Immigration and the Business of Second-Class Citizenship

The United States is a nation shaped by migration, yet immigration—whether forced or voluntary—has long polarized public life. Again and again, racial hierarchies have relegated many non-white newcomers to second-class status: from chattel slavery and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the inspection and detention regimes at Ellis and Angel Islands.¹ Crucially, this stratification has never been merely social; it has been profitable. By constructing and policing a tier of “lesser” workers, corporations have extracted cheap, coercible labor in industries from agriculture and railroads to contemporary logistics and service work. Nowadays, security and detention enterprises monetize exclusion itself—from the militarized U.S.–Mexico border to today’s sprawling network of immigrant detention centers. In short, corporate America has repeatedly turned second-class citizenship into a business model—one that thrives when fear is high, labor is precarious, and rights are unevenly distributed.²

Capitalism and Civic Republicanism

To see how this persists, it helps to situate immigration within two competing traditions that shape American political economy: capitalism and civic republicanism. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production in a country are privately owned and firms organize for profit. In its classical, laissez-faire form it limits government intervention; however, in practice the U.S. utilizes a mixed approach with many public programs and regulations. Advocates of capitalism highlight its potential for efficiency and innovation, while critics point to its tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and weaken worker bargaining power. Civic republicanism is a political philosophy that aims to achieve political freedom through active virtuous citizenship and robust well-designed institutions. In the United States, this is seen through the right to vote and the separation of powers into three branches: the Legislative, Judiciary and Executive. The ideology depends on the continuous cooperation and participation of citizens, and through active engagement citizens can hold the government accountable. Moreover, civic republicanism argues that all citizens have a shared set of interests that should take precedence over narrow self-interest in public life.

In his book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times McChesney argues that capitalism’s drive towards monopoly and concentration of wealth subverts the principles of civic republicanism. As capitalism places undue emphasis on the individual, the “free market,” encourages self-interest over shared interest. In turn, it fosters a system of monopolistic corporations where economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of the few. Massive economic inequality created by the system meaning that wealthy individuals have massive social, economic and political advantages, making political equality impossible. As the interests of the public constantly clash with that of the powerful corporate class, we have a “citizenless democracy” where all decisions are made to benefit the elite. In this context, the distance between the ideals of civic republicanism and the realities of capitalist power is not aberrant; it is structural.

The Politics of the Friend-Enemy Distinction

Immigration politics intensifies this contradiction. As argued by Michael Sandel in his Populism, liberalism, and democracy paper, many politicians convert economic insecurity—stagnant wages, volatile housing, regional decline—into a populist narrative positioning “the people” against a “corrupt elite.” They exploit uncertainty about economic, social, and cultural livelihoods of U.S. citizens shifting blame for the fallout of late capitalism onto immigrants. This creates a friend-enemy distinction which works to unify U.S. citizens against an alien invasion. Most famously articulated by the Nazi German political theorist Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction groups people into “friends” and “enemies” where the enemy is viewed as a subhuman existential threat to the collective identity of a group.³ This decision to identify a public enemy creates a unified political people, which justifies extraordinary measures in the name of security: the expansion of border policing, bureaucratic exclusion, and the suspension of rights for those labeled “illegal.” Rather than confronting asymmetries of corporate power or rebuilding public capacity, the state hardens its carceral border apparatus. Exclusion becomes policy; policy becomes profit. Private contractors, surveillance vendors, detention operators, and temp-labor intermediaries derive revenue from the management of a manufactured second-class.

Counter-Publics and the Work of Freedom

Yet the story is not only about capture; it is also about counter-publics that push institutions back toward civic republican ideals. Freedom for Immigrants (FFI), a California-based nonprofit committed to ending immigrant incarceration, exemplifies this civic work. FFI documents and maps detention sites, monitors conditions, and amplifies the voices of people in detention through hotline, visitation, and storytelling programs.⁴ It produces media that challenges state-sponsored narratives, connects families with legal and material aid, and coordinates campaigns to close facilities and curb abusive contracts. In doing so, FFI performs democratic functions that concentrated markets and captured agencies neglect: public oversight, rights education, solidarity, and agenda-setting from below. Organizations like FFI do not merely “help” immigrants; they widen the sphere of who counts as a rights-bearing member of the polity, making civic republicanism real rather than rhetorical.

A Choice as Old as the Republic

The United States faces a choice that is as old as the republic itself: whether to align its practices with its civic ideals or to let market imperatives dictate who is granted dignity and belonging. The history recounted here reveals that immigration has never been only about migration flows or labor needs. It is a flashpoint where capitalism’s logic of extraction collides with civic republicanism’s promise of political equality. When corporations profit from exclusion and the state deploys friend-enemy distinctions to consolidate power, second-class citizenship becomes systemic—not a failure of democracy but a feature of an economy structured on hierarchy and precarity.

Yet movements like Freedom for Immigrants remind us that institutions are not fixed; they are contested. By demanding transparency, amplifying marginalized voices, and refusing the dehumanization baked into detention regimes, such organizations reclaim the civic republican tradition from below. They insist that democracy cannot coexist with a permanent underclass and that political community must be built through inclusion rather than exclusion. The question, then, is not whether the tension between capitalism and civic republicanism can be resolved, but whether enough citizens will join the work of bending institutions toward justice. In that struggle lies the difference between a democracy that exists in name only and one that delivers freedom in practice.