As open fascists win elections throughout Europe by targeting migrant workers, the liberal racist bosses—from France and Britain to the U.S.—are leading their own virulent attacks. With the collapse of the old liberal world order, the rapid rise of China, and the accelerating decline of the U.S., the rulers’ ranks are split and unstable. As inter-imperialist rivalry escalates and capitalism plunges into crisis, immigrants are in the capitalist rulers’ crosshairs. In places with aging populations, including the U.S. and Europe, the bosses absolutely need migrant labor to keep their economies afloat. At the same time, however, they need anti-immigrant racism to divide and exploit workers—and to super-exploit Black, Latin, women, and immigrant workers. And they need scapegoats, a hallmark of rising fascism, to take the blame for their failing system.
The global “migrant crisis”—more than one hundred million displaced workers—is a creation of the bosses and their national borders, the artificial lines that serve to parcel out the capitalists’ profits. The solution to the crisis is communist revolution—to create a borderless world that serves the needs of the entire international working class.
Biden’s racist treachery
On June 5, U.S. President Joe Biden exposed the liberal bosses’ treachery with an executive order that effectively stops migrant workers from claiming asylum in the U.S. Four years after promising to reverse Donald Trump’s brutal migration policies, Biden used Trump’s go-to statute: the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, a racist law that excludes “any class of aliens” if their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States” (Al Jazeera, 6/5). This was nothing new for Genocide Joe. Last fall, breaking another 2020 campaign pledge, his administration confirmed it would build 20 miles of border wall in Texas with funds set aside by Trump. In May, Biden backed a proposed law to block asylum claims and add another 1,500 nazi border patrol agents (New York Times, 6/16). After Trump’s puppets in Congress torpedoed the bill, the widely despised Biden took matters into his own bloodstained hands. In a desperate effort to beat Trump again this fall and keep his finance capital masters in charge, he’s joined the global chorus of anti-immigrant fascists. He is scapegoating migrants for U.S. decline and the incurable sickness of capitalism.
The collateral damage of Biden’s liberal racism are the workers and children fleeing the dire effects of U.S. imperialism, from capitalist climate change and war to joblessness, hunger, torture, and death. Thousands of migrants are trapped in squalid tent camps in Mexico, many of them run by cartel gangsters (American Sociological Association, summer 2023). Others are forced to risk their lives on remote routes into the U.S. through the California desert (Reuters, 6/11).
Biden’s latest assault on migrants is more than a ploy to win votes from misguided workers. The main wing capitalist rulers—the big banks and multinational oil companies—are fending off a challenge by the Trump-fronted, isolationist bosses. At the same time, they need to condition workers to fight in the next world war against China or Russia or both. Vicious attacks on the most vulnerable workers are designed to acclimate our class to rising fascism. The bosses’ tools are uber-nationalism, intensified racism, the suspension of fake legal “freedoms,” and wholesale terror by the state. While the rulers’ liberal media outlets will urge us to vote for Biden as the “lesser of two evils,” make no mistake: Liberal misleaders are the main danger! We cannot vote our way out of fascism and inter-imperialist war. To smash the bosses’ borders, we must abolish capitalism. Only communist revolution can truly liberate our class!
Europe: bosses on both sides build a base for fascism
The echoes of French imperialism still ring strongly across North Africa, compelling millions of workers to migrate north toward Europe in search of stable lives. With capitalism in decay and the French economy stalled, these migrants are met with anti-Muslim racism from French politicians and misled workers alike. Four days after Biden’s racist crackdown, the gutter racist, anti-immigrant National Rally swept to a shocking win in the European Parliament elections with 31 percent of the vote, up from 23 percent in 2019—and more than double the total for President Emmanual Macron’s Renaissance party (New York Times, 6/10). Macron, who’s even less popular than Biden, called for snap elections to the French parliament this summer. It’s a risky move that could usher the first openly fascist party into power in France since World War Two.
Elsewhere, Germany’s Hitler-loving Alternative for Germany party finished second in the EU elections with 16 percent, up from 11 percent in 2019, with much of its new support coming from young workers (Reuters, 6/9). In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s proudly fascist Brothers of Italy quadrupled its share to 29 percent. In the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders, who refers to Moroccan immigrants as “scums,” won six seats in the European parliament, up from one (AP, 6/10).
Like Biden, Europe’s main wing capitalist leaders are responding to the open fascists’ threat with revved-up racism of their own. In January, Macron joined forces with the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen and signed a new law that cuts off social benefits for migrants and eases deportations—an “ideological victory,” Le Pen bragged (Le Monde, 1/27). In France, “Islam and its practitioners are more than ever perceived and treated as needing control, surveillance, change, and if not, suppression” (Bridge Initiative, 1/24). In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has launched his Tory Party “manifesto” to cut legal migration by half each year, to put severe caps on work and family visas, and to force migrants to pass a health check before entering the country—and then to buy insurance if they are “likely to be a burden” (Independent, 6/11). Sunak’s disgusting slander echoes Trump’s racist rant about migrants “poisoning the blood of our country” (nbcnews.com, 12/17/23). Whatever their deep divisions, all bosses are sworn enemies of the workers of the world.
Stop migrant genocide with communist revolution
On June 8, the Israeli “Defense” Forces retrieved four Israeli captives—and slaughtered at least 274 Palestinians, including dozens of children, in a refugee camp in Nuseirat, in central Gaza. Already overwhelmed hospitals were thrown into chaos (Al Jazeera, 6/11). More than 37,000 Palestinians have been murdered to date by Israel’s Zionist regime and made-in-U.S. bombs—nearly all of them migrants from the mass expulsions of 1948 or 1967 or the descendants of those refugees. As Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign continues apace, the migrant workers of Gaza are trapped in a stranglehold of national borders, with Israel on one side and Egypt on the other. Their homes have been destroyed and they have no place to go. One of the fascist members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s racist cabinet has called for their “voluntary migration” out of Gaza—to clear the way for Israel’s bosses to grab some highly valuable real estate and the vast reserves of offshore oil and gas.
Most of all, like workers in the U.S. and Europe, the migrants of Gaza are trapped by anti-working-class ideas—by the nationalism of Hamas and other misleaders who want a share of the profit pie. Their one way out of this nightmare is to unite with the international working class under the red flag of communist revolution. The fight for communism is inseparable from the fight to liberate workers in Palestine and forced migrants everywhere. Progressive Labor Party is building a mass organization of workers that transcends the bosses' borders. We are dedicated to ending racism, sexism, nationalism, and imperialism for all time. Join us in the fight for worker liberation!
