Or: Shouldn’t immigration be good for capital?
I know they’d prefer for migrants to stay somewhere where their labor time is cheaper to make better use of unequal exchange, but how is it better to spend so many resources on turning away refugees and immigrants that are desperate to work for cheap, than to simply let them get exploited? What are the forces at play that make capitalists invest in border security so much? Is it simply to keep an implicit threat on the existing undocumented immigrant population to make them more precarious and more exploitable?
It’s neocolonial in nature. So-called border security and immigration enforcement are what enable migrant superexploitation and the extraction of superprofits by creating a special underclass of underdeveloped workers that have few legal rights or protections, as well as trapping them outside of any potential labor movement within the US that could join with them in a larger labor struggle.