The Political Manufacture of a “Crisis”
The political and fiscal “crisis” surrounding the influx of migrants and asylum seekers is a manufactured spectacle that reveals the limits of the “sanctuary city” concept within a bifurcated state. Mamdani’s work on how political identity is constructed and weaponized is crucial here. The ruling class frames newcomers as a threat to scarce resources, a narrative designed to pit different segments of the “native” working class against each other and obscure the real crisis: the deliberate defunding of public goods by the same ruling class. The city’s response–a scramble for emergency shelters–manages the symptom while accepting the framework of scarcity. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution rejects this nativist framing entirely. It demands we dismantle the bifurcation that pits the “deserving” poor against the “newcomer.” Our struggle must be to expand the universal social wage–housing, healthcare, food, education–to include everyone, regardless of immigration status. We must fight for a city where the right to shelter and a dignified life is not a limited resource to be fought over, but a fundamental guarantee, using this crisis to build a broader working-class solidarity that transcends the borders imposed by the settler state.
