Trump and his cohorts are justifying their war on immigrants by viciously demonizing them as “rapists” and “vermin” from “shithole countries” who are “infesting” America. This is the same language Adolf Hitler used to target and dehumanize Jews, Roma people (gypsies), and others in Nazi Germany.
Laura Ingraham of Fox News recently
chimed in to the fascist chorus, expressing her outrage that today millions more nonwhite immigrants—especially Brown people—live in the U.S. compared to past decades: “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” she complained, whining that “Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”
Who Is Stealing from Whom?
Motherfucker, did the people of Mexico vote for America to steal half their land in 1846? Did El Salvadorans and Guatemalans vote for the U.S. to arm death squads and military juntas that massacred well over 150,000 people during the 1980s, turning their countries into uninhabitable hellholes? Did these millions of people “like” that? Did they “like” being forced to trek thousands of miles, risking their lives, to escape near-certain death?
Ingraham’s poison is a version of the America First lie that immigrants are “taking advantage of” America and “stealing” from “real Americans.”
Stealing? You stole this whole country from the Native peoples through genocide! You stole the Southwest—including Texas and California, now two of the U.S.’s largest and wealthiest states—through war with Mexico. You stole Hawai`i and Puerto Rico through invasions and war. And you bartered with other colonial predators to get the rest: You grabbed the Mississippi and the continent’s heartland from France and Alaska from Russia. And just to be clear, the Louisiana Purchase from France and the 1846-48 war on Mexico weren’t about expanding “freedom”—they were about expanding the slave system!
You stole the very lives of Africans who’d been captured and brought to America in chains! You built up this country on the backs of enslaved Black people, and made millions buying and selling human beings like so much cattle, splitting families up whenever it suited the slave masters and slave traders—a savage practice that echoes today in how you’re ripping immigrant families apart at the border.
Then you accumulated more wealth by brutally exploiting wave after wave of immigrants—in cotton and agriculture, building the railroads, in your factories—people from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. (In the early 1900s, a quarter of the entire workforce exploited by U.S. capital was made up of immigrants.)
White Supremacy and Xenophobia: As American as Apple Pie
Through all this, Black people, Native American people, and nonwhite immigrants have been subjected to white supremacist oppression—treated like pariahs who aren’t fully or really part of the so-called “American people.”
When the needs of capitalism-imperialism and maintaining white supremacy demanded it, immigrants were terrorized, vilified, and stripped of their rights—like the Chinese after they worked like slaves building the railroads; the Japanese-Americans who were forced into concentration camps during World War 2; or the 1.3 million Mexicans who were driven out of the country during the 1950s after having been the backbone of the Southwest’s economy since the 1920s. Black people toiled in your fields as slaves and then as sharecroppers, then toiled some more in your factories—the last hired and the first fired—only to be cast out in recent decades when it was more profitable for the capitalists to exploit people in oppressed countries around the world.
A Worldwide Refugee Crisis Driven by Imperialist Destruction and Plunder
The U.S. and other, mostly Western, powers grew into imperialist empires, stretching their tentacles around the planet. The workings of capitalism-imperialism led to an enormous concentration of wealth and power in a handful of wealthy First World countries, and mass poverty, dislocation, and oppression in the Third World countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. This global system of exploitation and oppression, its wars, and the accelerating impact of climate change have generated massive migrations of millions seeking refuge and a way to live.
Faced with this, America’s rulers (and those of other Western imperialist powers) are increasingly relying on militarized borders and mass deportations to maintain their oppressive order and hold on society. This is why, even before the Trump/Pence regime escalated the assault on immigrants to new, fascist levels of brutality, Obama deported far more immigrants than any of his predecessors, all the while touting “border security.”
Did the many millions and millions enslaved, crippled, killed, or dislocated by U.S. capitalism-imperialism—inside or outside U.S. borders—have any choice, any voice or any “vote” in any of this?
No! Blaming immigrants for problems in America is like a rapist blaming his victim—or in America’s case, its millions upon millions of victims.
Exploitation and Abuse of Immigrants: Woven into U.S. History, Society, and Capitalism-Imperialism
Trump’s fascist assault on immigrants isn’t a repudiation of America’s history and values—as the Democrats and the media mouthpieces for this system claim. It’s an extreme concentration of that history and this system’s “values” now taken to the level of outright fascism and genocidal ethnic cleansing. Capitalism and white supremacy have been inseparably woven together throughout U.S. history right up to today. The oppression of immigrants and the creation of refugees are built into the very functioning of this whole system.
This is the America that Laura Ingraham the rest of the fascists—and yes, the Democrats—know, love, and want to maintain—even as they have sharp differences over how to do so.
The Democrats Are No Answer
Look at how the Democratic Party’s leadership is responding to the Trump/Pence regime’s fascist rampage against immigrants. They raise some criticisms of the regime’s immigration policies, but frame them in terms of what will “really make America secure” or “strong.” They refuse to make Trump/Pence’s Nazi assault on immigrants the moral and political dividing line it is. Why? Because the system they, too, represent can’t do without white supremacy and the abuse of immigrants, and a serious effort to challenge glaring injustices, much less uproot them, would unravel America’s oppressive social fabric. So instead, their focus—especially during elections—is on “jobs, the economy, and healthcare.”
In short, in the name of “political realism,” they are training millions to see things through the lens of “America’s interests,” to conciliate with racism, xenophobia, and fascism, and put American lives and their own economic well-being first—as immigrant children are being tortured and migrants are being sent to their deaths.
It DOESN’T Have to Be This Way—All This Suffering Is Completely Unnecessary
There’s nothing legitimate, much less emancipating, about any of this. As Bob Avakian (BA), the leader of the revolution and the architect of a new communism, has said, “There is nothing sacred to us about the USA, as it is presently constituted, or about the borders of the U.S. as they are presently constituted. Quite the opposite.” (BAsics 3:20)
In short, the horrors being inflicted on immigrants and refugees are intolerable and utterly unnecessary. People must NOT be forced to live this way—and they
don’t need to live this way. The
Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian, provides a sweeping vision and concrete plan for a radically new society built on a fundamentally different economic and political basis. A liberating society that aims to overcome the great divides that exist between those who work in the realm of ideas and those who mainly work with their hands, between men and women, and between different nationalities and regions; that protects the planet’s ecosystems; and that is aiming to advance revolution worldwide to uproot all exploitation and oppression in order to emancipate humanity. As part of this, “The orientation of the New Socialist Republic in North America is to welcome immigrants from all over the world who have a sincere desire to contribute to the goals and objectives of this Republic, as set forth in this Constitution and in laws and policies which are established and enacted in accordance with this Constitution.” (From the
Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, Article II, Section 3, H. Immigrants, Citizenship and Asylum.)
The Fight Right Now for an Actual Revolution
Creating such a new revolutionary society is possible, but ONLY on the basis of overthrowing this system and dismantling its institutions through an actual revolution. We need to be building the movement for this revolution now, so that this system can be overthrown, as soon as the conditions for that momentous, historic struggle have been brought into being. This movement welcomes immigrants, refugees, and all oppressed peoples—in fact it’s urgent that thousands and ultimately millions join in.
We need to Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution—mobilize people to fight like hell right now to beat back and STOP these vicious attacks on immigrants as well as other key outrages of this system. As the Revolutionary Communist Party statement on strategy,
HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution (HWCW), states:
We need to oppose and disrupt the moves of the ruling powers to isolate, “encircle,” brutalize, mass incarcerate and murderously repress the people who have the hardest life under this system and who most need this revolution. Weneed to “encircle” them—by bringing forth wave upon wave of people rising up in determined opposition to this system.
All the while we’re doing this, we need to lift people’s sights to revolution by spreading BA’s pathbreaking leadership, HWCW, and the website revcom.us far and wide, and concretely organize people into the movement for an actual revolution. As we’re doing this, we also need to unite with a great many people coming from very many different perspectives to step outside the killing confines of politics as usual—as defined by the Republicans and Democrats—and drive out the fascist regime that imperils humanity and the Earth itself.
And as for the “debate” about who are the “real Americans”—people have to STOP thinking like Americans and start thinking about emancipating humanity!
STOP the Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants and the Militarization of the Border!
Immigrants are full human beings, not “illegals” or criminals to be demonized, terrorized, hunted down, locked up and thrown out.
Revolution—Nothing Less! This System Cannot Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown!
