Budget deal on border wall: more fascist terror for workers

Although a federal budget deal was reached between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress, workers should have no illusions that either party has our class interests at heart. President Donald Trump’s open, vicious, anti-immigrant racism and his fascist “state of emergency” is a big attack on our class. But both competing wings of the U.S. ruling class—the  main-wing finance capitalists represented by the Democrats, and the Fortress America nationalists fronted by Trump and his Republican base—serve the needs of U.S. capitalism. Both sides back the maximum exploitation of the working class, using whatever terror is necessary. Immigrant workers and children languish in torturous detention camps on the border with Mexico, and throughout the U.S. interior, with at least 22 deaths in the last two years (nbcnews.com, 1/6). Meanwhile Democrats and Republicans are quibbling over how many tens of thousands of bunks and cots the camps should contain!
Communists reject the bosses’ phony national borders, which are designed to control labor and resources while keeping our class divided. Communists understand that working-class solidarity knows no boundaries. The slogan of Progressive Labor Party is “One world, one class, one flag.” Workers share a class interest to smash the profit system, the fundamental cause of the misery and death inflicted upon us. Only a communist revolution can abolish profit and exploitation, enable workers to seize state power, and create a borderless world that serves workers’ needs.
On January 25, after a long impasse and a 35-day partial government shut-down over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for a border wall. Trump finally signed a budget bill pushed through by the Democrats. The legislation allowed for $1.3 billion for the wall and an additional $1.75 billion for surveillance technology and more immigration cops. Now Trump wants to take  more money for his wall from military construction and other funds. His declared “state of emergency” is dangerous to our class for several reasons. First, it is rooted in the racist “immigrant invasion” myth that plays into Trump’s white-supremacist base. Second, it expands the executive power that has marked the growth of U.S. fascism since the 1980s. Finally, it sets a precedent for extra-legal fascist rule in the bosses’ run-up to their war with China and/or Russia.  
   In the face of a furious inter-imperialist challenge by China’s bosses, the U.S. main wing will be pushing new forms of “multicultural” patriotism (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019). Unlike Trump, the finance capitalists know the U.S. needs to recruite immigrant fighters for an inevitable World War III. They continue to push for the DREAM Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which would funnel young immigrants into the U.S. military. Most of the U.S. population, including 92 percent of Democrats, are against Trump’s wall (Washington Post, 1/14/19).  But the Democratic Party’s opposition to Trump only highlights their own hypocrisy and a criminal history of attacks on immigrant workers.
Racist Democrats no friends of immigrants
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law two bills passed by a majority Republican Congress: the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The first used the spectre of “Islamic terrorism” to justify “secret evidence” in deportation hearings. The second vastly expanded the list of federal and state criminal violations as grounds for deportation. Both laws led to today’s mass deportations and rising fascism. By empowering anti-immigrant racism, they also drove down working conditions for all workers.More recently, Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama deported 3 million immigrants during his eight years in office. Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate, recently warned Europe’s governments to “get a handle on migration” and “send a very clear message [to immigrants]–We are not going to be able to provide refuge and support’” (The Guardian, 11/22/18).Clinton previously backed her husband’s racist immigration reform policies. As a U.S. senator, she joined Obama and Chuck Schumer, the current Senate minority leader, in voting for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized 700 miles of border fencing (Washington Post, 1/10/19).
While Trump promotes open racist terror through forced family separation, renewed workplace raids, and extended imprisonment of asylum-seekers in his Nazi-style concentration camps, the liberals’ brand of fascism is more dangerous to our class. Some Democratic Party leaders, recognizing the rise of anti-capitalist sentiment among younger workers, try to pose as friends of immigrants. They use popular social democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to enhance their “progressive” image. But the social democrats records expose them for the liars they are.
When Ocasio-Cortez and others call for an end to ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), their plan is to reassign the immigration gestapo to other agencies that will continue to terrorize workers (The Atlantic, 7/11/18). None of these fake-leftists question the legitimacy of national borders. None of them are calling for the detention camps to be dismantled, or for freeing these victims of U.S. imperialism. None of them are friends of the international working class.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s willingness to make a deal with Trump shows that her objection to the “immorality”of the wall is nothing more than opportunist rhetoric. In 2013, Pelosi supported a bipartisan bill for more border fencing. She and other key Democrats want kinder, gentler concentration camps that allow parents and children to be jailed together, not separately. They want a smaller wall and more drones, surveillance, and cybersecurity—potentially greater threats to workers than anything Trump has imagined.
Anti-immigrant racism is nothing new in the U.S. It is deeply embedded in the country’s history.  From the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1796 to the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s to the eugenics-based national origin quotas of 1924, U.S. bosses have used their control of the state to divide the working class.  The latest bipartisan budget agreement continues the same pattern. Working class struggle may temporarily force changes to the rulers’ immigration policy.  But anti-immigrant terror, enforced by racist cops, has been a given from the beginning.
Workers’ power can shut down racist borders
Workers have the power to fight all of these racist attacks. As the caravan of thousands of workers from Central America moved northward to flee the capitalist horrors of poverty, gang violence, and state-sponsored fascism, hundreds of workers from Mexico and elsewhere responded to the call for working-class solidarity. They provided the travelers with food, water, clothing, and shelter. Despite the bosses’ racist anti-immigrant propaganda, many workers recognize how our own lives are tied up with those of our class brothers and sisters. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have joined this mass movement of support. We call on our comrades, friends, and all workers to join these heroic efforts now!