Hyksos to the Border Wall: How Immigrants Protects the Powerful

Throughout the entirety of western civilization there has been one staple among all developed societies. This staple is as popular and as essential to societies as grain or the development of agriculture. This staple is a wealthy powerful class using immigrants as scapegoats to prevent class consciousness and give the working-class a sacrificial lamb for their oppression.

As far back as 1550 BCE this strategy has been utilized by almost every developing civilization to control their working-class populations. In “The Foreigner as Scapegoat: Lessons from Ancient Egypt and Today” Stantis and Mourad note that the Hyksos Dynasty was defined by the accounts of Manetho and preserved by Josephus’s “Contra Apionem”. They describe the Hyksos as “invaders of obscure race marched in confidence of victory against our land [i.e., Egypt]. By main force they easily seized it without striking a blow” The Hyksos described by ancient Egyptians massacred many, destroyed cities, forced many into submission, destroyed temples and demanded tribute from the Egyptians.

The Hyksos, actually, were represented by multiple groups from the Near East and their story is far more mundane. The Hyksos were groups of immigrants from various parts of the Near East, many of whom settled in what would become known as Avaris due to its diverse population and being known as an international hub to the ancient world. In analyzing the Hyksos, it’s found that they were not a militaristic external force that swept through ancient Egypt setting up their domain, but were a group of immigrants that settled in Egypt, raised their children and shared their culture and technology with the Egyptians. 

From the stories of ancient Egypt, The demise of the Hyksos was at the hands of Egypt. From Manetho to Josephus there are multiple accounts of Egypt overtaking the Hyksos and driving them from Egypt. Queen Hatshepsut, writing generations after the expulsion, describes, “how she restored what lay in ruin since foreigners were at Avaris. Removing the footprints of those who ruled without Ra.” However, no evidence of a sweeping dominant invasion of Avaris exists. 

Looking at the story of the Hyksos through a modern lens we can see the outline of how every civilization has demonized the immigrants story time after time. The Hyksos were a minority in Egypt and found some solace in immigrating to an international city that could value what they brought. The likely conclusion to the Hyksos story is one of assimilation and the rewriting of history to reinforce that only the powerful hold the keys to western civilization. 

In more recent times, Robert Tressell in his fictional book, “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”, describes life in England in the late 1800s. Tressell describes the demonization of the immigrant by the English working-class. ”You know very well that the country IS being ruined by foreigners. Just go to a shop to buy something; look round the place and you’ll see that more than half the damn stuff comes from abroad. They’re able to sell their goods here because they don’t have to pay no duty, but they take care to put heavy duties on our goods to keep them out of their countries; and I say it’s about time it was stopped.” 

England during this time had over two hundred years of the dispossession of working-class wealth by a small wealthy population. Between 1604 and 1914, The English Enclosure saw common lands that were farmed by peasant communities throughout England for hundreds of years privatized by the wealthy elite. In the 310 years of the Enclosure, 22% of all of the land in England was transitioned from common land to private land.

The people who had been driven off common land across generations had become the urban working class by the time Tressell wrote his book. This new class, which just two generations prior had been self-sufficient, now had to rely on factory wages in industrial cities where even that work was scarce and insecure. Charles Booth’s survey, “Life and Labour of the People in London”, over 17 volumes examining poverty from 1889-1903 found that 30% of all Londoners lived in poverty.

What Tressell addresses in his book is the view of the working-class about the conditions that they were living within. The working-class of Tressell’s time didn’t have the class consciousness to realize that the conditions they were living in were a result of the Enclosure. Even with a 30% poverty rate within London, the working-class still blamed the immigrant for their plight, even though the immigrant often was in the exact same or worse plight than themselves. 

The narratives of the dominant class of England from 1850-1910 echo a familiar tale. Poverty was a result of character weakness, moral and personal failing, and excessive alcohol consumption. Poverty was a moral failure and the poor were responsible for their own poverty. In 1859 Samuel Smiles “Self-Help” he describes poverty, “far from poverty being a misfortune, it may, by vigorous self-help, be converted even into a blessing.” 

When Tressell’s workers blame immigrants for their condition, they’re doing exactly what the dominant class of England narrative equipped them to do. The moral failure framework trained the working-class to look for individual explanations for structural conditions. The immigrant was that individual explanation. The immigrant was visible, culturally different, concentrated in specific communities and areas. The immigrant was taking work, depressing wages, and adding to overcrowded housing. The immigrant was the dominant class's scapegoat once again. 

The dominant class narrative of the immigrant, today, revolves around crime and economic burden in the same way England in the late 1800s and The Hyksos were portrayed in ancient Egypt. In December of 2025 “Social Sciences”, a peer reviewed study found the four pillars of immigration-crime narrative are immigrants increase crime, fuel gang violence, are responsible for drug problems and mass deportations are necessary to reduce crime. 

The data all tell another story than the dominant classes narrative. Between 1980 and 2022 the immigrant population increased from 6.2% to 13.9% while the total crime rate dropped 60.4%. A 2025 Cato Institute analysis found that illegal immigrants are 48% less likely to be incarcerated than native born Americans. 

In 2022 America's 10.9 million undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes, $19.5 billion in federal income taxes, $32.3 billion in federal payroll taxes, and $37.3 billion in state and local taxes. In 40 of 50 states they pay a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top 1% of households. Undocumented immigrants paid a higher effective federal income tax rate than five of the richest Americans and 55 Fortune 500 corporations in the same year. They pay into Social Security and Medicare at the full payroll tax rate and will never collect those benefits. 

Northwestern IPR research found that immigrant workers improve economic outcomes for the American working-class, directly contradicting the dominant class narrative. The Economic Policy Institute documented in 2019 that actual wage suppression is not the presence of immigrant workers but the legal framework that makes undocumented workers exploitable. The largest negative impact on the working-class is employers who use immigration status as a tool to prevent organizing, suppress wages, and steal labor from workers who cannot report violations without risking deportation. 

Among the working-class there are also a great number of misconceptions that are used to support the dominant class narrative of the immigrant that takes advantage of the working-class by utilizing social programs designed for citizens. This narrative has been perpetuated for many years. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as the welfare reform law, bars immigrant access to federal benefits. Those restrictions remain the baseline legal framework. Undocumented immigrants are also restricted from virtually all federally funded programs, including SNAP, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and all other benefit programs. Green Card holders are required to reside and show they are able to support themselves for five years, during those five years they are excluded from any benefits.

There are narrow exceptions for immigrants in the United States of America, those who attain the legal status of refugee and asylum seekers have different eligibility rules and can access some federal benefit programs. Some states do not ask the immigration status for WIC benefits, the nutrition program for women, infants, and children. 

The Cato Institute in February of 2026 published the most comprehensive analysis of the fiscal impact of immigration that covered 30 years from 1994 to 2023. During that time, the immigrant population paid $10.6 trillion more in taxes than they received in benefits.

The impact of removing these immigrants from our society is at our own detriment. The Congressional Budget Office covering the 2026-2035 period found that the Trump administration's immigration enforcement actions are projected to increase the 10 year deficit by approximately 500 billion dollars. The results of increased enforcement of immigration policy causes reductions in tax receipts from a smaller workforce combined with slower economic growth from reduced labor force participation. 

No one is advocating for complete open border policy. Immigration policy has been an issue for every president over the past 40 years. The last immigration reform policy was passed by Ronald Regan and was championed by the American business class. Not because it was the right thing to do at that time, but because American businesses needed to ensure a supply of low-wage workers were accessible for exploitation. A new immigration policy is past due for 14 million immigrants that currently reside in the United States of America.

In 1883 Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus". The poem was inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” In our history we have never lived up to that ideal. The Statue of Liberty was presented to the United State as a gift from France in 1884 and arrived on our shore in 1885. Just 2 year before the presentation the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, which suspended Chinese labor and required identification of type of labor for those traveling into the United States. Then in 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act, which made strict quotas on the number of immigrants from specific countries. Interestingly rather than use a current census, 1900, 1910, or 1920, to derive the allowed immigrant population allowed per year, the Senate chose the 1890 census which underrepresented what they deemed "hordes of inferior stock". This included Jews, Italians, Poles, and Slavic people.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act remained in place while the Holocaust happened. Restricting Jewish immigration to the United States. Bills were proposed to save Jewish children, but were never voted out of committee and no floor vote was ever taken. By 1939, three-hundred thousand Germans requested immigration to the United States, but the laws quota only allowed a fraction of that. In 1939 the St. Louis, traveled from Hamburg, Germany to the West. The German Nazi party had just annexed Austria followed by Kristallnacht. The St. Louis had 937 passenger with almost all of them being Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germanys increasing reach in Europe. The St. Louis attempted and was denied docking in Cuba, Florida, and Canada. The passengers of the St. Louis, thanks to their captain, found solace, for the moment, in Great Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands, and France. Within a year, Nazi's would occupy every country, excluding Great Britain, that accepted the Jewish refugees.

Despite all the data and what we know about how immigrants affect our society, they are still demonized by a large portion of society. The stakes of that demonization are not abstract. In 1939 the world watched 937 people sail from port to port, while governments hid behind laws, national security, and quotas. Many of those who were denied, died in the Holocaust. The Nazi party didn't kill them alone, the demonization and exclusion of every western nation was complicit in their murders. From Manetho's rewriting of the Hyksos into foreign invaders, to Samuel Smiles instructing the English poor that their poverty was a personal failing, to the four pillars of the contemporary immigration-crime narrative, the structure is identical. Identify a visible minority, strip them of political representation, concentrate them into communities where they can be pointed at, and blame them for the structural conditions that the dominant class produced. The working-class of every era has been given the same explanation for the same conditions, and the explanation has served the same purpose, to prevent the question that actually threatens concentrated power, who benefits from the arrangement that keeps both the immigrant and the working-class economically precarious, legally vulnerable, and pointing at each other. 

Sources:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3608/pg3608-images.html
https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/
https://arce.org/resource/hyksos/
https://chrisnaunton.com/2020/09/03/the-foreigner-as-scapegoat-lessons-from-ancient-egypt-and-today/comment-page-1/
https://hrnews1.substack.com/p/how-elites-use-immigrants-and-outsiders
https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/news/2023/us-immigration-rhetoric-and-reality.html
https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-immigration-policy/
https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/undocumented-immigrants-snap-medicaid-benefits/
https://www.cbo.gov/topics/immigration
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105