Capital Dividing Lines in the New Police State. Are We Approaching Reconciliation? 

As the battle between ICE and the people rages on the streets of Minneapolis, there is another quieter immigration-related fight going on in Washington and in regional oligarchies across the country.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on anyone who looks like an immigrant continues to exacerbate worker shortages in numerous sectors of the economy. At the same time, the burgeoning police state is proving a boon for Trump’s biggest benefactors in the surveillance tech and private prison industries. But there might be a way to keep capital on both sides of this dividing line happy, and we look to be approaching the precipice.

Let’s first look at who’s being hurt and helped by the ICE state before turning to the final piece sliding into place of a new system of capital-labor relations.

The Winners

They are in the tech sector, which has a heavy presence in the administration. Some of the biggest are Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft provide ICE with the digital backbone for its data and surveillance operations. Palantir has deals for hundreds of millions for data platforms that integrate and analyze information so agents can search, link, and target. The company’s influence appears far greater, however, as it plays a lead role in its partnership with ICE bringing the hybrid warfare and terror the US helped bring to Gaza back home.

The military-tech sector is no doubt pleased by the fact ICE has increased weapons spending by 600 percent compared to 2024.

It’s still unclear which company is making a presumed killing off of ICE’s facial recognition software.Business is also better than ever for the private prison industry. It was a big backer of Trump’s election campaign and is reaping the benefits as ICE’s detained population grows to a record number of over 68,000 people—that number is expected to keep climbing and along with it billions more for the private prisons.

There are others:

On the Losing End—For Now

Here are some recent sightings of how “old” capital—sectors like construction, hospitality and agriculture— is being hurt by ICE running amok.

ICE arrests/kidnappings and the fear they spread are hammering the construction industry in Texas, slowing the homebuilding industry, and potentially sending prices up.

Tyson Foods—35% of its workforce made up of immigrants—is fighting a shareholder attempt to force the company to disclose the financial risks posed by the ICE administration.

Pressed on the issues back in June, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell admitted that the administration’s policies on black and brown people are one of the factors slowing economic growth.

Shortly after Powell’s comments, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that the “immigration” policy would lower U.S. economic growth by almost a full percentage point in 2025.

A January study from the neoliberal Brookings Institution estimated that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century in negative territory. Barring a major shift in policy, they expect the same to occur this year with continued downward pressure on the labor force, consumer spending, and gross domestic product.

RSS Inc. bemoans that “deportations are triggering strike staffing challenges” across the country. (note the opportunity, union readers):

Today, healthcare, hospitality, logistics, and even emergency services are experiencing severe disruptions due to the shrinking labor supply. The result is a labor crisis with implications not just for economic growth, but for national productivity, supply chain stability, and public safety.

Neoconservative Jennifer Rubin declares that it’s high time for big business to start standing up to the administration:

If corporations do not want to see the job market shrivel under the weight of violent, excessive immigration crackdowns or lose the stability of an independent central bank, they should start to weigh in publicly and with Republican lawmakers who have marched lock step behind Trump.

Democrats should remind them that passivity, let alone fawning over and paying off Trump, will not work out well in the long run. Their silence in the face of violent immigration thuggery that promises to paralyze cities, freeze economic activity, and increase crime will not bode well for their operations or endear them to Democrats who are poised to take at least one house of Congress.

Why isn’t corporate America heeding Rubin’s call?

Perhaps they are simply playing the waiting game, hoping the Democrats rein Trump in after the midterms.

Perhaps their timidity is representative of the new economy:

What could possibly go wrong?
👉AI related investment drove all of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025: 📊👇🎩 @FT
👉 consumption of 10% richest Americans drove most of the consumption growth in 2025.
👉The same Americans own most of the high tech stock.
🧐And if the AI boom… pic.twitter.com/xpnUQqgRar

— Richard Baldwin (@BaldwinRE) January 5, 2026

How much power does old capital have in the face of the massive AI bubble whose inflaters play some of the most prominent roles in the administration?

Lastly, perhaps relief is coming for the industries most affected by the ICE state.

If we look at the longer term trajectory of the administration’s project to reengineer the domestic workforce, there are reasons old capital would be on board.

Push for More “Guest” Workers

During Trump 1.0 the temporary work visa programs steadily grew a total of 13 percent larger, and he used the Covid emergency to help make it happen:

During the pandemic, his administration issued a series of emergency measures that made H-2A and H-2B [guest worker] visas more flexible and employer-friendly. Workers were allowed to stay in the country for longer periods of time, in part because they had been deemed “essential workers,” and wages for H-2A workers were effectively frozen.

What Trump 2.0 has done is effectively engineer another essential worker crisis, and there are emerging signs that guest workers will once again be the answer.

Let’s turn back to Minnesota but not to the street fight between ICE and the public; Gopher state Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar recently declared that ““The time has come to get this done. Sometimes, when things are the worst, you find an opening, and we’ve got to find that opening now.”

Klobuchar is talking about “reforming” the guest worker program. More from Capital Press:

Klobuchar said she was recently able to find “common ground” on the issue during a meeting with several “very conservative House members,” as there are strong economic incentives to change immigration law.  “That is the case to make, about how we want to feed the world. We want to have strong businesses, and to do that, we need a smart immigration system that allows for workers. We cannot equate all the time border policy — which must be secure — with the economic needs of our farmers and ranchers.”

What are the changes that need to be made to the guest worker program? Well, Klobuchar and the “very conservative” Congressmembers didn’t say exactly, but we can make an educated guess as they were meeting with  the American Farm Bureau Federation which consistently lobbies for lower wages for guest workers and less regulations.

Additionally, the meat processing industry is also pressing for access to H-2A agriculture guest workers. Until now, it has relied on H-2B guest non-agriculture workers, but the H-2A program has the distinction as the only one without a cap on the number of foreign workers recruited.

Greg Schell, a legal aid attorney for Southern Migrant Legal Service in Florida tells Sentient Media the following:

 “We’re going to see this continued growth in H-2A. We’re going to see pressure elsewhere as the non-agricultural jobs try to get more workers in there.”

On top of that, the meatpacking industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture, lawmakers and agricultural industry groups are aiming for the agriculture guest worker program to grant year-round visas. Currently, it’s seasonal, which translates to up to 10 months per year. This change would require Congressional approval, which makes Klobuchar’s comments notable.

Circling back to Trump 1.0’s response to the pandemic, Zippy Duvall, the Farm Bureau’s president, naturally says that these measures are necessary to avoid the type of food shortages seen in the COVID era.

Trump is of course on board. Zippy says he’s “surprised” by Trump’s extensive knowledge about the issue and believes the president recognizes the impact that labor shortages have on the economy.

You bet he does. Trump is very fond of “guest workers” at his properties.

The administration is already cutting the pay for agricultural guest workers. Let’s recall the following from November, courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute:

The Trump administration will cut the pay of all farmworkers by reducing the minimum wages paid to workers filling seasonal agricultural jobs in the H-2A visa program. By lowering wage rates implemented by the Department of Labor (DOL), we estimate that over 350,000 H-2A farmworkers could see their annual wages cut by a total of $2 billion or more—between 26% to 32% of their wages. These significant wage cuts for H-2A workers will put downward pressure on the wages of U.S. farmworkers, reducing their total annual wages by about $3 billion—up to 9% of their total wages.

Let’s recap.

The administration aggressively goes after foreign-born workers who don’t have legal status here but in some cases had lived and worked here for decades.

It is trying to get rid rid of those who don’t have residency status tied to employment, like those under Temporary Protected Status or Humanitarian Parole. These individuals are largely from countries the U.S. played a hand in wrecking through economic or more kinetic warfare.

This creates labor shortages in certain industries. And so there is now a push to bring in guest workers whom employers have more control over, are paid less, and it’s difficult to impossible for them to unionize.

Even the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security have in the past acknowledged that “[guest] workers face structural disincentives to reporting or leaving abusive conditions, and often lack power to exercise their rights in the face of exploitative employment situations.”

What will the effects be? Here’s one:

Now imagine that for many more sectors as this provides the model for capital-labor relations that capital wants to see. That is the fundamental shift taking place beneath the ICE goons terrorizing the country. From Sentient Media:

This projected expansion of the H-2A system would have major ramifications for the future of labor in the food production sector. The visa program, which more than tripled in size between 2012 and 2021, has been the subject of contentious disagreement within Congress and even immigration and farmworker groups for years — a debate often hinging on the need for accessible forms of legal immigration and the rampant labor abuses and human rights violations that have plagued the H-2A program for its entire 33-year history.

The structure of the H-2A program has been compared to indentured servitude because it grants employers a high level of control over workers: the visas are tied to a single employer, who also provides their housing, transportation and livelihood. If an H-2A worker is fired, they don’t just lose their job. They lose their right to live and work in the U.S.

The expansion of this model to a year-round workforce would effectively establish a new class of permanent, low-wage workers, with few rights and no economic mobility.

“It’s a really horrible idea and a little dystopian to bring in people on a temporary visa to make them ‘permanently temporary’,” says Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.