JURIST Senior Editor for Long Form Content Pitasanna Shanmugathas interviews Aviva Chomsky, a historian, author, and activist whose work challenges dominant narratives about immigration, labor, and colonialism. Chomsky, a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University, has spent over 30 years engaged in Latin American solidarity and immigrant rights movements. She is the author of several influential books, including Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal and They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths About Immigration. Her latest book, Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice, explores the causes of climate change, which she argues include colonialism, racism, and capitalism.
In this interview, Chomsky critiques the myth of the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” arguing that this narrative obscures the country’s settler-colonial history and racialized immigration policies. She examines the policies of past administrations — from Clinton’s criminalization of immigration and Obama’s record on deportations to Biden’s continuation of restrictive policies — and discusses how both Democratic and Republican leaders have reinforced the exclusion and exploitation of immigrants. Chomsky also explores the extreme immigration agenda of the Trump administration, which seeks to implement what it calls “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Lastly, Chomsky discusses the intersectionality of colonialism, racism, and capitalism as it relates to the climate change crisis. Throughout, she situates contemporary debates within the broader historical context of exclusion, exploitation, and racial categorization.
Pitasanna Shanmugathas: Professor Chomsky, you’ve asserted that when people say America is a country of immigrants, we’re hiding as much as we’re explaining. Could you elaborate for our readers on just what this common phrase obscures about American immigration history?
Professor Aviva Chomsky: Settler colonial theory has increasingly entered mainstream US history studies, and I believe it’s an essential concept when examining immigration. Settler colonialism is a form of European colonialism spanning hundreds of years. Unlike the British in India, who sought to rule over a native population, settler colonialism aims to eliminate the native population and establish a white settler society in its place.
This settler colonial project has been continuous from the 1600s through the 20th century. It has taken different names—Manifest Destiny, westward expansion — but from the earliest days of colonization, the goal was to bring in white European immigrants. This continued until the first restrictions on white European immigration in the early 20th century. Throughout the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, this was the case.
When studying Latin American history, it’s well known — part of the master narrative — that state-sponsored immigration projects in the 19th century aimed to “whiten” the population. However, we don’t often learn that the same was true for the United States.
The welcoming immigrant narrative — Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty — applied only to European immigrants. Until 1868, after the Civil War, only white people could be US citizens. The 14th Amendment, passed in 1868, created birthright citizenship. However, the 1870 Naturalization Act extended naturalization only to white people and those of African nativity and descent. This made clear that when Congress enacted birthright citizenship, they were thinking of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants, not others.
This became even more evident in policies toward non-European immigrants, such as the Chinese. When Congress realized that Chinese immigrants would qualify for birthright citizenship, there was a huge uproar because they were deemed “racially ineligible for citizenship,” a phrase used in legislation. Since they belonged to neither category — white people or people of African nativity and descent — they were excluded.
Immigration exclusion has always been part of the racial whitening project. The US has historically welcomed white immigrants while rejecting people of color who could claim birthright citizenship. Before birthright citizenship existed, citizenship was simply racialized, and America became a “white” country through its racialized citizenship laws. Many non-white people were encouraged or forced to come, but they were denied citizenship. Once birthright citizenship was established, racial exclusions in immigration law intensified.
Saying the US has always welcomed immigrants erases this racial history of immigration law. This is still relevant today. Take Trump’s comments: “Why are we accepting immigrants from these shithole countries? We want good immigrants, like people from Norway.” I wonder if that is a racialized comment.
We see this racialization in 20th-century immigration laws—guest worker programs, mass deportations of Mexican and Latin American immigrants, and policies that construct Mexicans and Latin Americans as deportable workers. Trump’s push to rescind birthright citizenship is just another step in this pattern.
So, when people say America has always welcomed immigrants, they whitewash the reality of who was welcomed, under what conditions, and why.
Shanmugathas: There’s a great deal of demonization of migrants who enter the United States from its southern border. However, what many people fail to acknowledge is that these migrants are often fleeing terrible conditions in their home countries—conditions created, in large part, by America’s militaristic foreign policies. Could you discuss this connection and provide specific examples of countries where US intervention has contributed to migration?
Prof. Chomsky: Yes, and let me first note that the statistics on this issue are somewhat inexact because they are difficult to measure. However, it’s estimated that approximately 11 million people in the United States are undocumented, and about half of them crossed the US-Mexico border. This means that a significant portion of undocumented individuals actually entered the country legally—with tourist visas, student visas, or other permits — and later lost their status. Some overstayed their visas, while others, such as student visa holders, may have fallen out of status by failing to maintain full-time enrollment.
Additionally, when we talk about the undocumented population, we must also consider those who entered without a visa but were later granted parole or temporary protected status (TPS). These individuals are legally in the United States, yet policies under President Trump have sought to strip them of their protections, effectively turning them into undocumented people. Many are still counted as undocumented simply because they lack permanent legal status. The reality is that immigration status exists on a spectrum; there are many people in limbo, awaiting asylum hearings or navigating complex temporary statuses. Trump’s policies have actively sought to expand the undocumented population by eliminating these liminal protections, such as TPS and parole.
But to address your question about US foreign policy, there’s a saying: “We are here because you were there.” If you examine migration patterns in the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly post-World War II, you’ll notice that migration has largely flowed from former colonies to former colonial powers. This is due to historical and structural factors, including the economic policies, political systems, and exploitative relationships imposed by colonial rule.
Take the countries President Trump referred to as “shithole countries,” almost all of them endured decades of colonization and resource extraction by European powers. That’s how Europe became so wealthy while its former colonies remained impoverished.
Looking specifically at US influence, Mexico has historically been the largest source of migrants to the United States. This is no coincidence; US-Mexico relations have been shaped by direct colonization—the conquest and annexation of nearly half of Mexico’s territory, which is now the American Southwest—and ongoing neocolonial dynamics. US corporations have long extracted resources from Mexico while trade agreements have favored American economic interests at the expense of the Mexican population.
For example, so-called free trade agreements prevent Mexico from implementing policies to support its poor, such as protecting small corn farmers or subsidizing tortilla prices. Meanwhile, the US is allowed to subsidize its own farmers and flood Mexico with cheap corn, which devastates subsistence agriculture.
Beyond Mexico, US interventions in Central America and the Caribbean have been extensive. The US occupied Nicaragua for years, colonized Cuba, and repeatedly intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In the 1980s, the US launched direct interventions in Central America, waged covert wars in Nicaragua, and backed right-wing regimes throughout the region. The US has also imposed crushing economic sanctions on countries like Venezuela and Cuba, severely harming their economies.
For many nations, it’s unclear whether having the United States as a friend or an enemy is worse. Either way, the enormous economic, political, and military influence the US wields — especially in Latin America but also across the Global South — has perpetuated what many call neo-colonial policies. These policies continue to extract resources from formerly colonized countries, benefiting the world’s wealthiest nations while forcing millions to migrate in search of survival.
Shanmugathas: In your book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, you discuss the revolving-door system of Mexican migration that existed for decades. In fact, you describe how for 150 years, border migration followed a pattern of circular movement. Could you elaborate on this?
Prof. Chomsky: Since World War I, the United States has maintained some form of guest worker program for Mexican laborers. The first formal program, the Bracero Program, was introduced during World War I. A second, much larger Bracero Program began during World War II and lasted until the 1960s. Since then, other guest worker programs have continued.
These programs create a system of worker dependence because laborers are brought in by specific employers. If [workers] attempt to organize unions or protest for better conditions, they risk losing their jobs and being immediately deported. This structure places workers in a highly vulnerable position.
Even though the Bracero Program officially ended, it was replaced by the H-2 programs, which still bring in agricultural workers today. For decades, these programs primarily served agriculture in California, Texas, the Southwest, and the country’s agricultural heartland. Just as agricultural development in the US South was historically based on enslaved African labor, the post-Civil War agricultural expansion of fruits, vegetables, and cotton in the Southwest relied heavily on migrant Mexican workers.
Because these workers were considered disposable and racially ineligible for citizenship, they were seen merely as seasonal laborers rather than potential members of American society. This attitude was evident in two major mass deportations in the 1930s and the 1950s, when Mexicans — regardless of their citizenship status—were rounded up and deported as a racialized group.
So, the practice of mass deportations isn’t new. The large-scale removals of immigrants that we see today have historical precedents in these deportations of the 1930s and in Operation Wetback in 1954.
Shanmugathas: In your book They Take Our Jobs, you debunk the myth that immigrants steal American jobs. Could you explain why this belief misrepresents economic reality?
Prof. Chomsky: There’s a common misconception that jobs are like a pie—if there are five people, each gets a big slice, but if there are ten, each gets less. However, jobs don’t work that way because we live in a globalized economy. We’re already seeing this [now] with the [Trump] tariffs—many people will lose their jobs as a result.
The number of jobs in any given community is influenced by local, national, and global factors simultaneously. If a major factory shuts down, jobs are lost—not because of immigration but due to corporate decisions to cut labor costs. Historically, automation and outsourcing have been two of the biggest drivers of job loss. The Industrial Revolution itself was built on automation designed to reduce reliance on workers.
Population size affects employment but not in a zero-sum way. If a community shrinks due to outmigration or low birth rates, jobs disappear as well. Small businesses reliant on local consumers shut down, large employers may relocate due to labor shortages, schools close, and social services lose funding. Many parts of the US—and entire countries like Japan, South Korea, and even China—are grappling with aging populations and workforce shortages. When younger generations are too small to support the elderly, economies struggle.
On the other hand, when the population grows — whether through immigration or natural reproduction — demand increases, and new jobs are created. Immigration is just one factor among many that influence employment, but it often leads to job creation rather than job loss.
Immigrants enter the workforce at all levels. Some are highly educated professionals—professors, scientists, neurosurgeons—while many more fill critical, low-wage jobs in agriculture, food processing, eldercare, and personal assistance for the disabled. These jobs are often difficult, hazardous, and underpaid, making them hard to fill without immigrant labor. If all 11 million undocumented immigrants were deported, the US economy would collapse.
Shanmugathas: In terms of job loss, we see Trump making China into a boogeyman, a narrative that existed even before Trump but is escalating even more now.
Prof. Chomsky: A lot of US automakers are now saying they’re going to have to cut back production because they get raw materials and parts from Mexico, China, and Canada, and they’re not going to be able to continue production without that. That’s what I meant by the interrelated nature of the global economy and the multiple factors that go into corporate decisions about where to locate their jobs.
Shanmugathas: What’s often overlooked is that President Obama earned the nickname “deporter-in-chief” from immigration advocacy groups due to his record of deporting more than 2.5 million people — more than any other president, surpassing even Trump. Could you discuss the immigration policies under the Obama administration and how they laid the groundwork for what followed?
Prof. Chomsky: To fully understand the current deportation system, we should go back to the Clinton administration. The criminalization of immigrants isn’t entirely new, but a series of laws under Clinton — especially the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 — along with his welfare reform policies, solidified the current detention and deportation regime. These laws led to a vast expansion of detention centers, particularly private ones.
The private prison industry has specifically targeted immigrant detainees because they are more profitable — they stay for shorter periods, typically have fewer health issues, and don’t require long-term care as they age. Private prisons make significant profits from the federal government by housing these detainees, which is one reason politicians are pressured to maintain the system. Much like the military-industrial complex, this detention infrastructure persists because jobs and profits depend on it.
Many of the neoliberal reforms that have shaped the country’s economic landscape also trace back to Clinton, including the dismantling of the social safety net. Under Obama, one of the biggest missed opportunities was failing to implement universal healthcare. While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) did expand Medicaid and prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, it ultimately benefited private insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical corporations. This has contributed to today’s healthcare crisis, where costs remain uncontrolled, and bureaucracy is overwhelming.
These systemic issues are self-perpetuating because of powerful industry interests that politicians struggle to confront. Since the Clinton era, the New Deal social safety net—built throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’60s under FDR and LBJ’s War on Poverty—has been systematically dismantled. Obama contributed to this as well.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is often mobilized to serve this neoliberal agenda. When economic conditions worsen, instead of acknowledging the policies responsible, politicians scapegoat immigrants. One key example under Obama was setting quotas to keep immigration detention facilities — mostly privately run — at high occupancy levels.
Obama also frequently stated, “We want to deport felons, not families,” without clarifying what qualifies as a felony. This language ignored the reality that many non-violent offenses are classified as felonies—and that felons, too, have families.
Toward the end of his presidency, Obama introduced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which provided temporary legal status for 700,000-800,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. However, even within this policy, he reinforced the broader criminalization narrative, emphasizing that DACA recipients were “innocent” because they came “through no fault of their own.” This rhetoric implicitly suggested that other undocumented immigrants were at fault for their status.
Biden has followed a similar pattern — implementing programs such as expanded parole and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) while simultaneously upholding high deportation levels. These policies allow presidents to claim they are “pro-immigrant” while still reinforcing the larger criminalization framework.
Shanmugathas: People say Trump was the one who put migrants in cages, but that was happening under Obama as well, right?
Prof. Chomsky: Yes, absolutely. And I should add that every deportation is a family separation since virtually everyone has some form of family.
Shanmugathas: The second Trump administration seeks to implement what it calls “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Could you discuss the immigration policies of Trump’s first administration? Was there any meaningful change under Biden, and in what ways are Trump’s immigration policies now more extreme in his second term?
Prof. Chomsky: We’re only a month into Trump’s second administration, so there are still many unknowns about what will happen in the coming weeks and months—both in terms of which parts of Trump’s agenda he will actively pursue and which may be blocked by the courts. In some ways, it’s difficult to answer that question definitively at this point. However, we are already seeing efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship, a slew of executive orders whose exact implementation remains uncertain, the removal of various legal pathways, the shutdown of Biden’s CBP app that allowed migrants to schedule appointments, and threats to overhaul the asylum system. Under his first administration, Trump essentially shut down the asylum system using Title 42, and Biden continued those policies for a significant period before making efforts to reopen certain pathways through the CBP app.
It’s still too early to determine exactly how these policies will unfold, but I see three key factors shaping Trump’s second administration. First, there is Trump’s unpredictable personality. His decisions can be erratic — one day he supports someone, and the next, he turns against them. His stance on certain issues, like his hostility toward Canada, often lacks substantive reasoning. Second, there is his appeal to his political base. Trump uses anti-immigrant rhetoric to energize his supporters, but I don’t think he personally cares about immigration. After all, he has long relied on immigrant labor, especially in the hospitality industry, which would collapse without it. The key question is how much of his rhetoric will translate into actual policy and how much is simply performative. Third, there is an underlying political agenda that includes initiatives like Project 2025, which some have called “techno-feudalism.” It involves alliances between financial sectors, the high-tech industry, defense contractors, Christian evangelicals, and traditional conservatives. While these groups don’t agree on everything, they share certain interests that Trump’s administration is serving. The extent to which these interests will shape policy remains to be seen.
Shanmugathas: Prof. Chomsky, in your book, Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice, you mention that the causes of climate change include “colonialism, racism, and capitalism.” How do you see these systems specifically contributing to our environmental crisis?
Prof. Chomsky: Why does the issue of social, racial, and economic justice matter to countering climate change? Some have argued that addressing climate change is so urgent, we shouldn’t complicate the fight by adding other issues into the mix. Others argue that, from a strategic perspective, we must include these issues in order to create the kind of broad-based social movement we need to confront the entrenched power of the fossil fuel industry.
Justice matters for its own sake, but I’ve tried to show here that social, racial, and economic injustice are tightly bound with the history and institutions that have led us to the brink of climate disaster. Our world continues to be shaped by ideologies and practices of progress rooted in Europe’s colonial expansion and exploitation of the resources and labor of people in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Europeans destroyed traditional lifeways and displaced, dispossessed, and enslaved people of color in their drive to build a new industrialized world based on ever-intensifying extraction of the planet’s resources.
That’s not just ancient history. It’s the very foundation of the world we live in today. Elites and corporations worldwide have created unimaginable wealth and luxury for themselves and for a growing global middle class. Even before COVID-19 made things much worse, 690 million of the world’s people — 8.9 percent — didn’t have enough to eat. In Africa, 250 million, almost 20 percent of the continent’s population, suffered from hunger; another 381 million of the world’s hungry lived in Asia, and 48 million were in Latin America. If we include those who faced moderate food insecurity, which means they lacked regular access to nutritious and sufficient food, we’re looking at two billion people — a quarter of the world’s population. The pandemic and associated lockdowns further devastated those impoverished by the global economic system.
If we erase history, we might conclude the world’s poor, conflict-ridden regions just happen to be inhabited mostly by people of color. But it’s our global social and economic system that places people of color at risk. Historical, systemic exploitation created a wealthy Global North and an impoverished Global South. In the United States, it has concentrated people of color in jobs with the lowest pay and the most dangerous conditions, in unstable housing, and in neighborhoods with few resources.
Scholars Barbara Fields and Karen Fields have cogently pushed for expanding our critique of racism and our understanding of racial justice by challenging the explanation that people are oppressed or discriminated against because of the color of their skin. That’s a false logic that ignores the structural causes of racial inequality.
It’s not skin color that makes some people suffer more from coronavirus, or hunger or climate change than others. The roots of racial, social, and economic exploitation are in the very system that has led us to the climate crisis.
Those who created the crisis also have the resources to protect themselves from its worst ravages and even to use it to enhance their wealth and power.
One reason to link the fight against climate change with the fight for social, racial, and economic justice is strategic. “To break the power of the reigning elite and impose public priorities on the economy, we need to build a mass coalition of ordinary people,” argues an important recent analysis. “Rebuilding public power will require tackling the inequalities and divisions that capitalism sows.” We need to bring issues together because we need to bring people together to build the power necessary to create change.
But the reasons go deeper than just strategy. Our global economic system is the result of five hundred years of colonialism, extraction, production, profit, and economic growth. It’s stolen the land, labor, and resources of the colonized world, creating a global racial hierarchy. It created fantastic wealth and power for the few, a high-consuming lifestyle for a significant and growing middle class, dispossession, exploitation, and poverty for many, and a climate crisis for all of us. We need to understand the system in order to change it.
Shanmugathas: Thank you Prof. Chomsky for speaking with JURIST.
Prof. Chomsky: You’re welcome.
