From Murrieta to Palestine — Smash All Borders

MURRIETA, CA, June 13 — “Stop racist deportations, working people have no nations!” “Las luchas obreras, no tienen fronteras!” Over sixty members and friends of Progressive Labor Party chanted loudly and carried red flags while marching through the heart of Murrieta, California, the site of a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center.
The situation in Murrieta is a product of U.S imperialism. U.S.-fueled political and economic instability has forced these children from their homes as the wars over oil in the Middle East have produced over 2 million displaced workers. For many, the choice is flee or die. As imperialist oil wars break out across the globe, the number of displaced workers will only grow.
Since October 2013, increasing poverty, drugs, and gang violence have forced more than 57,000 unaccompanied children from Central America to flee north to the United States (see page 2). A large number of these children have been transferred to Murrieta’s detention center, making it a flashpoint for anti-immigrant racism.
Emboldened by Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama’s racist deportation of over 2 million workers, racists across the U.S. have created a climate of fear by staging counter-protests to disrupt pro-immigrant vigils, launching vile racist taunts, and claiming that the children are carrying diseases into the United States.
We marched though Murrieta to inspire the local residents to stand up and fight racism. While some residents responded with hostility, others supported our boldness. We made new friends while giving out CHALLENGE and leaflets that attacked the racists, which led one person to say, “Thank god! I hate them, too.” Two Home Depot workers shared CHALLENGEs with co-workers in the break room. One worker passing by joined the march! He explained that many of his friends have bought into anti-immigrant racism but that he had not. He was glad to see an organized group offering an alternative.
“The Most Important Thing We Did”
Over the course of three days, PLP members organized for the march while at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in LA by leafleting delegates and raising the crisis in Murrieta at several forums. As a result of these efforts, seven Chicago teachers marched with us in Murrieta. As the march ended, one of them gave a speech and said, “We stand in solidarity with all children…Coming here was the most important thing we did at this convention.” Another teacher pointed out that the main cause of immigration is imperialism and expressed her solidarity with PLP and immigrant workers everywhere.
Convention delegates passed a special resolution by teachers from Austin, Texas, in favor of granting refugee status to women and unaccompanied children crossing the border. Teachers and students across the United States have another rallying point to bring to their neighborhoods.
Summer Project members held follow-up study groups to analyze the recent history of anti-immigrant racism under the Obama administration, and made concrete proposals to return to our cities to organize more fightback. PLP has a fifty-year history of militant battles against racists, from the KKK to the Minutemen. Our action in Murrieta is a small glimpse of the power of multiracial unity in the fight against fascism. But it is also one more battle in a larger class war as the Party advances the fight for communist revolution.   
Every PL’er and reader of CHALLENGE should discuss how to sharpen the struggle against racism and growing fascism. The solution to end imperialism once and for all is to join PLP, smash anti-immigrant racism, and build for revolution.

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An Anti-Immigrant History

The U.S. capitalist ruling class has a long history of super-exploiting immigrants for cheap labor and then expelling them when it served the bosses’ racist political purposes. For example:
Passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all immigration of Chinese workers. U.S. capitalists originally recruited Chinese immigrants to build the Transcontinental Railroad, where many perished in the harsh conditions and all were exploited to the fullest extent. Upon the railroad’s completion, when the bosses no longer needed Chinese laborers, they used anti-Asian racism to abruptly halt immigration. Coupled with many racist state laws, this legislation led many Chinese workers to return to China because they feared they would be permanently separated from their families, who could not follow them to the U.S.
While not a law, the informal Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 banned Japanese immigrants after Japan won the Russo-Japanese War, a conflict between two aspiring imperialist countries. At the same time, many states passed segregation laws against the Japanese, promoting racism and further dividing workers.  All of this served to create anti-Japanese sentiment, a reflection of the growing competition between two rising imperialist powers, the United States and Japan.
The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from the country who were in the U.S. in 1890. This law discriminated against southern and eastern Europeans, Jews, Arabs, East Asians, and Indians, since none of these groups were in the U.S. in large numbers prior to the cutoff date. It was no coincidence that the great waves of southern and eastern European immigrants, typically poorer and less educated than northern and western Europeans, began arriving immediately after 1890.
At the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, U.S. bosses were desperate to find scapegoats to divert workers’ anger toward the collapsing capitalist system. In an event known as the Mexican Repatriation, they rounded up and forcibly deported as many as two million workers of Mexican descent without the “right” of due process. Though “repatriation” implies Mexican citizenship, 60 percent of the expelled workers were U.S. citizens. Most of the rest were legal residents. The Immigration and Naturalization Service found it easy to target them because of “the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios [neighborhoods].”
In the Immigration Act of 1965, a slight modification of the 1924 Act, a Senate report concluded that the national origins quota system “preserve[d] the sociological and cultural balance in the United States.” This was justifiable, according to the report, because northern and western Europeans “had made the greatest contribution to the development of [the] country” and the nation should “admit immigrants considered to be more readily assimilable because of the similarity of their cultural background to those of the principal components of our population.”