As the Joe Biden administration jails thousands of immigrant children and plans to warehouse tens of thousands more in tent camps and army bases, the liberal bosses’ hypocrisy and blatant inhumanity is on full display. Last fall, millions of voters were misled into voting for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The candidates vowed to stop Donald Trump’s vicious war on immigrants and shed crocodile tears for the “kids in cages”—but that was then. As hundreds of thousands of workers flee capitalist-inspired violence and poverty in Central America, Biden’s Homeland Security chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, vowed to charge more of them with felonies—for the “crime” of crossing the bosses’ borders (Washington Times, 4/6). Mayorkas hailed the “noble mission” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a notorious nest of white nationalists, card-carrying Nazis, child abusers, and sexual predators (vice.com, 1/6/20; Los Angeles Times, 10/1/20). Then he promised to fill “gaps” in Trump’s pathetic border wall (New York Post, 4/6).
The next time anyone tells you that Democratic Party liberals are “lesser evils” next to gutter racists like Trump, don’t believe them. Evil, yes—lesser, no! All capitalist politicians—from Biden to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) —are loyal, first and last, to a profit system that feeds on racism, sexism, and inter-imperialist war.
Hidden behind the “border crisis” headlines is another story with vast implications for the working class. Finance capital, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, is trying desperately to maintain control over their imperialist “backyard,” Latin America and the Caribbean. But as they jockey for position in advance of the next global conflict, the U.S. bosses’ chief rivals, China and Russia, have other ideas.
Borders exist to divide up profits among different groups of capitalists. But the bosses themselves cross these artificial lines all the time to plunder resources, exploit sweatshop labor, and dodge restrictions on poisoning the environment. They also use borders as essential tools to divide the working class and build patriotism for war.
Under communism, borders will be relics of the past. The workers of the world have one and the same class interest: to smash the bosses with communist revolution, and to create a society run by and for the people who create all value: the international working class.
Liberals are still the main danger
When it came to criminalizing immigrants, Trump followed squarely in the footsteps of Democrats Bill Clinton and Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama. As a U.S. senator during Clinton’s regime and then as Obama’s vice president, Biden actively supported his predecessors’ racist policies. Even so, the “socialist” Ocasio-Cortez continues to defend “lesser-evil” Biden: “What is happening here is not the same as what happened during the Trump administration where they took babies out of the arms of mothers and deported their families and permanently traumatized these children” (thehill.com, 4/1). In other words, AOC is okay with the traumatization of children as long as her fellow Democrats are running the show.
In March, U.S. border kkkops apprehended more than 171,000 migrant workers and children trying to cross the border from Mexico, the highest monthly total in 20 years (Reuters, 4/2). That mind-numbing number is a product of sheer desperation. As Mexican journalist Leon Krauze wrote, “People from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador don’t migrate in search of a better life. They are looking for a shot at survival” (Washington Post, 3/24).
The Biden administration needs to push back on migration from Mexico and Central America because their concentration camps are overflowing. After four years of Trump, there’s a backlog of 1.3 million pending asylum cases (Washington Post, 3/31). “Temporary shelters” include the Fairplex in Pomona, California, the site of an internment camp for Japanese workers during World War II (Daily Bulletin, August, 2016). In announcing the Fairplex opening, Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor under Obama and now chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, seemed proud to be incarcerating children who’d fled mass devastation from summer hurricanes, fascist cops, murderous drug cartels, and starvation caused by 200 years of U.S. domination (Los Angeles Times, 4/9; see box).
Jim Crow Joe and Top Cop Kamala are pushing the utterly racist lie that the recent surge of migration is mainly the result of a failure by Mexico and Guatemala to secure their borders. Biden is conveniently silent about the U.S.-engineered coup in Honduras in 2009, when he and Obama were in charge—or about the horrific violence that ensued and forced workers to flee to the U.S. In Biden’s latest budget draft, he is asking for an insulting $861 million—less than $20 per person--to “fix” the problems in Central America. He wants half again as much, around $1.2 billion, for high-tech border security (New York Times, 4/9).
Covid-19 vaccine imperialism
As the U.S. empire continues to falter, capitalist bosses in Latin America have welcomed a rising tide of Chinese and Russian influence. As Argentina’s powerful Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner mused: “Who would have guessed that…the only vaccines we’d receive are Russian and Chinese?” Victor Jeifets, a professor at the School of International Relations at St. Petersburg State University, boasted: “If you’re in trouble [Russia] is here to help you…We have the ability, we have the technology. The same goes for China” (Christian Science Monitor, 4/2).
China’s merchandise trade with Latin America has soared from $17 billion in 2002 to $315 billion in 2019. “Reuters reports that, if Mexico were removed from calculations, China is now Latin America’s biggest trading partner” (Newsweek, 3/29). Nineteen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean will be using a new $3 billion container port in Freeport in the Bahamas, part of China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project (Newsweek, 3/29). Biden has countered by forcing Mexico, the country with the world’s third-highest Covid-19 death toll, to send troops to stop immigrants at the Guatemala border in exchange for a measly 2.5 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine (NYT, 3/18; CHALLENGE, 4/2).
Capitalism, no matter which national flavor it comes packaged in, will never be able to solve the problems of war, mass migration, economic instability, or public health disaster. Why not? Because the capitalist system itself lies at the root of all these ills. A communist revolution will unleash the enormous power and creativity of the world’s working class to meet and overcome all challenges to humanity. The aim of Progressive Labor Party is to organize millions to make that revolution by smashing the racist, fascist warmakers who now hold our class in bondage.
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SIDEBAR:
U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America
With the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, U.S. rulers told European rivals to stay out of “their” hemisphere.
U.S. bosses have a long and sordid history of military intervention, installation of puppet governments, and economic extortion. The seizure of Panama to build and guard the Panama Canal, the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, the multiple invasions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the 1980s backing of fascist death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua--these are just a few examples of the blood on these criminals’ hands.
The U.S. has been policing and destabilizing Latin America and the Caribbean for almost 200 years. Immigration from these countries is in no small part due to the devastation that has followed. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a “good” imperialist. Bosses from Russia and China are governed by the same laws of capitalism as those in the U.S. They are all driven to exploit resources and labor and to expand their markets. Workers should never betray our class interests by allying with any imperialist.
