While the Joe Biden administration has ended the use of Title 42, a public health law that was perverted to stop migrants from claiming asylum in the U.S., the criminal abuse of immigrant workers at the border with Mexico continues unabated. Liberal racist Biden is following in the lethal footsteps of open racist Donald Trump and deporter-in-chief Barack Obama. The crisis of capitalism that displaces workers from their homes is only getting worse. Whoever gets elected as the next capitalist stooge in the White House won’t change that hard reality. Only communism—a new society run by and for the working class—can end this mass misery.
Breaking his campaign promise to create a humane border, liar Biden has instead accelerated deportations by adding a transit ban. His new policy requires proof that a migrant has tried and failed to get asylum from a country they passed through en route to the U.S.—in most cases Mexico, where the bosses refuse to provide safe conditions or a reasonable path to legal residency. Any migrants breaking this bogus rule can be deported summarily and blocked from reentering the U.S. for five years. These workers are forced into lives of utter instability and daily degradation, all for the ‘crime’ of trying to survive. The recent death of an 8 year old Honduran migrant girl, seeking ayslum on the Texas border after being denied medical assistance is just one of the many racist horrors committed by the liberal fascists on a daily basis (NBCnews.com, 5/19)
The cages Obama built are still full of migrant workers and families, with more than four thousand people a day booked into immigration detention centers (Washington Post, 5/19). Undocumented workers are sorted for immediate deportation or bused to inhumane conditions in mass shelters. They sleep on police station floors with no beds in Chicago, or in “respite centers” without showers in New York (Chicago Sun Times, 5/1). Terrorizing migrants coerces them to take jobs with low wages and to accept potential pathways to citizenship that enforce loyalty to the bosses, often by joining their military.
As the bosses’ profit system crumbles all around us, the international working class continues to bear the brunt of its failure. The migrant crisis is part of a broader crisis of global capitalism. Sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry and the war in Ukraine have made the situation even more desperate for the working class.
We, the communists of the Progressive Labor Party, affirm that workers have no borders. We must fight back against racism, nationalism, and the bosses’ brutal attacks against migrant workers. In unity with the international working class, we are building an international communist movement that will smash the bosses’ borders with communist revolution.
Workers uprooted by capitalism
Immigrant workers have been uprooted by the misery generated by capitalism–by unemployment and hunger, by criminal gangs in league with the bosses, by the violence perpetuated by this ruthless system. In countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Honduras, workers have long been struggling under extreme poverty. Over the last three years, with jobs lost to the COVID pandemic and living standards eroded by inflation, conditions have gone from bad to horrific.
The working class in the U.S. has not been spared. In New York City, the world’s greatest center of wealth, half the population lacks adequate income to meet basic needs (Citizens Committee for Children of New York).
To divert workers from the reality of the disaster of the profit system, the bosses are criminalizing poverty and displacement. Their targets are the homeless or those forced to make a dangerous trek across thousands of miles to find work. These are the people that capitalism deems most expendable. The racist rulers have sent the message, and the most racist elements of the working class are following their lead. Jordan Neely was murdered on a New York subway for demanding food. To protect the real estate developers’ profit margins, people without homes are refused shelter in liberal-run cities where hundreds of thousands of apartments sit empty (City Limits, 11/17/22). In fact, there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person in the U.S. (United Way, 3/28).
Bosses’ economy depends on undocumented labor
Capitalists ignore borders every day. They freely span the globe to fight their wars and to exploit workers and raw materials. They use borders to restrict or expand the numbers of migrant workers allowed into their countries, as their shifting economic needs demand. Meanwhile, workers are held prisoner by these arbitrary dividing lines, and used as cheap labor and cannon fodder in the bosses’ wars.
Even as the bosses attack immigrant workers across the globe, they cynically rely on undocumented labor to extract profits. Whole sectors of the U.S. economy would fall apart without undocumented labor: “The vast majority (96.7%) of Mexican undocumented workers are working and contributing to the economy and are vital to critical American industries including agriculture (11.5 percent of the workforce), construction (6.7 percent), and the tourism and hospitality sector (3.4 percent)” (New American Economy Report, 3/8/2021).
One hallmark of capitalism in crisis is rising fascism, as the bosses seek to scapegoat certain workers for the system’s spiraling failures. Trump and his billionaire backers built a movement on attacking immigrant workers. Now that Biden and his band of liberal Democrats and their own billionaire backers find themselves pathetically unable to alleviate the crisis, they are out-Trumping Trump in their racist anti-migrant attacks. The bosses can’t admit that capitalism cannot possibly serve workers’ needs. As the world spins toward global war, they will become increasingly vicious and organized in their assaults.
One international working class
The capitalist bosses have carved up the world through war and genocide. They build nationalism to enlist the working class to defend the lines that imprison and divide us. Every national border has been drawn with workers’ blood. By keeping workers fighting each other, the ruling class ties us to their thieving, murderous rule. The time has come to erase the bosses’ borders and to unite the international working class. The time has come to smash racism, sexism, and nationalism–to smash capitalism itself.
PLP knows that migrant workers are a critical element in this fight. They have deep knowledge of the horrors of capitalism from their own experience. They possess unlimited potential to turn their collective power to endure into a force for revolution. We must unite with migrant workers wherever we are.
Workers everywhere, on all sides of all borders, suffer from the exploitation, incompetence, and brutality of capitalism, from its callous indifference to human life. Communism means abolishing all nations. It means serving one world, one Party, one international working class. Join us!