U.S.history has been one of waves of migration . From the early colonial immigrants who largely came from England and Germany, to the forced migration of Africans to work in plantations, to the later waves of European immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Jewish populations from Central Europe, to the use of Chinese labor to build much of the U.S. rail system,immigration has defined U.S. demography. (This immigration often occured at the expense of native populations, who suffered the destruction of their culture and mass murder at the hands of European immigrants.) Since the heydays of "robber baron" capitalism in the 1880s, national immigration policy has in part been set by industrial owners, who use the cheap labor provided by recent immigrants to keep their own costs down and profit margins high. The strategy of pitting impoverished recent immigrants, who are in the early stages of struggling to survive in a new country, against less impoverished, less recent immigrants, who are often struggling to secure gains through trade unions, has been anincredibly successful divide and rule strategy for much of U.S. history .

In 2008, immigration is again a contested issue. Partly as aresult of the North American Free Trade Agreement (see section below on trade), since 1994 there has been an influx of undocumented migrants coming to the U.S.Most commentators/opinion-makers fall into one of two camps on the issue. The first camp believes that, though "these people" do not necessarily have a legal right to be in the U.S., they are here now. Further more many of them are productive contributors to the U.S. economy, doing low wage jobs that would otherwise not be done. The second camp agrees that "these people" have no right to be here, and would like to see many of them repatriated to their countries of origin ("deported"). A compromise position that has come up is that many immigrants would be allowed to stay in the United States - and even allowed a "path to citizenship" - after certain punitive measures have been enforced (fines,etc.)

All of these positions fail to consider two basic realities.The first, as alluded to earlier, is that U.S. foreign policy is largely the reason that so many migrants are coming to the United States in the first place. Examples of this are NAFTA and related trade agreements, but also U.S. backed wars in Central America in the 1980s. The second reality that is ignored by these points of view is that immigration has been playing a useful role from the point of view of industrial owners. The last ten years have not only seen a huge boom in undocumented immigration, they have also seen the slowest growth in trade union membership since World War II, as well as record profits set every sector of theU.S. economy. The relation between these statistics should be clear, but is rarely mentioned.