On July 29, people across the country were scheduled to travel to Arizona to protest that state’s racist anti-immigrant law (SBI070) which would require local cops to stop individuals they “suspect” of being undocumented immigrants and turn them over to immigration authorities.
Recently, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit to stop the law from taking effect. The Obama Administration’s stance against this law, and promotion of Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), appears to oppose anti-immigrant racism. However, virtually simultaneously Obama also asked Congress for $500 million to add 1,000 agents to the Border Patrol and 160 to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Additionally, two more aerial drones would be deployed to continue the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border. This expansion adds to the 1,200 National Guard troops Obama already plans to send to the border.
The Obama Administration has adopted this seemingly contradictory position because it is concerned with winning workers, especially Latino workers, to buy into U.S. patriotism and support U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, at the same time, U.S. capitalism needs to control and exploit these very same workers. That’s why Obama supports the DREAM Act — which essentially promises U.S. citizenship in exchange for military service. Yet, since the beginning of his presidency, deportation rates have climbed above those reached under the Bush Administration.
According to internal memos obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, ICE officials set deportation quotas and spelled out how agents could meet them. Thus, Arizona’s racist law hardly approaches the level of anti-immigrant racism the Obama administration already is enforcing.
Don’t Just ‘Boycott Arizona’ — Smash Capitalism!
Since the early 19th century, U.S. imperialism’s legacy in Latin America has been one of destroying workers’ lives on both sides of the border. Imperialist economic policy has pushed Latino workers around like pawns on a chessboard, exploiting their labor when needed and then unceremoniously deporting them. The last major deportations were in the late 1940s.and ‘50s. The U.S. has had a militarized border program since the 1980s, serving not to keep immigrants out but to keep them unable to fight low wages and abuse. This resurgence of deportations under Obama is partially aimed at using immigrants as scapegoats for capitalist-created unemployment, but most importantly it’s another racist measure aimed at further terrorizing those immigrant workers who remain.
It is capitalism that generates such apparent racist contradictions, resulting in attacks on workers, whether they’re on the streets, in Arizona’s ICE detention camps or on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governor Jan Brewer is certainly a vile racist, but she is only one cog in a machine that is rotten to its core. Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, these politicians serve the interests of the capitalist class and U.S. imperialism.
The international working class must unite, not only in such protests but also for the long haul, to wipe out the capitalist system that makes Arizona’s SBI070, CIR and the DREAM Act possible and build a communist society that meets all workers’ needs and ends racism for good.
PLP’s Summer Project was joining this July 29 protest, not to beg Obama for mercy but to expose him as part of the growing racism and terror workers face, linking that to the need to destroy the capitalist system that perpetuates this violence. (Full story next issue)