The city of Tapachula in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala has become the largest refugee camp in the Americas with 35,000 people trapped in a makeshift city of barbed-wired streets (El Pais, 9/12). This is a direct consequence of joint policies between the governments of U.S. President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO).
This mass incarceration of workers, primarily from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti is cruel evidence of liberals’ willingness and ability to exploit the power of the state in naked attempts to control and divide the working class to drive down wages and build nationalism.
Both AMLO and Biden campaigned as alternatives to unrestrained fascism and unregulated capitalism. But despite the liberals feigning horror at Donald Trump’s immigration politics, under Biden the hunt for workers at the border between the U.S. and Mexico has not only continued, it has become more brutal (see Editorial). In Mexico, AMLO is willing to do the dirty work of corralling workers at its borders in exchange for U.S. funding for programs – cynically called “Sowing Life” and “Building the Future”–that will create temporary worker programs to supply cheap labor for AMLO’s megaprojects in southern Mexico.
The capitalists have always used borders and immigration policy to meet their imperial needs and keep the working class divided. They build maquiladoras (factories) close to the border to exploit low wages while facilitating the movement of goods.
They institute guest worker or bracero programs to move cheap labor across the border only when they need it. AMLO and Biden both make a show of welcoming workers fleeing the U.S. disaster in Afghanistan. But in Tapachula, like in northern Mexico, workers desperate for relief from the brutality of capitalism find themselves herded into overcrowded camps with inadequate food and facilities. Those who risk fleeing to the surrounding mountains or jungle are pursued by AMLO’s newly formed National Guard or by criminal gangs ignored by the police.
Under communism there will be no nations or borders. All workers will work to meet the needs of workers all over the world. Capitalism is brutal for the working class. And the biggest capitalists in both the U.S. and Mexico are the liberals who are inflicting tremendous attacks on our class. Elections offer no hope of changing this as the choice between the Small Fascists like Donald Trump or the Big Fascists like Biden is a lose-lose for the working class (See glossary, page 6). Liberation for our class across the globe will only come through communist revolution and a society based on workers’ power.