighting gangs—such as the 3 percenters, Proud Boys, Vanguard America, Patriot Front, Identity Evropa, and many others—had been organizing and building up capacity. Their 2017 Unite the Right “coming-out party” in Charlottesville, Virginia, marked “a moment when the language of the alt-right changed, from demonstration to street violence,” with anti-immigration as its leading edge.
These radicalized fascists, motivated by Trump’s directives, have contributed to a surge in racist violence against perceived immigrants, targeted suspected immigrants in mass shootings, and infiltrated different enforcement agencies. The reconvergence of big capital, the state, and the fascist movement has accelerated with Trump’s return to power in 2025.
Trump stormed in by declaring a total war on immigrants. He substantially increased the funding and the ranks of agents, making ICE the largest armed enforcement organization in the US, and the 13th most heavily funded militarized force in the world. His regime has politically armed and empowered agents, structuring them into fascist shock troops to occupy US cities through militarized operations against migrants and political opponents, left-wing political groups, and entire civilian populations. ICE’s recruitment strategy has overtly appealed to racists, far-right extremists, and ideological fascists, while the agency is allowed to operate with immunity from prosecution. This has translated into a state-sanctioned spiraling of violence and terror, extrajudicial murders and executions, torture, racial profiling, and the suspension of constitutional protections.
Today’s anti-immigration-activated fascist movement recapitulates elements of the past but is also taking on new forms and dimensions. The scale, organization, and strength of mass resistance movements to Trumpism, ICE, and growing state-aligned fascist movements—such as the anti-ICE popular uprisings in Los Angeles in 2025 and in Minneapolis in January 2026—will determine in the years ahead whether the course of events will increase the balance of power in favor of the fascists—or whether they will be defeated.
This article was commissioned by A. Naomi Paik and Catherine S. Ramírez.