While much of the news coverage has turned toward the US president’s mobilization of the military and what that means for his growing authoritarian tendencies, this is only half the story. To fully understand what is at stake in the protests, we can’t lose sight of the thing that drove people to protest in the first place: a violently unfair immigration system that is an affront to us all.

It is worth noting that this immigration system is not an original component of US governance. Whereas the first government under the US constitution formed in 1789, there were no federal immigration laws until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and even this law was limited in the sense that it banned a specific class of immigrants. The US did not have closed borders until the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national origins quotas across the board.

The primary justifications for these early immigration laws were xenophobia, eugenics, and overt racism. By the 1990s, however, multinational corporations understood that closed borders – especially combined with free trade agreements freeing multinational companies to shop around for “cheap” workers, while at the same time constraining the options of workers to move around and look for better jobs – were a powerful weapon in their arsenal to squeeze ever more profit out of global supply chains. While cleverly hidden behind discourses of “security” and “sovereignty,” our immigration system is actually a scam rigged to guarantee an upward flow of wealth at the cost of human rights.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) illustrates this dynamic. Signed in 1992, Nafta created a free trade zone among Mexico, Canada and the US, specifically making it easier for goods, capital and corporations to move freely while conspicuously ignoring the movement of workers. Far from an oversight, as the scholar Bill Ong Hing has written, this was the whole point of the agreement.