Statement by the Chicago Antiwar Coalition (CAWC)
The Chicago Anti-war Coalition (CAWC) unconditionally condemns the provocative and racist attacks against immigrants across the U.S.
CAWC particularly condemns the recent violent response to protests against the actions of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the federal government Department of Homeland Security in Los Angeles, Chicago, and many other cities.
The decision by the Trump Administration to call up the California National Guard and War Secretary Hegseth’s threat to mobilize the Marine Corps in opposition to the stand of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom is a severe provocation against defense and sanctuary for immigrants, and to the countless numbers of people who have come out over the years against government crackdown on immigrants. It is an imposition of federal state terrorism.
CAWC stands with the thousands who have in recent days opposed these federal government attacks in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities. We call on everyone to be as active as possible in opposing these divide- and-conquer racist tactics, these “law and order” tactics.
The opposition by many governors and local mayors and legislators shows that this is an important political moment.
Trump and goons like Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth, and so-called border czar Tom Homan represent a section of the capitalist ruling class which refuses to accept the multinational character of the current U.S. population. They desperately hope that restrictive immigration enforcement will stanch the changing demographic reality.
They desperately hope to stop the drive of the American working class and other oppressed people to empower themselves in order to have a government of, for, and by the people based on peace and justice.
CAWC opposes this further glorification of the military which, stripped down to its essence, is a linchpin of the capitalist state and its drive to rule the world, including the U.S., for maximum profits for the big banks and corporations. And CAWC opposes the further promotion of law-and-order rhetoric by the government at all levels.
The raids carried out by Trump’s fascist goon squad aka ICE, are carried out under cover of a thin veneer of legality provided by U.S. ruling class immigration laws and other laws and often violate even these, such as with lack of due process of fair hearings on cases.
There is a long history of U.S. capitalist ruling class use of racist immigration enforcement—using the available ruling class parties, including Democrats in recent history, as well as the Republicans.
Even though many immigrants are in the U.S. because U.S. government interference in their countries has helped to create conditions of poverty and oppression, and even though these immigrants have been very important to various sections of the U.S. economy, the U.S. capitalist ruling class has insisted on continuing to use racism and the issue of migration to try to have the working class divided as much as possible. It uses force to try to stop all opposition.
This racist attack on indigenous people and immigrants is something the ruling class here has been doing since the days it first hit the shores that became the U.S.
For example, on the Pilgrims’ first encounter with Native Americans, William Bradford writes about “these savage barbarians.” By 1676, the minister Increase Mather wrote about the Puritans’ property rights over “the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers has given to us for a rightful possession.” Typical demonizing rhetoric included calling the Native People infidels, hell-hounds, and savages.
These Pilgrims and the other colonialists on their ship arrived to make a profit for themselves, for the corporation that sponsored them, and for the British Crown. Other people be damned.
The racist nature of the U.S. ruling class toward immigrants is shown in the Naturalization Act of 1790. This allows only free white persons of “good character” who have lived in the U.S. for two years to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents were denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in courts.
Then there was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and declared Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization even though from the 1850s Chinese immigrants were needed as cheap labor for the risky job of building transcontinental railroads, and working in gold mines, agriculture, and factories, especially in the garment industry.
In 1907, amid prejudice promoted in California that an influx of Japanese workers would cost white workers farming jobs and depress wages, immigration was restricted. And then Japanese loyal to the U.S. Constitution were interned during World War II and their property confiscated.
The taxonomies of “Hebrew race” and “Mongolic” immigrants that dictated restrictions of admissions to the U.S. in the early 1900s was white-supremacist ideology cloaked in pseudo-science. This followed on from the pseudo-science that declared African-Americans inferior.
The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 limits the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S. yearly through nationality quotas that favor immigration from Northern and Western European countries with “white people” who were mainly Protestant. The quotas limited immigration from countries with people who were predominantly Catholic or with a lot of Jewish migrants.
The Act completely excludes immigrants from Asia, aside from the U.S. colony of the Philippines and cheap labor from there.
Hitler wrote approvingly of the Act as Yale Law Professor James Whitman explained in his 2017 book Hitler‘s American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Nazis drew on the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Johnson-Reed Act in shaping the race laws of the Third Reich.
Labor shortages during World War ll prompted the U.S. government to start the Bracero Program, which allowed Mexican agricultural workers to enter the United States temporarily. The program lasted until 1964. The hypocrisy of allowing Mexican labor into the U.S. is shown by how, during the Great Depression of 1929-39, those in power turned against Mexican immigrants, blaming them for the nation’s economic troubles.
President Herbert Hoover led a wide-ranging campaign with the slogan “American Jobs for Real Americans.” White supremacists declared that this excluded Mexican immigrants. State and local governments in the Southwest and all across the country conducted “Mexican Repatriation” efforts with support and funding from the federal government. Historians estimate that at least one million people of Mexican descent were forcibly deported. This included many U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. Some research says that as many as 60% of those sent “home” to Mexico in the 1930s were U.S. citizens.
The Los Angeles government conducted raids on the Mexican community and this happened in other parts of the Southwest and in the Midwest. People were removed from jobs and deported, all to make the factory jobs they held “available for white people.” Major companies, including Ford, U.S. Steel, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, colluded by laying off thousands of workers of Mexican descent.
In 1935 a similar repatriation effort was instituted for Filipino immigrants after the Tydings-McDuffie Act set a plan for the Philippines to become an independent country and no longer a U.S. colony. The Act also instituted a new immigration quota of only 50 Filipino immigrants per year.
So President Trump was not out of this line of action when he implemented an Executive Order banning travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries in early 2017.
Soon thereafter, the Department of Justice began an aggressive new program, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, imposing special registration requirements on male temporary residents in the U.S. aged 16 and older, from 25 designated countries, mostly Arab and predominantly Muslim. These people were required to be interviewed and fingerprinted.
Trump is continuing this with his new ban on passage to the U.S. of people from a number of countries.
This is how the capitalist system has worked since its founding in the land that has become the U.S. In addition, ruling class crackdown on opposition is as old as the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798.
This all shows that the U.S. capitalist ruling class system is a system that is criminal, inhumane, anti-people. And it is continuing with the vicious and barbaric arrests and deportations of hard-working family people, or students who take a stand against U.S. government genocide of Palestinians and actions by its Israeli proxy, with the attacks on those who oppose the attacks on immigrants.
Don’t we need to work to get rid of this system and, instead, have a humane system?
Don’t we need to declare:
No to the U.S. Government’s inhumane immigration policies! Immigrants Are Welcome Here!