Los Angeles, USA—“The immigration raids that this Mr. Trump has ordered are making life harder for us. My wife is very afraid of what can happen to us,” said an industrial worker who reads Red Flag.
“We have to go out into the streets to protest and organize in the factories for a Communist world without borders,” answered a comrade party member.
The worker thought about it and said, “I don’t know, many of my friends say that we should be very careful and if possible not go out of our houses, except for the most basic things.”
Other workers also expressed their opinions when asked about the immigration raids ordered by Trump:
A garment worker commented, “I like the idea of Communism and a world without borders. But every morning I leave my house with great doubt about whether I’m going to return in the afternoon. My co-workers don’t want to talk about this. I think it’s so they won’t feel overwhelmed, and they want to pretend like nothing is happening, even though they have a lot of fear.”
“We only have to put up with eight years of Trump, and hope that a new Democratic administration comes in that will help us,” said another, an industrial worker.
A new friend of the Party who came from Honduras expressed a lot of enthusiasm. She said, “When there are marches, invite me. I want to protest. I like the Red Flag newspaper— and we have to do something.”
“To think that if we don’t do anything, things will turn out better is to walk passively to extermination,” said a veteran comrade who is a former garment worker.
“Let’s go to the struggle,” said a garment worker when he was leaving the factory and receiving Red Flag.
These conversations show two key aspects within the racist process of deportations: on one side the fear of acting, and anger together with the desire to fight on the other. In this we can see a contradiction, not of contradicting oneself, but a dialectical materialist contradiction.
By sharpening this struggle against fear, we are strengthening the working class’ anger. We must turn this anger into communist class consciousness, and see the collective struggle as the best way to fight as the working class for a world without walls or borders.
The other side of the contradiction is passivity. It includes the wrong idea of relying on other “lesser evil” bosses, the Democrats. During the administration of the Democrat Obama, he also deported hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers. This has been the bosses’ plan, both Republicans and Democrats.
An attack against one sector of the working class is an attack against all workers. The political struggle with these workers continues. We explain to them that this is one of the aspects of fascism that the bosses are trying to implement.
But, we masses of immigrant and citizen workers are going to show that we will not be passive victims, but instead fighters against fascism and for a communist world.
Our response must be organized and careful, but the political struggle for Communism is our best defense.
We have invited these friends to participate in protests, study groups and social activities. Some of them have seen that there is a different atmosphere in the streets, that you breathe pure air with the will to fight and not of fear.
Overcoming the fear of fascism with a vision of a communist world is to advance under fire. It is resolving the contradiction between fear and struggle.
We understand clearly that deportations mean losing a job and sometimes the family. It means facing an uncertain future, sometimes full of violence and extreme poverty. Many citizen or immigrant workers, with and without legal documents, have a lot of anxiety about what may happen with these racist deportation attacks.
The recent protests against deportations show that the masses are not sitting by with their arms folded. The response to our communist literature also shows a much more important aspect: that they can be mobilized to fight for a communist world without borders.