LETTERS, CRITICISM AND SUGGESTIONS
ICE Destruction of Families in San Diego Shows Need for Communism
Immigration raids in February in San Diego included an Asian market owned by a rich Korean immigrant family. Over two dozen workers, some who have worked there for many years, are being processed for deportation. The owners have not been prosecuted. Those deported include workers with US citizen children, who are devastated by the loss of their parents.
The Trump administration’s separation of young children from their parents at the border and other vicious policies have been in the news, but family-destroying deportations have been regular occurrences in Southern California for years. Last week, I spoke with a young woman student in Tijuana, Mexico, who explained why she spoke English well. She was a US citizen living with her family in Mexico because her father had been deported. In Tijuana, there is even a center for US military veterans who have been deported.
Not only Trump but other Republican and Democrat politicians have tried for decades to convince workers that US citizens would have more jobs if immigrants were kept out or deported. Economic research reported last year by UC Davis Professor Chloe East and others showed the opposite. The massive US deportation program called “Secure Communities” that deported 450,000 people from 2008 until it ended in 2014 also cost the jobs of 300,000 male US citizens. Most of these jobs were lost from US businesses that depended on immigrant labor.
The idea that anti-immigrant policies help US citizen workers is just one more on the list of vicious racist lies that US capitalist politics rests on. Lies, cruelty and exploitation are permanent features of capitalism, in the US and elsewhere. This will not end until communism wins and the masses run the world. Read and distribute the latest ICWP pamphlet “Fight for the Day When No Worker Will Be Called Foreigner,” and join us to mobilize the masses for communism.
—San Diego Red