It’s an unfortunate truth that immigration has, historically, been actively employed to screw over the American working poor.
If you look at the history of (for example) copper mining in Montana, you see a repeated wave of the mines being staffed by whoever the latest round of immigrants were. Basically, the mine bosses would employ a group of easy-to-exploit new immigrants up until the point where they’d established themselves and began to organise for labor rights, then they’d sack 'em all and move onto the next batch of fresh-off-the-boat victims.
The immigration system today is not what it was then, but the idea of “plutocrats used immigration to screw the working poor” is not totally without foundation. The big issue is in where do you direct the outrage at the situation: the exploitative bosses, or their immigrant victims? And for solutions, do you fight to prevent exploitation, or just choke off the supply of the most easily-exploitable workers?
Tragically, the plutocrat parties have a great deal of expertise at directing the hate onto the victims, and laws against workplace exploitation have gone sharply backwards in much of the USA.
