LOS ANGELES, USA, February 22—The US Government has just released its latest guidelines for attacks on immigrants. Deportation officers will conduct more raids in immigrant communities, detain people without criminal convictions, and deport people for minor infractions like driving without a license. Anyone who has been in the US for less than two years can be deported without a hearing. Parents can be arrested for paying a smuggler to bring their children across the border.
Even with 10,000 new federal agents, they can’t deport 11 million people immediately. But they can create mass terror and uncertainty. This is a return to the days that many of us lived in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 80s—a period where immigrant worker comrades led the way in fighting the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, immigration raids, apartheid, and racist police terror. (See Fighting “Migra” Terror Vol. 7, No 20)
This order follows mass deportation raids which swept up hundreds of unauthorized immigrants over a three-day period earlier in February. One person deported that week was Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an unauthorized immigrant who had lived and worked in the US for more than twenty years. Garcia de Rayos, like millions of our class brothers and sisters, was forced by imperialist exploitation to migrate from Mexico to the US where she used a social security number that was not hers. For this “crime”—considered by the US rulers to be a felony—she has been deported to Mexico and separated from her US-born children.
Millions of immigrant workers were deported under Obama. Millions more will be deported under the new rules. This is the capitalist rule of law, enforced by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Yet this is the same rule of law celebrated by lawyers and liberals when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily stopped Trump’s racist ban on refugees and travel to the US from seven Muslim countries. It is the same rule of law that will provide the guidelines for a new, more carefully written, “Muslim ban” in coming weeks.
Capitalist laws establish, regulate and patrol the borders between capitalist nation-states. Different groups of bosses may disagree about immigration policy, but they all agree that borders should serve the interests of the capitalist class. Sometimes they need cheap labor; sometimes (often at the same time) they need workers terrorized; sometimes they want to improve their international reputation.
The current rulers are demonizing immigrant workers, building racism among American workers so they blame immigrants for the job losses in US basic industry caused by the capitalist crisis of overproduction. Workers must reject this racist division and unite against our real class enemy—the capitalists and their system.
We don’t call on the bosses to open the borders. We are organizing a revolutionary communist movement to smash the bosses and their borders. This movement owes much to the commitment of immigrant workers who provide leadership to our party. Their experience of revolutionary class struggle on both sides of national borders is an example to our entire party.
We are building one international communist party. We don’t have “national parties” in an international organization—just one party. We are fighting for a world with no nations and no borders. We’ll welcome workers from anywhere and encourage people to travel to build solidarity with people from different regions—just like we do now.
We won’t have laws, a President, courts or copss enforcing the laws. We’ll engage in collective work and struggle around our basic principles of from each according to commitment, to each according to need.
The rule of law is the rule of the whole capitalist system, Democrats or Republicans, liberals or fascists. We don’t try to take the fascists to court or elect lesser-evil politicians. Our task is to mobilize the masses to smash the capitalists and their state and build a communist society in its place.
Front Page
