In Bob Dylan’s song “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” from his 1964 album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Dylan lamented the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. While Dylan’s song specifically addresses Evers’ murder, it has broader lessons for the current immigration crisis. Much of the dispute about immigration and deportation is nothing more than partisan posturing, with immigrants — both documented and otherwise — caught in the crossfire of a cynical political war.
Medgar Evers was a decorated World War II veteran and 1952 graduate of historically Black Alcorn A&M College, now known as Alcorn State University. In 1954, after the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Evers applied to the University of Mississippi Law School but was denied admission because of his race. In November of that year, he became the first field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi. In that role, Evers led the campaign against racist Jim Crow laws by organizing boycotts and helping to set up new regional chapters of the NAACP throughout Mississippi.
Byron De La Beckwith was also a decorated World War II veteran, honorably discharged in 1945 after being wounded in the Pacific theater. After the war he settled in Greenwood, Mississippi, with his wife and young son. In 1954, after the Brown decision, De La Beckwith joined his local White Citizens’ Council, a white supremacist group similar to the Ku Klux Klan, which he later also joined. The White Citizens’ Counsel, which boasted about 60,000 members throughout the South, was dedicated to opposing racial integration in schools and other public institutions.
In the early morning hours on June 12, 1963, Evers, then a 37-year-old husband and father of three young children, returned to his Jackson, Mississippi, home after attending a meeting with NAACP attorneys. Armed with a rifle, De La Beckwith was hiding in shrubbery adjacent to Evers’ driveway. As Evers emerged from his car, De La Beckwith fired a bullet into Evers’ back and through his heart. Evers staggered to his house and collapsed at his front door, where he was discovered by his wife, Myrlie. He died later that morning in an all-white hospital, where he had been the first Black patient ever admitted.
De La Beckwith was tried twice in 1964 before all-white juries. Both trials ended in a hung jury, the second after Mississippi governor, Ross Barnett, shook De La Beckwith’s hand in the courtroom. His legal expenses were paid by the White Citizens’ Counsel. In 1975 De La Beckwith was convicted in Louisiana for his part in a 1973 conspiracy to murder Adolph Botnick, then director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, for which he served three years in Angola State Prison. It was not until 1994 that De La Beckwith was finally convicted of the murder of Evers, after new evidence was uncovered, which included testimony about De La Beckwith boasting about the murders at KKK rallies. He died in prison in 2001.
Bob Dylan saw the bigger picture
Within three weeks of Evers’ murder, Dylan had written “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” performing it for the first time July 6, 1963, at a Mississippi voter registration rally. While never excusing De La Beckwith’s personal responsibility for Evers’ murder, Dylan frames it in the context of broader racial politics in the U.S., calling De La Beckwith a pawn in a game of institutionalized race-baiting and victim-blaming. Poor white southerners, Dylan asserts, are manipulated by racist politicians and pundits, induced to blame Black people for their own poverty. De La Beckwith was not a rogue extremist, but rather the product of a broader racist culture.
Written less than a century after the end of the Civil War, Dylan’s song is firmly rooted in the arguments that many slavery apologists — both North and South — had made in defense of slavery. “If Black people are freed from slave labor,” the contention went, “they will take away paying jobs from poor white people.” The assertion was both fueled by racial animus and further spread the fire of racist politics in the South. This, Dylan’s song explains, is still going on in 1963. De La Beckwith was a pawn in this insidious game. Blame him, yes. But don’t do so without also condemning the larger racist context in which his resentment and hatred were learned:
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
‘Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
The political game that surrounds immigration today
The 2025 immigration conflict in the United States is not dissimilar to the cultural and political pathologies that Dylan condemned in 1964. The only significant difference is that working class whites and Hispanic immigrants alike are pawns on both sides of the partisan game. The mass-deportation side is motivated partly by conjured assertions of economic burdens caused by large-scale immigration. To be sure, the impact of immigration on social welfare systems is a legitimate consideration. But the thinly veiled xenophobic mass-deportation voices are not interested in nuance. The fine points of individual cases and special circumstances are erased by the bitter acid of racist hysteria.
But the blanket-amnesty side of the debate is no less eager to exploit immigrants than the mass-deportation side. They are just as guilty of using immigrants as pawns in their version of the same racist game. In the first instance, this side considers immigrants as votes for their party. They are less interested in the well-being of refugees than in winning the next election through the immigrant vote. This side is purchasing future votes by advocacy of mass amnesty, without regard to considerations of either social costs or immigrant status. Immigrants are not people, they are votes. And they are pawns in the political game.
Even more insidious are arguments from the mass-amnesty side that are virtually identical to the pro-slavery voices in the 19th century. Wealthy politicians and pundits lament that they will have no one to pick their fruit, scrub their toilets, trim their shrubs or wash their clothes if they lose the cheap, off-the-books labor of immigrants. They advocate for immigrants in order to exploit their below-market labor, not protect their dignity. Their advocacy has nothing to do with welcoming the stranger and everything to do with saving a couple of bucks on their avocados and marijuana.
In the middle of this nasty war between partisan generals are a wide variety of immigrants, migrants and refugees, who are treated not as unique persons with dignity but interchangeable pawns to be sacrificed in political combat. Neither side is interested in distinctions between, for example, economic migrants and political refugees. All are subsumed under one umbrella, either as parasites to be deported or votes and cheap labor to be exploited. To paraphrase Dylan’s song:
And the (immigrant’s) name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the (immigrant) remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
