Xenophobia as a Weapon For Working-Class Disunity

The Working-Class Does Not Have the Time for Disunity (part 4).

(This essay is part 4 in a series called ‘The Working-Class Does Not Have the Time for Disunity’. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. More parts will appear in the next few weeks).

No African migrant is responsible for unemployment, poverty, crime, or state failure.

Socialist Movement of Ghana, Africa Liberation Day 2026.

Throughout the history of capitalism, ruling elites have repeatedly relied on xenophobia to divide workers who might otherwise unite around common economic interests. When wages stagnate, unemployment rises, or social instability grows, political and economic elites often redirect public anger away from corporations and governments and toward migrants, minorities, or foreign workers. The tactic is old, effective, and global. Workers who share similar conditions of exploitation are encouraged to see one another not as allies but as enemies competing for jobs, housing, and security.

Xenophobia therefore functions not merely as prejudice but as a political weapon. Employers use it to weaken unions, governments use it to rally nationalist sentiment, and far-right movements use it to fracture solidarity across race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Yet history also offers moments in which workers have overcome these divisions and fought together. Those moments remind us that xenophobia is not inevitable; it is cultivated, and it can be defeated.

Capitalism and the Production of Division

Modern capitalism depends heavily on labour migration. Wealthier regions and industrial centres require migrant workers to fill dangerous, low-paid, or precarious jobs. Migrants harvest crops, drive trucks, clean office towers, care for the elderly, construct buildings, and staff warehouses. Yet instead of recognising how central these workers are to economic life, political discourse frequently portrays them as threats. This contradiction serves an important purpose. If workers blame migrants for unemployment or declining wages, they are less likely to challenge the corporations and policies responsible for deteriorating living conditions. Xenophobia transforms structural economic problems into cultural or national conflicts.

The mechanism is familiar, particularly in the poorer nations. Multinational corporations steal the value of primary resources, suppress wages and weaken unions, and hire migrant workers through precarious contracts; governments underfund public services through austerity policies; and then, politicians claim that migrants are putting pressure on hospitals and schools, while they say that migrants are stealing jobs. The result is fragmentation, as workers who face the same system of exploitation are encouraged by the establishment to fear and resent one another.

Fear and the Factory Deserts

Xenophobia has long been used in the Global North as a political and economic tool to divide working-class populations and redirect social anger away from systems of inequality. In the United States, racialised labour hierarchies were established through slavery and later reinforced through anti-immigrant politics. During periods of economic crisis, migrants were frequently blamed for unemployment, declining wages, and social instability, even though structural changes driven by corporate power and austerity were the deeper causes of insecurity. This pattern intensified during Donald Trump’s presidency, when anti-immigrant rhetoric portrayed migrants as threats to jobs and national identity while obscuring the role of neoliberal economic policies in producing inequality.

Across Europe, xenophobia similarly expanded alongside economic restructuring, austerity, and the decline of welfare protections. In France, the National Rally mobilised fears about immigration and Islam to channel discontent produced by unemployment and neoliberal reforms. In Germany, the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) reflected anxieties over migration and economic insecurity, particularly after the 2015 refugee crisis. Italy, Hungary, and other European states also witnessed the growth of nationalist movements that framed migrants and refugees as threats to cultural identity, public security, and economic stability. These narratives ignored the ways European economies depended on migrant labour in agriculture, construction, logistics, and care work, while shifting attention away from privatisation, wage stagnation, the corporate concentration of wealth, and the subordination of Europe’s self-interest to that of the North Atlantic elites.

In Britain, deindustrialisation, privatisation, and austerity had devastated many working-class communities, yet public debate increasingly focused on immigration rather than the economic policies responsible for social decline. Migrants from Eastern Europe and refugees from the Middle East were blamed for pressure on housing, wages, and public services, even though migrant labour was central to sectors such as agriculture, transport, care work, and logistics. Brexit politics redirected anger toward migrants and the European Union rather than toward corporate restructuring and austerity, reinforcing nationalism while weakening international working-class solidarity. Across the Global North, xenophobia has therefore operated not simply as prejudice, but as a mechanism for protecting entrenched economic power and fragmenting collective resistance.

Afro-phobia

South Africa offers one of the clearest examples of how xenophobia is used to divide workers in the contemporary Global South. The end of formal apartheid thirty years ago did not mean any real shift in social inequality. Mass unemployment, inadequate housing, and collapsing public services have created enormous frustration in working-class communities. In this climate, migrants from Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere have repeatedly been scapegoated. Xenophobic attacks erupted in 2008, 2015, and again in recent years. Politicians and anti-immigrant groups claimed foreign workers were taking jobs from South Africans (the key politicians are Herman Mashaba, Gayton McKenzie, and Nhlanhla ‘Lux’ Dlamini – egged on by the white billionaire Rob Hersov).

But migrants did not create South Africa’s crisis. The roots lie in unemployment, privatisation, corruption, and the concentration of wealth in corporate hands. Employers in sectors such as trucking, agriculture, mining, and construction often prefer migrant labour precisely because vulnerable workers can be paid less and are less able to resist exploitation. The ‘pay per load’ approach of South African trucking, for instance, encourages the use of migrant drivers who are then paid less and receive minimum benefits. The trucking sector became a major site of xenophobic tension after 2018. Some groups demanded restrictions on foreign drivers, and attacks on migrant truckers increased. Labour organisers and worker formations increasingly pushed back against this politics of division. They argued that the real issue was not nationality but the deregulation of labour and the use of precarious migrant labour to undermine wages for everyone.

The South African case demonstrates how xenophobia fragments the working class precisely when unity is most needed. Yet it also reveals the possibility of rebuilding solidarity once workers recognise how capital benefits from division. Strikingly, the politics of division remains at the level of the workers: there is none of this rhetoric of xenophobia against foreign capital. It is more accurate, therefore, to call this Afrophobia, a fear of the African workers who come from other parts of the continent.

Hindutva Supremacy

In India, divisions among workers often take the form not only of xenophobia, but also communal (or, more precisely, anti-Muslim) and regional hostility. Migrant workers from poorer states such as Bihar or Uttar Pradesh are frequently targeted in wealthier regions. Hindutva nationalist politics increasingly channels economic frustration into hostility toward Muslims and minorities. This strategy became especially visible during the farmers’ movement of 2020–2021, one of the largest mass mobilisations in modern history. Farmers protesting agricultural reforms faced intense propaganda campaigns. Sikh protesters were accused of separatism and branded ‘anti-national’. Muslim participation was treated with suspicion, while right-wing media attempted to communalise the movement. The objective was clear: divide workers and peasants along religious and regional lines instead of allowing a united struggle against corporate control of agriculture.

But the movement defeated these efforts through conscious solidarity. Farmers from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and elsewhere organised jointly despite religious differences. Sikh organisations provided food through the langar system to anyone participating in the protests, while Muslim groups defended Sikh protesters during moments of communal tension. Trade unions representing industrial workers joined nationwide strikes in support of the farmers. The movement succeeded because it shifted attention back toward shared material conditions: debt, privatisation, precarious livelihoods, and corporate domination of agriculture, and it frontally challenged the bigotry of Hindutva supremacy.

In this sense, the farmers’ struggle represented a direct challenge to communal politics. Workers and peasants refused to allow religious identity to override economic solidarity. These contemporary struggles reveal an important truth: xenophobia flourishes where workers are fragmented and insecure, but solidarity becomes possible when workers recognise that insecurity is produced by employers and economic systems rather than by migrants.

Class Struggle

In South Africa, employers used migrant labour to depress wages and encourage conflict among workers. In India, communalism attempted to transform economic grievances into religious antagonism. In both cases, ruling elites benefited from fragmentation, and yet workers also demonstrated the possibility of resistance. Truck drivers, migrant labourers, farmers, and union activists began to identify common interests that crossed national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. This lesson is increasingly important today because capitalism itself has become profoundly international. Supply chains stretch across continents, labour migration shapes entire economies, and corporations operate globally. Workers therefore cannot defend their interests through nationalism alone. The ruling classes understand this very well. That is why they continually cultivate fear of migrants, refugees, minorities, and outsiders. Xenophobia diverts anger away from inequality and exploitation. It weakens labour organisation and fragments resistance.

But history also shows that these divisions are neither natural nor permanent. Workers have repeatedly overcome them when they recognise their shared conditions and shared adversaries. To take a moral position against xenophobia by itself can reproduce the elite attitude of hostility toward workers, whose own positions are shaped by the structures and not by any inherent attitude held by working-class communities. Morality in the face of xenophobia is the gasp of a liberal bourgeoisie unwilling to recognise that the structure that benefits them produces this ugliness. The challenge today is therefore not only to oppose xenophobia morally, but to rebuild forms of international solidarity capable of confronting global capitalism itself. Without such solidarity, workers remain divided against one another. With it, they begin to rediscover their collective power.

---

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Sign up for the weekly newsletter from the institute, the most recent being on the concept of ‘slow to mature’ - about how revolutionary processes must hasten to develop institutions and capacity quickly in perilous circumstances.