by Cristobal Cavazos, published on Socialist Action, June 16, 2024
The June 4th announcement by President Joseph Biden that the right to asylum was all but over is a reactionary move by a reactionary administration. Ironically, 85 years ago to the day, the racist 1924 US Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, tragically refused asylum to close to 1000 Jews onboard the MS St. Louis. Many of passengers subsequently met their death during the Nazis Holocaust.
Roosevelt’s Johnson-Reed Immigration Act prioritized immigration from Western and Northern European countries and all but banned immigration from the rest of the world. This system, which inspired Adolf Hitler, enabled consular authorities during the 1930s to deny visas to Jews attempting to flee the spread of Nazism in Europe, including the family of Anne Frank.
And this legacy lives on in Biden’s immigration policy and imperialist objectives. In early March Biden called on the fascistic Donald Trump to “join” him in supporting a war on immigrants via a bipartisan “security bill,” the “toughest this country has ever seen.” Biden’s proposal would have taken away (months ago!) the human right of immigrants to claim asylum in the US. It would have greatly expanded immigrant detention facilities and the border-industrial complex as a whole, while granting presidents the executive authority to shut down ports of entry – an assault on democratic rights that will inevitably be used to target workers.
But Biden couldn’t wait for Trump’s approval. He rejected the call of the grassroots immigrant rights movement for an executive order issuing work permits for the 12 million undocumented workers in the US. These 12 million, the so-called “illegal” work force in the US, make up disproportionately the “essential” work force in US factories, warehouses and construction sites today. With little or no forms of legal protection they are subject to periodic ICE persecution and deportation, not infrequently accompanied by the instant denial of wages and benefits – a boon to unscrupulous employers who forever profit by a permanent low wage, non-union labor pool of immigrant workers.
Biden’s executive order effectively aimed at shutting down the border of “illegal” crossings that reached an average of 2,500 migrants a day in a given week – a number which has not been reached since the stock market dive of 2018, which had, along with the Great Recession a pushing affect.
Border crossing have always operated with a “push-pull” logic. That is, when there are jobs and economic growth in the US there is that pull, when there are few or no jobs there is a push. Also there is a major push when the US sabotages countries that dare organize resistance to the plunder of their resources and stand up to US imperialism as with revolutionary Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Venezuela. Any nation that moves to nationalize US or other imperialist-owned land, resources or foreign “investments,” i.e. to oppose the plundering of their wealth, are made to pay a heavy price, including being subject to US-backed sanctions, coups and/or confiscation of their foreign bank accounts. They are effectively excluded from the world marketplace.
Even Nicaragua’s more limited measures to defend its sovereignty under the Sandinista government, have seen the US brutally respond.
Biden, while calling out Donald Trump publicly to gain electoral advantage from rightists, worked closely with Trump ally, the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, to privately, ensure $95 billion for US imperial interest-backed wars abroad, that is, the US- NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and for ever-increasing $billions to fund the racist genocide in Palestine. This while neither party says anything about the more than 850 migrants who died attempting to cross the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022 and many more who died in 2023 and 2024 as the militarization of the border maliciously pushes inevitable crossings to more and more dangerous places.
Indeed, according to the Council of Foreign Relations, “Since the start of Israel’s war with Hamas on October 7, 2023, the United States has enacted bipartisan legislation providing at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel, which includes $3.8 billion from a bill in March 2024 (in line with the current MOU) and $8.7 billion from a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024.”
The fronts in Palestine and the Ukraine – both of which could be catalysts for World War III via nuclear armed Iran and Russia – are strategic in the overall desperation of US imperialism as it increasingly confronts China’s economic growth and influence globally in the ever-intensifying inter-imperialist competition for domination in the globalized world marketplace. (I don’t think Iran is nuclear armed but we know that Israel is- jb)
The differences between the two US capitalist parties shows just how minor they are in the face their uniting to militarily back and fund the Zionist genocide – to date 35 thousand Palestinians slaughtered – an unmitigated horror called out across the world. In the US, with youth in the vanguard building pro-Palestine campus encampments across the country, enduring 3,000 arrests, demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire, divestment and university withdrawal of imposed student punishments, recent polls indicate that a majority of the US population opposes the ongoing genocide.
Today, as Democrats and Republicans unite to prop up the fascistic Zelensky regime in Ukraine, replete with its open fascists like the Azov Battalion integrated into the US/NATO funded Ukrainian Army and with fascistic Svoboda Party figures in government, the same Democrats and Republicans now reunite in their racist frenzy to scapegoat and deport immigrants for the nation’s growing social crises.
Though so-called “progressives” like Alexandra Ocasio Cortez call left criticisms of Biden’s immigration policies “privileged” what must be called out as privileged is the Democratic Party and its “immigrant rights” non-profit-industrial complex enablers like the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant Rights and similarly styled “Immigrant Rights” Democratic Party front groups around the US. These and related corporate-funded NGOs were largely silent in the face of Obama’s three million deportations. They remain silent in the face of Biden’s descent into the fascism of the US Republican Party right. Committed to the Democrat’s corporate agenda and to Biden’s destruction of the human right to asylum, how could it be otherwise? Today’s Democratic Party-funded NGOs privately took in millions from grants and contracts via their insider status with Democratic Party officialdom and “liberal” foundations that have flourished on the status quo, albeit with Brown faces at the podium – i.e., with “identity” politics and rainbow capitalism masking US imperialism.
Only an immigrant rights mass movement with a working class perspective can force the US to its knees with general strikes, worker strikes and a socialist, immigrant worker consciousness. “No human being is illegal!” “No to all racist deportations!”
The rise in labor struggles and strikes nationally and internationally can provide a spark similar to the 1930s, when fighting class-conscious immigrant workers helped to lead the radicalizing labor movement. Socialist activists today can play a leading role in helping to fuse the growing struggle for immigrant rights with the struggle to qualitatively expand today’s organized trade union movement into an independent, united, democratic fighting force for all humanity, forever relegating capitalism and its twin racist and imperialist parties to the dustbin of history. Join us!