Letter: Tijuana, ground zero for fascism vs. refugee workers

I recently returned from a week in Tijuana, Mexico, responding to a call by the New Sanctuary Caravan to lend moral and other support to our brothers and sisters fleeing from Central America. Their bold call was a pro-internationalist to president Donald Trump and the U.S. ruling class’s racist divisiveness.
Tijuana is one of the largest ports of entry in the world, and even though the vast majority of migrants/refugees are from Central America, they are also from many other countries, like Haiti, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico itself, fleeing the poverty and instability that the system of imperialism produces.  And the U.S. embassies refuse to grant them visas to the U.S. (So much for the argument that “They should come ‘the right way’”). 
Sexism and racism are also at play here.  Many of the Central American refugees are young women fleeing sexual violence and persecution. A brave 14-year-old Central American girl walked away from home one night without informing her family where she was going. Fleeing the sexual abuse of a family member, she carried nothing with her except a little money in her pocket. She told the lawyer who found her at the border crossing that she found her way to the border by following the lights from the cars and buses.  Many refugees are indigenous workers being victimized by racist abuse and oppression in their countries of origin.
As bad as then-president Barack Obama was “Deporter in Chief”, Trump’s policies are carrying on, and advancing, that legacy. He’s raising the level of state sponsored cruelty to new heights by separating families, effectively shutting the border, and torturing workers and children in Customs and Border Patrol facilities (nicknamed “The Icebox” by refugees).  I watched the face of a little girl sitting on the curb at the border crossing listening intently as a lawyer advised her mother to write her own name and date of birth with a sharpie pen on the girl’s shoulder in the event they are separated. The trauma that children and their parents are experiencing is reminiscent of Southern slavery and the boarding schools for U.S. indigenous children. 
Thousands of refugees have been living for months in Tijuana in tents and unheated shelters (the temperature is in the 40’s at night) waiting for their numbers to be called to begin the asylum process. Working hand-in-glove, the U.S. and Mexican governments have manufactured this crisis to force people to self-deport or accept the one-year Mexican work visas offered. Every day, the Mexican government shuttles refugees and migrants to a job fair, channeling them into the low wage jobs that will boost the Mexican economy.
The refugee crisis is more than an immigration issue. It’s part of the racist division of labor across borders that capitalism needs to maximize profits.  It’s part of the legacy of sexism that began with class society when women became the property of men.  It’s a reflection of capitalism’s view of workers as tools for profit with disposable lives.  It’s a reflection of workers’ mass impulse to resist exploitation and claim their full humanity. It’s an issue that lay bare capitalism’s failures, and the neccesity for a new social system: communism.
Now, a new caravan is leaving Honduras, continuing to challenge the existence of the capitalist borders that keep the poor countries poor and the rich countries rich.  We need to bring the communist line to the struggle “Working People have no Nation, Smash the Borders” and do all we can to build solidarity.
The hundreds of volunteers coming to the border also need to hear our class analysis, the only answer to a movement, that is heavily influenced by the liberal establishment.  Karl Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, “All history is the history of class struggle”.  Here it is.  The refugee movement is overwhelming the status quo and pushing history forward. Volunteers mostly see themselves as providing service and moral support to the immigrants but not as organizers of struggle to change this system. The Party’s involvement could help transform it into a fighting movement of the international working class. 
I worked with Al Otro Lado that has a Pro Se Clinic that prepares refugees to advocate for themselves in the asylum process. Spanish speakers, and speakers of Arabic, French, Haitian Creole, and other languages, lawyers, law students, or medical professionals are most useful, but everyone can play a role.  There are others organizing support too—World Central Kitchen, Food not Bombs, Border Angels, Deported Veterans, DACA moms, Pueblo sin Fronteras.
 I raised the Party’s ideas in conversation with some of the volunteers and distributed a party flier to them, but was unable to get very far with the little time we had together. I plan to continue this solidarity work in my home city with the community college students I work with. Tijuana and other border communities where migrants confront a militarized border, present a great opportunity for the Party to bring its ideas.