It creates a sort of form of domestic Imperialism, Capital supports anti-immigration so they can domestically hyper-exploit immigrants via threat of calling ICE and kicking them out or killing them, all while maintaining Capital and development of Capital domestically, so it can't be seized. It's monstrously cruel and is an example of just how well-organized Capitalism evolves to become over time, independent of anyone's individual will, ironically paving the way for its own erasure.

Climate change brings with it 100s of millions of climate refugees. We are already seeing some of this occur.

The destabilising effect of 100s of millions of refugees is beyond anything any state has ever survived before. It will cause collapses and revolutions. These revolutions will be won by socialists if fascists are not around to fight us.

The funding and development of fascism coincides directly with the bourgeoisie feeling a need to use ultra violence to suppress the left. That need is on the horizon and they feel it existentially.

Others have given good answers (The reserve army of labour) but may I give another one. They're fantasically, transcendentally stupid and they've got nothing left but cruelty.

They are running out of productive forces to centralise, have rotted innovation from within, and have gone all in on AI as their last hope. They've not so much drunk the kool aid as injected a kool aid producing gene directly into their cells. It's their last gasp as China's natural productive capacity outpaces them.

If you really believe in AI, you believe that most labour will be replaced. But, you can't have labour be replaced since it causes a crisis of consumption and there's only so many ivory backscratchers you can own. So you need a minimal UBI to maintain capital flows in the medium term (using it as guillotine insurance has only occured to a few in DMT fueled fever nightmares). Additionally you need to fuck over China by outproducing them and maintaining the living standards of the upper middle classes in the imperial core.

On the other hand, UBI costs money and you like money and your shareholders are literally legally obliging you to give them all the money in the universe. So you have the contradiction of

a) Needing to prevent a crisis of domestic consumption

b) Fucking over the third world with over-production to screw China

c) No tax, only spend.

d) If everythings a robot we don't need third world slaves anymore!

So a UBI (or more likely a bullshit jobs generator to make middle management tyrants happy) inside the core (for Pell grant recipients etc etc) and a air gapped populace outside being sold stuff they increasingly can't afford, kept in check by bombs.

Some might say, this is just Generalplan Ost with robots, to which I say "yeah, good thing AI is mostly bullshit huh?"

The west has a really powerful petite bourgeois class, they're the main drivers of anti-immigration sentiment since large scale immigration can in fact hurt the middle class by reducing completion for labor. Middle class ideology is so engrained into the American psyche that some members of the haute bourgeois like to larp as plucky small business kulaks and so go along with the anti-immigrant thing for cultural reasons. Also most of the haute bourgeoise have international investments so domestic production doesn't matter that much to them.

From Matt Christman of the podcast:

And that's what these guys are, these guys that marched in Charlottesville, these are the people who are aware of the unspoken premise of this sort of zombie neoliberalism that we're living in, which is that we're coming to a point where there's gonna be ecological catastrophe, and that it's gonna require either massive redistribution of the ill-gotten gains of the first world, or genocide.

And these are the first people who have basically said, "Well if that's the choice, then I choose genocide", and they're getting everyone else ready, intellectually and emotionally, for why that's gonna be okay when it happens, why they're not really people. When we're putting all this money into more fucking walls and drones and bombs and guns to keep them away, so that we can watch them die with clear consciences, it's because we've been loaded with the ideology that these guys are now starting to express publicly.

On the other side of them, we have people who are saying in full fucking voice, "No, we have the resources to save everybody, to give everybody a decent and worthwhile existence, and that is what we want." And that is the fucking real difference between these two, and you can tell that to the next asshole who tells you that they're actually two sides of the same coin."

Because production inside the core is not really as important to capital as maintaining hegemony, and it sees multiculturalism as a threat to hegemony. Leaving production in the periphery where currencies are undervalued relative to the dollar, and the colonialist power structures allow for superexploitation wages is a more beneficial state of affairs for international, imperialist capital than allowing for those workers to make their way to the imperial core. They still have to allow it in a limited way (who's gonna mow their lawn?) but they have to keep a tight restriction on it because it threatens the current neoliberal order.

This is my personal belief, but maybe it aligns with reality. Consider where most of these people are coming from. They come from South America, a region that the US has a direct hand in destabilizing. The immigrants coming across the southern border are the product of that destabilization, and they bring with them the stories they have about their life before and why they needed to leave. These stories directly undermine the narrative presented by the state about these people. They need the population to be fearful of them, so they do not allow them to integrate into the community and, as a byproduct, share their stories with that community.

That sits alongside all the other reasons mentioned already. More power to deport immigrants means more leverage in the hands of those who utilize their labor. Those tools allow for a kind of shadow slavery. Illegal Immigrants exist in a kind of superposition of being criminals before being tried as criminals. By existing inside the borders of the state without proper documentation, you are automatically a criminal. The more you restrict immigration laws, the more you make it difficult to legally immigrate into the country, the more likely you are to drive up the actual number of illegals in the country, and force them into this contradiction.

You don't want the public to trust these people in any capacity because they might tell them the harrowing conditions under which they exist, and you might become sympathetic to their cause. So they are "othered" in the same way that minorities throughout history have been "othered" so they can be used as scapegoats for the failings of the state.

easier to exploit people when their immigration status is constantly called into question

I think both parties want them here, just not legally. Even though we’ve “tightened”restrictions on who can legally come in, we have more people than ever crossing right now. My friend worked as a legal translator at the border for a few years during the presidential switch and was saying it’s a massive mess and the dems didn’t functionally change anything from when trump was in power.

My personal theory is that it looks great for unemployment numbers, making our economy look like it’s skating by when it’s on the brink of recession. We get to add hundreds of thousands of jobs without adding any people to the denominator making it look like the labor market is much stronger than it actually is. Also what other people said about having a sub-citizen population who are more willing to put up with shit so they aren’t deported.

It makes the chuds happy, which makes them willing to vote for the worst reactionaries that will cut taxes and regulations the most. It divides the working class against itself. Western capitalists are also incredibly stupid and have been utterly defeated by China but are still in the denial phase.

Rhetoric is ramping up and sometimes the conservative movement catches the car. They caught the car on Roe v. Wade.

They might catch the car on this and that's terrifying as well. It would be one of the world's largest ethnic cleansing campaigns.

But they don't really mean it. They have never wanted to deport all immigrants, they have always wanted to keep them here and keep them individually deportable at will. That gives capitalists a much more exploitable workforce.

lots of good answers, but nobody has really touched on why the party is doubling and tripling down on xenophobia. and i, for one, don't have a good answer as to why the "rank and file" of the party would back these ideas. I get that the decision makers at the top are answering to capital, and i think the climate change refugee crisis is certainly a major reason, but why are all the good in-this-house-we-believe libs following suit?

Maybe they are moving towards relying more on prison labor?

It flows directly from a path of least resistance, the democratic wing of US capital is just as white supremacist and bigoted as their republican counterparts, but crucially less obsessive about it, largely because they have a more secular conception that originates from a New England style mode of capital management, republicans are still by and large southern aristocrats in their epistemology of capitalism

But both still have an instinct toward nativist policymaking, republicans because of their aristocratic obsession with blood and soil, and democrats because they believe it maintains the college educated racial hierarchy of professional asset managers

Without a left to point out the disgusting nature of both these ideologies, the river flows only one way and it's a toss up of which faction enforces their instincts, the democrats obviously being the more dangerous ones because of the soothing effect they have on the general public and activists, while Republican policy agitates more people toward real and effective opposition

It's easier to oppose a rotting syphilitic aristocrat, than a clean smart-talking corporate broad member, and this dynamic fools even capitalists who should know better

So they can use immigrants as slave labour

Labor efficiency is up, all The Powers That Be are drinking the Kool aid on automation and AI, it's still easy to outsource low-skill labor (with the possible exception of agriculture), and climate change is going to make it harder to support large, resource hungry populations.

Thus, I assume the plan (to the extent there's a plan) is to continue to automate or proletarianize white collar jobs while using immigration as a distraction and an excuse to build up the police state further. When there aren't enough immigrant workers to fill jobs, start pushing the whites back into lower skilled populations while they enjoy their robot utopia in the cities.

Given that the rich are idiots and automation is definitely not going to proceed as hoped, I'd imagine this plan is going to clash with reality and things are going to get messy.

Obviously it's not a conspiracy of ten guys in a secret room but a general consensus that develops from a chaotic web-like oligarchy of money peddlers, influencers, lackeys, billionaire puppetmasters, etc

These people are all in their positions because they do well at progressing within those positions (every organization is a meritocracy under its own twisted definition of merit.). Occasionally somebody gets to the top because they're a genius manipulator with no moral compass who will just do whatever lets them win (Bill Gates) but most of them get there under qualifications like "guy who allocates capital towards things that happen to be profitable in 2000-2020 and who started with at least a few million dollars" (Elon Musk). In all parts of the web, people who can be described as "guy who does thing that happens to progress in this role" outnumber "guy who does whatever it takes to advance, which happens to be this thing."

The complex web you describe doesn't actually support capitalism inherently, it's just that:

1. People with power (who are mostly top capitalists) try to steer the system towards their benefit. Most of them don't know what they're doing and steer it in random directions. But the ones who do know what they're doing aren't fighting each other as much, and it usually drifts their way.

2. If the system as a whole fails to navigate material constraints and/or account for the majority of power blocks, it collapses. Remaining systems are those that have not collapsed.

3. The inertia from 1&2 means that the system will generally at least do something that would have worked 20 years ago.

So to your question, there's not a deep supply of people with power that know that anti-immigrant policy will harm the capital class in the long run, but there is a deep supply of people who have advanced through the pundit/lackey system by riling up anti immigrant sentiment, and will continue to do so, because they're best described as "guy who riles up anti immigrant sentiment and benefited in an environment where that happened to be beneficial" instead of "cunning manipulator who rode anti immigrant sentiment to power". The richest person in the world is also currently a dumbass and happens to be anti-immigrant. And the system has not faced a crisis of shooting itself in the foot with anti-immigrant sentiment in the last 20 years, so it does not have inertia-based protections against this sort of failure.

The more precarious Capital can make their lives, the more they can be exploited.

I think they are manufacturing consent to a war in Mexico or Central / South America.

They'll probably toss China doing their infrastructure improvements / trade as some direct threat to the US. They've already been trying to with "Military aged Chinese men" and trying to tie fentanyl to both China and Mexico.

Because the moment a union of "illegals" crops up they can come down on it with the full might of the military lol

They don't actually want to stop them from being here, that's the lie. They just want them unable to organize

On top of all the other responses, reactionaries are reactionary. Politicians see that anti-immigration policies drive people to vote and act accordingly. Capitalists are infamously short-sighted and support the politicians that promise the best short term returns, the furthest they'll focus on is Q4 of next year.

While immigration and cheap labor are materially beneficial to capital, i think it is more worth it as a wedge issue that will maintain their status quo. They will still find cheap labor somehow