Mexico has deployed 15,000 soldiers and National Guardsmen to the U.S.-Mexico border. Immigrant workers, displaced by the misery and violence generated by capitalism, are caught in the raging battles between ruling-class factions across the globe.
Just as rivers of raw materials and goods flow from one end of the world to the other, so the workforce of millions of migrants flows. The communists of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) believe that the working class has no borders. In unity with the international working class, we are fighting back against racism, nationalism, and the bosses’ brutal attacks on migrant workers.
Wretched conditions
Migrant workers and families have increasingly organized in caravans of thousands of people, including entire families, to try to reach the U.S. and cross illegally or request political asylum.  They do this to protect themselves. Even under the harshest conditions, the working class organizes to defend itself.
As countless workers in Mexico and Central America attempt this journey to hell, they are faced with terrible choices. They can pay a pollero to smuggle them over the border. Or they can attempt it on their own and risk extortion by the police, army, criminal cartels, and the ICE police. Many women are raped or forced into sex or domestic work; other men and women are enslaved on farms.
The border crossers have found support from workers in Mexico, mainly women from the neighborhoods surrounding the trains, who have organized to give food and accommodations to their class.  Dozens of these support stations have been set up along the route. These actions reflect the spirit of solidarity of the working class and show the potential of our class to build a communist society freed from the enslavement of the bosses.
To liberate ourselves, this ember of class unity must be fanned into the flame of class consciousness. It must become a mass communist movement to fight against the source of all exploitation and misery, the capitalist system.
Trump’s gutter racism builds on Obama’s legacy
Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant administration, representing the isolationist Fortress America faction of domestically oriented U.S. bosses, uses open racism to mobilize its political base. It blames workers coming from Central America for the problems caused by capitalism. It has tightened measures to prevent workers crossing the U.S.-Mexican border from remaining in the U.S. while they wait months for their asylum hearings. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened Mexico with a trade war to force the Mexican ruling class to implement measures to stop or reduce the flow of workers from Central America (The Guardian, 6/20).
The U.S. Democratic Party liberal politicians, who represent the finance capital main wing of the U.S. ruling class, are using the suffering of the migrant workers for their own cynical purposes. They are mobilizing anti-racist workers against the liberals’ internal capitalist rivals, represented by Trump and the Republican Party. The liberal bosses, under growing pressure from the rising Chinese ruling class,  hope that we’ll forget that it was Barack Obama who authorized the building of the concentration camps at the border. It was the Big Fascist liberals who showed the Little Fascists, now running the White House and Senate, how to jail the children of the working class in the same prison camps once used to intern workers of Japanese descent during World War II. Just five years ago, “Oklahoma’s Fort Sill was used as a detention facility for migrant children under President Barack Obama” (Newsweek, 6/13).
AMLO exposed as liberal danger
Likewise, the dominant finance capital bosses in Mexico are showing the horrors that liberals have in store for the working class—a danger even greater than the program of the likes of Trump. The government of Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is sending 6,000 soldiers from the recently created National Guard to the border with Guatemala to harass and arrest workers in the caravans. Transport companies will now demand official identification. The new attacks represent a move towards fascist control of the population. On June 14, in the state of  Vera Cruz, a group of workers from El Salvador was fired on by Mexican police, who killed a 19-year-old woman (Washington Post, 6/19).
The military buildup at Mexico’s southern border will only increase the attacks on migrant workers. It also exposes the true nature of the liberal faction of the Mexican ruling class. While López Obrador speaks of investment projects for southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to benefit the working class (The Hill 12/18/18), he is making clear to his capitalist masters that he will do whatever it takes to preserve the exploitative capitalist system. The capitalist bosses need AMLO to build a fascist state that terrorizes, jails, and kills migrant workers. If he wants to stay in power, he’ll comply.
Ultimately, many of these terrorized workers will be forced into a low-wage labor force that the U.S. liberal imperialists and Mexican bosses will exploit together, a part of their decades-long plan to build an industrial and freight transport corridor between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Splits and rising fascism
In this period of internationally rising fascism, where a global war between the big imperialists looms on the horizon, the liberal bosses pose the greatest threat to our class as they desperately try to hold on to their power through intensified terror and violence. Parties like AMLO’s MORENA in Mexico and the Democrats in the U.S. are the spearhead of a movement to take down their enemies in the ruling class—and then go after our class even more viciously, once they have consolidated their power and are moving toward bigger wars.
Regardless of which party may be in power, capitalism has consistently failed the workers of Mexico. “[O]ne out of four Mexican municipalities has living conditions similar to sub-Saharan Africa in terms of illiteracy, access to healthcare, and homes without toilets or solid floors (Business Insider 8/2/15). AMLO and Mexico’s liberal bosses are banking on state terror to get workers to accept even worse conditions, lower salaries, and longer workdays. Their rival Mexican rulers, as in the U.S. and Europe, are small-time fascist bosses who mobilize poor workers to their side through open racism. Right-wing politicians and capitalists have already begun to attack the migrants and to question what little support the migrants receive from the government.  
But if the bosses are counting on a passive working class, they’re in for a surprise. Workers always fight back. The next step is to unite in the struggle for communist revolution. Communists fight to build a world without borders. Join us!