Migrant caravans: Worker unity only solution to smash bosses’ racism
Thursday, November 22, 2018 at 10:58AM
Challenge_Desafío

TIJUANA, Mexico November 20—Some of the first migrants from the current Central American caravans have arrived in this border city. U.S imperialism and its Mexican capitalist lackeys have welcomed them with more xenophobia, racism and obstacles. Only the international working class, following the communist leadership of PLP, can organize a future for our sisters and brothers. Only our class can offer them the solution to get out of this capitalist hell together.
In Tijuana, in unprecedented acts, the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) mayor Gastélum has used the media to encourage protests and xenophobic and racist attacks against the migrants. This achievement represents a great danger for the international working class. It is a bosses’ victory in their constant battle to keep us divided.
Our victories will be accomplished by confronting and crushing all expressions of anti-immigrant racism. In fact, there were protests and actions of solidarity with the migrants, but they have to grow andstrengthen to be able to beat the racists.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) say that workers migrate because of the same reasons, they facing a capitalist-made tragedy. That is why we organize to change this criminal system. The PLP in Mexico organized a collection of food and clothing to support the caravans, but mainly we have taken them our communist alternative: revolutionary politics in the form of literature demonstrating the need for workers’ power to overthrow all the capitalists.
The bosses’ racism and nationalism are capitalist strategies to hide exploitation and dispossession. The imperialists for centuries have carried out these crimes in the main regions of the world where the great waves of migrants come from: Latin America, Africa and Asia.
 Migrants try to find a better place to live with dignity, but with the capitalist economies’ crises and the imperialist wars that they cause, this is becoming more and more difficult. The caravans of Central American workers, mainly from Hondurans, show the tragedy experienced by our class sisters and brothers who flee poverty, oppression and violence in their places of origin.If this were not the case, no one would expose themselves to the horror of crossing Mexico to reach the United States. During this journey many of migrant workers are robbed, abused, kidnapped to work as slaves or hit men, women are raped or sexually exploited.Many of our class brothers and sisters are killed by criminal gangs, others are extorted by immigration authorities and the police.
In addition, hundreds have died or been mutilated in the dangerous journey they make on the train known as the Beast. Others, get sick without being able to receive any kind of assistance. They do not receive aid because nationalism has encouraged the population to see the migrants as enemies, they are seen as the ones that take away jobs, and in effect, they work for less than the minimum wage and without social security, under the bosses’ threats of termination, or deportation.
Faced with the migration generated by the crisis of their system, the capitalists and their governments close the borders with their armies, police, their criminal bands and their borders, while fomenting racist hatred against the migrants. For this, they use their media to blame them for the increase in crime, to steal from local workers the precarious and nonexistent jobs, to break the laws.
Working-class solidarity
But, in spite of this racist campaign, workers demonstrated their solidarity in the communities where the caravans have arrived. Despite the precariousness with which they live, people organize themselves to receive their class sisters, they prepare food for them, they give them accommodation, they also provide them with medical care and clothes and support them with transportation.
This solidarity can become an internationalist class consciousness to unite the workers of the world to fight against the cause of their problems, the capitalist system.Migration is provoked because capitalism is an unequal system at the local and global level. In ​​Latin America and especially in Central America, workers have suffered chronic and millennial misery, it is a region that produces mainly raw materials and cheap labor, the precariousness and scarcity of work together with the violence of criminal groups has forced the migration of hundreds of thousands in recent years, mainly to the U.S.
 Migrants are part of the labor force that capitalists use to perform the worst jobs, the heaviest and the worst paid, which means super profits for the bosses. But that situation affects all workers because it causes a general decrease in wages and working conditions.Migration is a phenomenon that occurs between countries and within the same country. It may have a political or economic origin.
For example, in Mexico, thousands of families have been displaced from their places of origin by the violence of drug trafficking groups, by land conflicts, by lack of work and livelihoods, by armed or electoral political conflicts, or by religious conflicts. These problems are generated by the capitalists, because in addition to providing them with cheap labor, it ensures the division of the working class, which limits our class’ ability to fight and face the attacks of their system.
The expulsion of workers also allows bosses to control the territories to take over the land for the mines, the extraction of gas or oil, also of the lakes, forests and rivers, and the richness of the biosphere.  Because of all this, capitalism will never be able to provide our class with a decent, and stable future. Only the working class can change our situation with a communist revolution. That way, we will crush all borders as well as all the racist divisions that separate us. Solidarity with the caravans! Crush anti-immigrant racism! Join the PLP!

Article originally appeared on The Revolutionary Communist Progressive Labor Party (http://www.plparchive.org/).
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