A quick essay on Marx and economic migration

Chapter 6: Marx and the Irish Question: Migration, Labor Arbitrage, and the Fracturing of Solidarity

Karl Marx did not live in an era of mass transcontinental immigration as we know it today. However, his writings on labor, political economy, and the Irish Question provide a detailed critique of the same dynamics seen in modern migration regimes: labor displacement, elite-driven division, and the use of economically desperate outsiders to suppress wages and fracture worker solidarity. Nowhere is this clearer than in his analysis of the Irish proletariat in England, a migrant class used strategically by capitalists to undermine the English working class.

In a letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt dated April 9, 1870, Marx writes:

“Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life... This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class... It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.”

This is one of the most direct and explicit explanations in Marx’s corpus of how migration—economic or otherwise—can be instrumentalized to weaken labor power. The imported Irish laborers were desperate, politically powerless, and willing to work for less. English laborers, rather than uniting with their Irish counterparts, saw them as rivals, thus precluding unified class struggle. The capitalist class had thus achieved one of its key objectives: the division of the proletariat.

Crucially, Marx did not argue that the Irish were bad people for this—he saw them as victims of colonialism and capitalism. But he was also clear that their use as a labor reserve in England produced downward pressure on wages and served elite interests, and that it is only natural for the English to be resentful about it.

This aligns precisely with his theory in Capital Volume 1, where he writes:

“The industrial reserve army... belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. It creates, along with the accumulation of capital... a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” (Chapter 25)

For Marx, then, the reserve army of labor is not simply a passive effect of capitalist expansion—it is an active tool. And immigration, especially of impoverished colonial subjects like the Irish, served to keep this army replenished. Its function was to suppress wages, discipline the labor force, and ensure a compliant, fragmented working class.

Marx’s writings also note how this reserve army takes on different forms depending on the needs of capital. In times of boom, it is absorbed and valorized. In times of bust, it becomes redundant and disposable. He describes the reserve army as consisting of various layers: floating, latent, stagnant. Immigrants often formed the ‘floating’ component—those cycling in and out of employment, easily discarded or rehired, and deeply vulnerable to exploitation.

Some Western Marxists have attempted to reconcile mass immigration with Marxist principles by focusing on the shared class status of all workers. But Marx himself would have found this abstraction dangerously idealistic. Class unity cannot be assumed; it must be built—and capitalist structures are designed precisely to prevent that unity by exploiting ethnic, racial, and national divisions.

Moreover, Marx advocated not just for solidarity but for strategic national liberation. He believed that England’s oppression of Ireland made unity impossible. Thus, in his 1867 letter to Engels, he concluded that “the national emancipation of Ireland is the first condition for the emancipation of the English working class.” He believed that English workers would only recognize their true interests once they stopped being complicit in the domination of Irish labor.

This insight can be extended to modern America. Today’s ruling class fosters similar antagonisms: between immigrants and natives, between races, between citizens and non-citizens. This is not accidental—it is the reproduction of a system that thrives on division. Mass immigration, especially of low-skill labor, is not a neutral phenomenon but a mechanism of capitalist control.

Marx’s critique offers a warning to modern progressives and leftists: to celebrate immigration uncritically, without examining its role in labor arbitrage, is to serve the very capitalist forces one claims to oppose. Moral framing cannot override material consequences.

Therefore, a truly Marxist approach to immigration would not involve open borders or the erasure of national distinctions, but democratic control over migration policy, labor mobility, and working-class solidarity. It would recognize that unlimited labor supply serves capital, not labor—and that only by acknowledging and managing these dynamics can class unity be forged.

In summary, Marx did write about mass labor movements in ways that prefigure today’s debates. The Irish in England were his case study for how capital weaponizes migration to divide and dominate. His solution was not nativism, but conscious internationalism rooted in material solidarity—not moral abstraction. Modern leftists would do well to revisit his actual writings before invoking his name in support of policies that, far from advancing labor, entrench its subjugation.