By RIO NERO
During the 2024 election cycle, immigrants and transgender people became the primary targets of a scapegoat campaign that was launched by the Republican Party and deepened by the Democrats, which now has borne fruit in the form of a slew of executive actions. As of March 26, both transgender people and immigrants had endured attacks from above in the form of 101 2 executive actions respectively, intending to force transgender people out of public life and to lay the groundwork for mass deportations of immigrants.
Transgender people in the U.S. are facing the rollback of discrimination protections, the loss of funding for federal health programs oriented towards trans people, exclusion from athletics programs and public restrooms in federal and educational facilities, and specific attacks on trans youth—including the prohibition of educational material on gender and sexuality in schools up to the college level—a ban on gender affirming care for trans youth, and, through the slogan “parental rights,” a policy of outing trans youth to their parents 3, which would force millions of trans youth into potentially dangerous situations.
Immigrants in the U.S. are experiencing a new proliferation of harassment, intimidation, and kidnapping by ICE agents, while the Trump administration is currently enacting plans to expand detention facilities, including the recently passed Laken Riley Act, a $26.9 billion plan to ramp up capacity at immigrant detention centers. The government of Mexico anticipated the fallout from this plan of mass deportation and is currently setting up shelters for deported migrants in Nogales, Mexico, along the Arizona border.4
While the struggles for transgender and immigrant rights may initially appear disconnected, the two are more acquainted than one might think. The first and most obvious connection is that transgender people and immigrants are not separate groups—according to a January 2024 study by the Williams institute, 13% of all trans people in the U.S. are immigrants. Apart from this, immigrants—especially undocumented immigrants— and transgender people share a similar sense of vulnerability and economic precarity.
On Jan. 20, 2025, the Trump administration passed “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” an executive order that legally erased transgender people from federal documentation. The text of the order is designed to force transgender people’s identification documents, such as passports and driver’s licenses, to correspond to the gender signifier that is on their birth certificate.
The issuing of this executive action wreaked havoc on transgender peoples’ freedom of movement. Passports submitted for renewal were instead confiscated, and in at least one case, returned in a destroyed condition. 5 Individuals who chose the now invalid X gender marker may not be able to use their passport at all.
This experience of un-documentation is a marked overlap with the experience of undocumented immigrants, whose freedom of movement is administratively bound by a lack of government-issued identification documents. Both groups are increasingly ostracized from participation in public and economic life, facing challenges finding employment in an already crushingly competitive job market.6
Over half of immigrants 7 and 82% of transgender people 8 report workplace and employment discrimination, with undocumented immigrants more or less locked out of legal employment, forcing both groups into disproportionate involvement in highly exploitative under-the-table arrangements without legal protection. In their own ways, both groups find themselves toe-to-toe with accepted societal and cultural norms in the U.S, and as a result must rely on small communities of others like themselves in order to share resources and support in a hostile societal environment.
Immigrants and transgender people are both highly marginalized populations that are primarily working class. For the purposes of this article, “working class” refers not to level of income, but to people who must sell their labor, usually in the form of waged labor, to survive. In a capitalist economic system, it pays to keep workers separated into distinct groups that can be pitted against each other. This serves to keep labor costs down for capitalists looking to hire, and the blame for problems endemic to a capitalist system pinned on vulnerable workers, rather than on the capitalist class, which seeks to indefinitely prolong an economic system that primarily serves to generate profit rather than to meet people’s needs.
During the last election cycle, Donald Trump campaigned in part on the slogan “Kamala is for they/them, not you.” 9 This exemplifies the phenomenon of misplaced blame; in this case, Trump points to a transgender “other” and implies that this marginal group bears interests counter to “yours,” whoever you may be, and wields the loyalty of a powerful political edifice—the Democratic Party.
In response, the Democrats evaded the issue of transgender people, mentioning this vulnerable population only to distance their party from support of transgender rights with statements that implicitly fed into anti-trans rhetoric, such as Biden’s statement in summer of 2024 that the Democratic administration “opposes surgery for transgender minors,” 10 evoking the QAnon-adjacent boogieman of forced gender reassignment surgery for children at the behest of “transgender groomers” and so-called “Marxist politicians,” such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The slogan “Kamala is for they/them, not you” is currently regarded as a wildly successful 11 political maneuver that shifted the presidential race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor, and lowered public acceptance of transgender people by 3-4 percentage points. Unfortunately, scapegoating works.
If the Trump campaign had one finger pointed at transgender people, they had the other pointed at immigrants—and so did the Democratic Party. While the Republican Party employed campaign ads that toted racist lines such as “Stop the caravan. Vote Republican,” 12 the Democratic Party competed for an even harsher immigration stance. In a campaign ad simply titled “Tougher,” Harris promises to hire thousands more border patrol agents to crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking, placing the responsibility for these social ills squarely on the backs of immigrants. 13
This bipartisan onslaught against immigrants has resulted in a 14 percentage point increase in the number of U.S. adults who want to see immigration decreased; in 2023, 41% desired a decrease in the immigrant population, and in July 2024, this number had increased to 55%. 14 While rhetoric around drugs and crime certainly appealed to rural and suburban populaces, this predatory attack also fed off of American workers’ concerns about unemployment due to employer’s preference for the cheapest possible labor, which is to be found amongst undocumented immigrants who have no choice but to take on highly exploitative contracts.
Regardless of their immigration status or other demographic particularities, all workers share the same interests in terms of higher wages, low rents, access to health care, more leisure time, and better working conditions, but all of these interests are diametrically opposed to those of capitalists and landlords who make their millions off the backs of working people. High wages would result in smaller profits for the capitalists, who purchase the labor power of workers, and low rents would invariably put a dent in the passive profits of landowners who demand their tithe for shelter. When the living conditions of working people are poor, capitalist political parties keep the common social and economic interests of all workers unrealized by ensuring that workers keep hostility circulating endlessly within their own class. So long as marginalized groups like immigrants and transgender people have to answer for systemic poverty and violence, the capitalist perpetrators of these social problems may thrive undisturbed.
In a broader sense, immigrants and transgender people, alongside cis-gender women, share a common region in the capitalist economic landscape: the reproduction of the labor force. Women, and gender minorities that share the physical capability, literally replenish the labor force by giving birth to future workers. Immigrants expand the labor force by increasing the U.S. population through migration and participation in the U.S. economy, whether that’s through legal employment or the cheapest labor of them all—slavery. The vast majority of people who are victims of sex and labor trafficking are immigrants, contrary to what Democrats and Republicans would have you believe. 15
The relationship of transgender people to reproductive labor is slightly more abstract. The far right imagines that transgender people threaten what they view as the ideal system of social reproduction under capitalism: the nuclear family. Most effective, the right believes, is the once normative setup of two adults, one tasked with economic pursuits and the other tasked with birthing and raising the next generation of workers, business owners, and traditional wives. This sex-deterministic model is ideologically wrapped in a backwards, patriarchal worldview in which embodiment of “God-ordained” gender roles is crucial to living a good, respectable life. On a purely ideological level, transgender people are fundamentally threatening to these sex-deterministic beliefs, because if it is true that the gendered social roles and behaviors that individuals fulfill and enact are not biologically determined, and it is true that gendered biology can be altered, these oppressive, patriarchal gender roles must be of a purely social, and therefore malleable, character. While “God’s Truth” may be immortal, social constructs certainly are not.
The liberal wing of the capitalist class is more than capable of employing meaningless, progressive lip-service towards oppressed groups like transgender people. However, liberal political support will always leave the roots of a given oppression intact, because capitalist class rule relies on subjugation. Patriarchal oppression is both the foundation of transgender oppression and an entrenched element of capitalist society, used to ensure replenishment of the global working class at the lowest cost and to maintain the family legacies of capitalists. For this reason, meaningful political support toward transgender people is nothing short of a political liability to the most liberal of capitalists.
In our current era, which may very well be the dawn of U.S. fascism, the declining neoliberal capitalist wing apparently finds even lip service towards transgender people to be a liability. Meanwhile, the dominating capitalist right is ideologically fixated on “bringing back” the American dream, largely through legally exterminating those it deems degenerates, and transgender people more than fit the bill. The nuclear family is a core tenant of the American dream, after all.However, this sex-deterministic family model, even if it were desirable, is far out of reach for the majority of today’s workers.
The rate of population growth in the U.S. is on the decline. This is related to high costs of living paired with low wages, keeping the vast majority of the youthful population of the U.S. living from paycheck to paycheck, spending vast amounts of their income on rent, and unable to save enough money to buy a permanent home or otherwise plan for the future. The number of 25-34 year olds who own their own home has dropped from 50% to 27% in two generations. 16 This simply is not a conducive economic environment to raising a family.
In the golden age of liberal capitalism, problems of stabilizing the capitalist economy and reproducing the workforce were solved through welfare. Franklin D. Roosevelt is synonymous with the idea of social welfare and reform in the U.S., having championed the “New Deal,” which reinvigorated the depressed American economy by alleviating conditions of poverty among the U.S. working class—conditions that could have otherwise proven to be revolutionary. But welfare is not a profitable venture, and the dismantling of welfare apparatuses in the 1980s has left low-income workers with nowhere to turn to in the present.
Currently, about half of U.S. workers make less than $33,000 per year. Today’s capitalist state answers problems of labor force decline with a far more cost-effective solution: Ban abortions, ban no-fault divorce, force transgender and LGBTQ people into the closet, and keep immigration highly restricted or illegal, ensuring that those immigrants have no rights and are working at little to zero cost to their employers (or prison wardens and labor traffickers). These factors combined are designed to force a struggling working class to reproduce beyond its means.
This situation will not be alleviated without the pressure of a mass movement. We cannot depend on political parties that are happy to paint our respective communities as “groomers” and “invaders” if it means swinging an election in their favor. The Trump administration agrees that immigrants and transgender people have much in common—enough so to run its presidential campaign on our collective backs.
If we are united, our forces will be significantly more capable than they are while we are separate and disorganized. We should connect our communities, build broad collaborative actions, and broaden our base of support and collective power, independently of the capitalist political parties that are incapable of keeping our best interests at heart.
All political struggles are won collectively. The civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the movement for gay rights all were prescient examples of movements that took great strides in securing political rights. It is clear that the victories of past struggles are in no means indefinitely secured, and if we want to keep the victories of struggles past, we ought to take the lessons of the past to heart, fight along the proven lines, and advance the rights and living conditions of our collective community.
