September 5—Protests erupt throughout the US over the government decision to end the DACA program which protected from deportation unauthorized immigrants who had arrived as children.
USA, September 5 – Thousands of young immigrants and their allies responded quickly and boldly to the Trump administration’s suspension of the DACA program. They are already walking out of school, rallying, meeting and marching. And, in Los Angeles, many are welcoming our party’s call for communism to end all borders.
DACA was an Obama-era initiative. It gave temporary work permits and relief from deportation to 800,000 undocumented immigrant youths who have lived almost their entire lives in the US. Now they are threatened with deportation to countries they don’t remember, where they may know nobody at all, and whose language they may not even speak. About three-quarters of the DACA youths – also called “Dreamers” – were brought to the US from Mexico as children.
This cruel racist attack is meant to egg on the same fascist scum who shouted Nazi slogans and flaunted KKK emblems in Charlottesville. It’s meant to terrorize immigrant workers and youth and force them to accept slave-labor jobs in the fields, factories and elsewhere. It’s part of US capitalism’s long history of vicious wage slavery.
Irish coal miners and domestic servants and Chinese workers who built the western railways in the 19th century… Eastern Europeans recruited for the steel mills and Mexican “braceros” in the 20th…Filipino/a, Haitian and other Caribbean workers in the health industry in the 21st…. They and many more have been super-exploited by bosses competing to maximize profits with “divide and conquer” employment practices, immigration quotas and racist lies.
DACA was a continuation of this tradition, not a break from it. Major US imperialists and their politicians realized they would increasingly need young immigrants in the workforce and in the military. When liberal Democratic Senator Kamala Harris said that “DACA recipients make our nation strong,” that’s what she meant.
US rulers also saw that the economic crisis they had helped to create in Mexico was fueling mass anger and political instability. They feared rebellion there – and still do. They hoped that building illusions about the “American DREAM” would defuse tensions while strengthening the US military for possible intervention.
Trump shattering the “DREAM” is like Trump promoting white nationalism: he is compromising US imperialism’s ability to build the multi-racial patriotism it needs among soldiers and industrial workers to confront its imperialist competitors in ever-widening wars. His enemies are not all our friends!
Not patriotism, but international working-class unity! Not a path to citizenship, but a path to communist revolution!
Only communism can tear down all of capitalism’s walls and erase all of capitalism’s borders. Only in communist society will we all be able to live without fear and work without exploitation.
Communist production “from each according to ability and commitment, to each according to need” will create the material basis for wiping out racism and xenophobia. Finally all humans, individually and collectively, will realize our full potential.
This is no “DREAM.” This is a PLAN.
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