This chapter explores further the material and imperial bases of popular sovereignty by tracking the entanglements between socialist and imperialist discourse. White labor activists in the Anglo world borrowed from imperial scripts to mark nonwhite migrants as a threat while demanding their own incorporation, which solidified settler projects. These demands depended on the continuous extreme exploitation of non-white workers at home and abroad and – while part of an imperial transnational imagination – resulted in the absorption of imperial labor control functions by national systems of migration control. The encounter between capitalists interested in accessing cheap labor by racialized subjects, elite projects invested in sheltering white settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition converged in founding moments of the people in the metropole. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice over labor solidarity created segregated labor spaces that fit with both capitalist goals of labor control and reinforced settler colonialism. The analysis recasts immigration as a central historical force that shaped and sustained racial capitalism and democratic politics in the core, making the case for its more serious theorization and incorporation into critical theory frameworks.