Washington, DC July 19—Racist Texas Governor Abbot has spent over $6 million to send over 130 busloads of migrant workers, detained after crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, to Washington, DC as a political stunt. The daily arrivals at Union Station have risen to four to five buses per day (Washington Post, 7/14 and 7/19). This is the reality of a capitalist system built on fake, profit driven borders.The working-class, however, NEEDS a world without borders. To fight back against this racist deportation and rising fascist state, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have joined mutual aid networks to help our working-class sisters and brothers survive. As we fight back we also remember that reform struggles won’t stop rising fascism in the U.S. As the bosses struggle to regain control of their system in crisis we are watching the state continue to take more direct control and incite state terror (see page 6, glossary). But it is only with international communist revolution that we will smash our chains.
Migration myths of freedom
Forced to be economic pawns and political fodder at home, it is no surprise that workers from many countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Angola, Cameroon, Congo, Cuba and Nicaragua continue to gather at northern Mexico’s border with the U.S. Harrowing portrayals of their journeys to reach the border are peppered with inspiring accounts of working-class solidarity throughout North, Central and South America.
The response by the U.S. government to this forced migration has been brutal. It falsely claimed that there was a public health risk from Covid-19 and used Title 42 of the Public Health Law to keep workers in Mexico. Democrats won a reversal of the policy at the Supreme Court, but the Congress controlled by Democrats has kept this policy in play by refusing to release domestic funding. And the bosses’ media has gone silent.
The “American Dream” is a capitalist hellscape
Today’s oppression of migrant workers continues a long tradition of racist immigration policy in the U.S., always attuned to the needs of capitalism. If the bosses need cheap labor in agriculture or services, they bring in workers on a temporary basis. Or the bosses terrorize undocumented workers into accepting horrid working conditions and pay, simultaneously undercutting the employment and pay of other workers. When the bosses don’t need them, they beef up deportation. Democrats and Republicans alike dance to the bosses’ tune – remember that Barack Obama was decried at mass demonstrations as the “Deporter in Chief.” Donald Trump and Joe Biden have continued that racist tradition.
Volunteer mutual aid workers have worked daily from 5:00 am until past midnight to find or secure housing and distribute food, a change of clothes, medicine for a cough, and a bus ticket to a desired destination. They have demanded government assistance for this humanitarian challenge. But Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Black woman politician in D.C. has rebuffed calls to tap into the city’s reserve funds, declaring that it’s a federal problem. Or perhaps she is telling these workers, if there is no bread, let them eat cake. Meanwhile, Covid-19 has sidelined many of the mutual aid workers while the pace of new arrivals increases.
The only solution is a communist revolution
Mutual aid cannot solve the big problems facing migrant workers. As more workers are pushed to destinations where they have at best tenuous ties, they are pushed to survive through spirit breaking, dangerous, and back-breaking means.
As communists, we struggle over the political limits of mutual aid and other reform struggles even as we strive to support our class brothers and sisters in the here and now. We have shared CHALLENGE, our party’s newspaper, and our flyers with mutual aid workers and migrant workers.
Capitalism’s immigration policy is not broken, it is operating just as intended to help capitalists maximize profits from the exploited labor of the desperate. It is an extension of capitalism’s institutionalized racism that for centuries has allowed capitalists to profit from super-exploitation and divide the working class to weaken the struggles of all workers for a decent life and ultimately liberation from wage slavery.
The sinister capitalist system takes the energy of those trying to make change and funnels it into inevitably-limited service to others or drop-in-the-bucket reform that only reinforces the system. It is time to place our energy into the building of a disciplined revolutionary Progressive Labor Party whose members are deeply rooted in day to day workers’ struggles against racist capitalism. At the same time we will lay the foundation for the destruction of the capitalist system and its state and replace it with workers’ power, collectivity, and equality – communism.