Karl Marx had very little to say on immigration. His only substantive contribution on the immigration issue of his day was to state the obvious viz. that the import of low-paid Irish immigrants to England in the nineteenth century forced them into hostile competition with English workers, driving down English wages (David L. Wilson, “Marx on Immigration,” Monthly Review, Feb 2017). That is it, so elementary was the issue to Marx. Marx would have torn bleeding strips off any leftist then, or now, who would invoke an abstract moralism about welcoming all immigrants whilst ignoring the reality that mass immigration from poor to richer countries benefits only the rich country’s capitalist class through depressed wages of the working class.
In the face of the contemporary left’s moralistic embrace of mass immigration under the current quasi-religious rubric of ‘Diversity’, however, it is necessary to drill down further and explain in a little more detail the economic dynamic that Marx took as read.
The central dynamic of capitalism is economic growth i.e. the quest for more profits through: the expansion of production (the making and selling of more goods or services), securing bigger markets (reaching bigger groups of consumers domestically or internationally), and increasing the rate of exploitation of workers (primarily through the lowering of costs, especially wages).
The capitalist economics of growth spurs globalisation through turning the world into one gigantic free market without any nation-state barriers to the minimisation of labour and other costs so that profits can be maximised. The capitalist globalisation imperative was long ago identified by Marx, and, post-Marx (expecially since the 1970s), globalisation has been accompanied by neo-liberalism which has accelerated the inherent capitalist growth dynamic through privatisation, government deregulation, removal of trade protectionism, abandonment of government control over key monetary policies such as interest rates and exchange rates, etc.
The ‘free movement’ of capital, goods and services are three of the core economic elements of capitalist globalisation but a fourth indispensable element is the ‘free movement’ of people through eliminating national barriers on the movement of labour in the quest by corporations for the lowest-waged and least-unionised workforce. This ‘fourth freedom’ of global capitalism – free movement of people (meaning the free movement of cheap labour) - serves the interests of only the capitalist class through the direct means of opening up their access to a global supply pool of the cheapest, least organised workers.
An ‘open-borders’ world allows corporations to relocate abroad to where labour is cheaper or to import a low-wage workforce. The result is fewer jobs in developed countries or downward pressure on wages for those jobs that remain. Working class living standards in the developed world suffer as a result through an increase in unemployment or declining or stagnant real wages.
The 2016 US Democrat Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, exposed the integrated nature of all four core elements of capitalist globalisation in her meant-to-be-private 2013 comment to Latin American bankers (revealed in a hacked email during the election campaign) that her dream is of a hemisphere-wide “common market with open trade and open borders” to “promote economic opportunity in the US” (a euphemism for boosting US capitalist growth).