Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, labor unionist, and educator based in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. He is currently a Professor at San Diego City College. Chacón has published three significant books on the US-Mexico border in the past six years. In collaboration with late historian and urban theorist, Mike Davis, his book “No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border” debunks the leading ideas behind the often-violent right-wing attacks on migrants. 

His most recent book, “The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border,” presents a comprehensive argument for transnational working-class solidarity and the need for a grassroots, anti-capitalist movement to abolish borders. Professor Chacón also wrote an extensive and vibrant history of the early 20th-century radical Mexican American working class in the US-Mexico border region. “Radicals in the Barrio” shows how history transcends borders, and how the transnational leftist solidarity of the past can inform our present and our future. 

In the first part of this interview, we discussed the politicization of the US-Mexico border, transnational working-class solidarity, and how history can inspire the kind of radical vision needed to save organized labor in the 21st century. 

Two months have passed since Chacón and I spoke on July 5th, 2024. Much has changed in our current political landscape since sitting President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential election, yet much of what we discussed remains the same. 

JG: First off, a key argument in your book, “The Border Crossed Us”, is that the US-Mexico border is a half-closed border, meaning that capital has the right to cross borders to exploit Mexican labor, but Mexican workers do not have the right to migrate. Could you expand on this notion of a half-closed border and describe the cruelty and violence migrants face at the border in the name of so-called “national security?” 

JAC: Sure. Well, the border as we understand it today is shaped by two things. One is the way in which the two economies have been integrated through the free trade agreements, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the now extended US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).  They’re called free trade agreements, but basically what they do is they restructure the economic integration in a way in which US capitalism over the last three decades has greatly extended its field of operations into Mexico. So much of Mexico’s economy is now directly linked or owned or subsidiary to the US economy. And so that creates a lot of flows — flows of capital, flows of merchandise, commerce, financial linkages — you know, a lot of forms of integration. And the capitalists, those who invest in Mexico, make a lot of profit because they either start production or move production or segment production and take advantage of lower labor costs and [that results in] less oversight in terms of how they operate within the Mexican economy. 

And so, a lot of wealth flows in the form of capital and profit from Mexico to the United States. And it also benefits some segments of the population of Mexico. Historically, Mexico’s capitalist class in different capacities has established linkages with US capital and worked as a kind of junior partner for US capital operations in Mexico and some other segments of the population. But for the most part, this model is predicated on having access to large pools of labor — a large working population that can be paid far less, not just because people accept lower wages, but because the economy has been politically structured to keep wages as low as possible by many decades of de-unionization or dismantling of unions and other mechanisms that have allowed more or less for the collapse of wages from their high point in the 1970s. 

So that’s the functioning of capitalism — transnational capitalism — on the one hand. On the other hand, the economic displacement historically of segments of the population because of the way capital operates to extract profits and not reinvest and essentially not share a larger percentage of the profits earned in the form of higher wages means people migrate. And they migrate to where economic opportunities of employment present themselves. So, we see that this dichotomy of the free movement of capital is then increasingly not extended to the free movement of people. So, when we look at the US-Mexico border right now, we see that over the last three decades it’s been increasingly policed and militarized — the expansion of border walls, surveillance and military technologies and enforcement. And I argue that this is not necessarily to stop migration, but it’s to establish the means by which workers across the border enter into a state in which they don’t have basic rights, they don’t have access to citizenship, and then they face being policed in ways that reinforce their segregation. They’re operating more or less in the shadows of the economy, which are getting bigger and bigger, and then having to face different types of police and state repression, but also political scapegoating. 

So, this is something that this election, I think more than any other, reflects how the criminalization of migration now is a defining feature of how the US political establishment and both political parties are presenting what are the most important things for the US political class, the working class, et cetera. And so, the border, while not stopping migration, has become more dangerous, more deadly. So, we are also seeing the dismantling of almost all legal means for people to cross the border without facing the types of repression that undocumented people face. We see the devolution of immigration enforcement now to the states, especially far right-wing states like Texas and Florida. And we see new scales of violence, whether it’s the segments of the border wall pushing people into deadly terrain where many people die trying to cross. Or like in Texas, where they build makeshift razor wire walls, and do other kinds of cruel and inhumane things to harm people who are trying to cross through parts of the state. 

JG: Building off what you’ve been talking about with the politicization of the border, you wrote that “the radical rhetoric of self-described progressives and social democrats calling for the abolition of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security and the closure of the concentration camps under Trump has since faded into conspicuous silence.” Given the recent presidential election in Mexico and President Biden’s new executive order that effectively shuts down the asylum system for migrants at the border, what do you see as the current political situation at the border and how should working class people change their perception of the border and the politicians on both sides of it that uphold it? 

JAC: Yeah, well there’s a great contradiction because part of the economic integration for capital is that it also occurs for the working classes. For instance, Mexico has a large population of workers who labor in the maquiladoras, which are assembly and production plants — factories essentially — that are concentrated in the border but spread through the country. And many of these workers will build either components or parts that go into finished products that are added to what workers are building on this side of the border. 

If you look across almost every sector, [like] retail — Walmart is the largest retailer in Mexico; Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States. I think Amazon has either surpassed it or is approaching it, but Amazon has also expanded throughout Mexico. And where I live here near the border, San Diego and Tijuana, there is a big new Amazon fulfillment center here in a place called Otay, which is southeastern San Diego County near the border. And a few years ago, they built a massive fulfillment center and then two miles south right across the border they built another one. Basically, workers do the same type of work but on the U.S. side they are paid $18 an hour and on the Mexican side they are paid $1 an hour. Most of the workers on the U.S. side are Mexican workers who cross the border. And so, the work force is linked by doing the same type of work or working for the same employer. The border is used primarily as a way to try to create divides between these workers but the integration of capital and the transnationalization of production — all aspects of the economy — make it so that workers are closer together. So, it’s clear that they have more of a common interest. 

So, we’ve seen some initial efforts by more class conscious workers and those who see people on the other side of the border not as threats to their jobs or livelihood but rather see that we can’t actually uplift our own wages and working conditions and union rights if the other side of the production front line that we’re on can’t do that, or is being used against us by preventing them from being able to improve their condition.  

So, class consciousness has developed in ways in which workers on both sides of the border and some unions are making efforts to figure out how to collaborate and build solidarity across the border so that workers could work together to uplift wages and working conditions and union rights. And like I said, this includes the automotive industry, the maquiladora sector — which feeds a lot of industrial production here — and it extends into logistics, trucking, transportation and things like that. So, there’s a lot of ways in which people are being brought together. 

And so the border —  essentially the border as a zone of differentiation, enforcement and violence —  I think has become a point of more contention for people who see that its function is not to stop migration or drugs or anything for that matter but to merely establish a political basis by which people can be divided against the other side to think that border enforcement is somehow protecting them, their jobs, their lives, their security. I think there has been progress in ways in which people have begun to articulate a critique of that by recognizing that it serves other purposes, and not purposes that are to the benefit of the working class. 

JG: Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, many educators and activists have been quick to point out Israel’s complicity in human rights violations at the U.S.-Mexico border, including chants such as “From Palestine to Mexico, all these walls have got to go.” In what ways are the dehumanization and criminalization of immigrants here in the U.S. connected to the struggle for Palestinian liberation? 

JAC: Well, that’s a good question. Well, I mean, there’s really many entry points to see a comparison between the two. You know, one would be the way in which the expansion of Israel at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people follows a similar model as the way in which U.S. expansion into the Southwest and the maintenance of the enforced border regime as a way of containing and preventing people from moving freely. And so, when Trump was trying to build his border wall last time around, it was quickly pointed out that a number of the bidders, the companies that wanted to build Trump’s wall were Israeli. They had ties to Israeli security companies. And so, in that sense, the United States is a negative innovation of extreme border policing and border enforcement and border violence [which] is the model for Israel. Israel has taken that to a new level, right? Because it extends not just in bordering and policing but also occupying and containing people on a larger scale through occupation.  

But, I see there’s also the intersection between surveillance technologies and how surveillance technologies developed here have been used there and vice versa. And there’s also the intersection of policing where Israeli forces train police, they train border agents. Essentially Israel has established and elaborated such a large scale policing apparatus — checkpoints, borders, surveillance, incarceral systems — that they’ve become a force to now train other countries, including the United States, on how to be more efficient and effective at what amounts to sort of low-intensity conflict police — like a counterinsurgency against a non-insurgent population. And so those are some of the intersections that I would see here. There’s many more. 

JG: Building off that, we are currently living in a heightened moment of transnational working-class solidarity. That being said, we have also seen the rise of a global far-right in the past decade. Your book, Radicals in the Barrio, highlights a key period of transnational working-class solidarity, both here in San Diego and throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region. What can history teach us about how a transnational working-class movement could defeat the rise of fascism? 

JAC: That’s a good question. History is just filled with examples of how racism, nationalism, chauvinism have been the basis for how mainstream political parties, like the Democrats and Republicans, have shaped their fortunes. But on the other side, there’s a rich history of how working-class, international, transnational working-class people and organizations have created alternative approaches to the nationalism, chauvinism, xenophobia by building solidarity and internationalism and organizing along those lines.  

And so, the labor movement in this country, for instance, has many different starting points and points of convergence. What we have today in terms of the AFL-CIO, its politics, are not a reflection of the much richer history of how more radical labor organizing efforts were predicated on internationalism. [There was] The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) — which also was known as the Magonistas. [The PLM] were a radical Mexican-led political movement that created unions all across the Southwest in the first two decades of the 20th century in close collaboration with the U.S. Socialist Party and even some sections of the AFL at that time, on the basis of trying to create integrated and transnational unions. 

The Communist Party and its efforts in building the CIO, The Congress of Industrial Organizations — which in its first more radical phase from 1937-38 to the mid-40s, not only created the foundation for a kind of internationalist and transnational labor organizing, but centered in all labor organizing, anti-racist, pro-immigrant, anti-segregation, anti-Jim Crow and all of these politics into how the unions were built. There were 11 unions built by the CIO that incorporated Black, Mexican, Latino, Asian, and immigrant workers — all of those groups were previously excluded. This was really the high point of the labor movement.  

So, when we see more radical political philosophies driving both an analysis of how capitalism operates by dividing and disorganizing — when we see those effects of radical political clarity in terms of how we need to counter that by building unions that are internationalist, transnationalist, and anti-racist in scope — we see that that’s when the greatest gains are made. 

In this era we’re living in today, unionism is in a kind of in a state of flux. In part because the political left has been largely driven out of the organized labor movement, especially by the 1970s and 80s. The combination of McCarthyism and neoliberal capitalism both contributing to the dismantling of the most significant concentrations of left-wing political tradition and outlook, essentially disappearing or being driven out. 

Of course, the unified approach of breaking and weakening unions associated with the 1970s and 80s in the neoliberal turn that we are still in today, we see unions for the most part at their weakest point. But there are ways of seeing a reawakening taking place, not in the center of the big battalions of labor, but in the newer unions that are being formed, especially around service workers. 

We see challenges taking place from a little bit more of a class-conscious left within the big battalions of labor. The United Auto Workers (UAW) under its new leadership has been emphasizing more of a class struggle approach, more at least rhetorically internationalist — there has been some support for independent auto worker organizing in Mexico from the United Auto Workers and even from the AFL-CIO, although not as much as needs to be done. And we see the new labor unionism that’s developing — for the most part recognizing a need to shift back towards the foundational principles of the workers movement, which lead socialist, internationalist, and are inclusionist in terms of recognizing the importance of organizing and including, in this case, undocumented or immigrant workers. 

But that, again, stands side by side with the absence of any kind of political vision outside of operating as a wing of the Democratic party, and as such incorporating the Democratic Party politics into labor unionism, which does not lead very far. So, that’s an interesting kind of contradiction. 

But, I’ll just conclude by saying on this question that the kind of situation we’re in now, where we have repeating crises of capitalism without a lot of sorts of geopolitical conflict, I would characterize as imperialist and an inter-imperialist conflict between rival sectors of capital and different state alliances. The circumstances for most working people in the world are getting significantly worse and that’s where the weakening of the left and the disconnection of left politics from the working class has been most obvious — where there’s the absence of a left in many parts of the world where it’s desperately needed. And instead, we see the rise of the far-right fascist threat. 

And I think that this is really a reflection of the deeper crisis of capitalism economically, but more importantly, for understanding the political changes, the political crisis, where a lot of people — working people especially — are essentially not supporting the old parties anymore, not supporting the old systems, especially as their lives get consistently worse. And so yeah, I think there is this widening social polarization. 

I think class consciousness has increased, but I think there’s a very low level of independent and left political organization that can rise to the challenge to meet the needs of how we need to organize, whether it’s for rebuilding a political left or rebuilding a more class struggle orientation in unionism, in the union movement, and just general political consciousness, building political consciousness of the left that can help facilitate how more people can be active in the process of trying to intervene in this world that’s on fire and try to create solutions that reflect not just the well-being of capital or empire or the Right, but workers and oppressed people all over the world.