There are aspects that are terribly old and frighteningly new concerning the most recent crisis along the Mexican American border. After years of ramping up deportations and militarization and a constant deluge of anti-immigrant propaganda, the American government is now currently and openly warehousing immigrant children. While we should never lose sight of the particular histories or specificities of any burning issue of our time, the people must recognize this attack on immigrant children as a part of the opening up of the face of fascism developing here in the United States of America. The American public is facing a deep moral crisis and is being forced to contend with questions that strike at the very heart of our common human experience.
Who are these children? Firstly, they are refugees of global capital, which allows money to flow freely, electronically, across national boundaries and borders, yet demands the caging of human beings for doing the same. More specifically, they are Central American youth comprised of various nations whose development over the course of centuries cannot be seen separately from the development of U.S. imperialism that arose out of the U.S. capitalist class.
As early as the 1840s Cornelius Vanderbilt had eyes set for the economic conquest of the newly founded republic of Nicaragua. In the 1850s William Walker overthrew that very government in order to reinstitute slavery. From those earliest days to the later toppling of Guatemala’s nationalist government of Jacobo Arbenz at the behest of United Fruit, to Reagan’s dirty wars, to Obama’s complicity in the most recent coup in Honduras as well as countless other incidents and examples that could be cited, it is readily evident that the various peoples of Central America have suffered the boot of the northern imperialists since near the very inception of their republics. These children did not wander aimlessly from random instances of poverty or corruption. There are historical roots to their current displacement.
What is the public’s stance on the broader issues? Pew Research Center in poll after poll shows that the American public is overwhelmingly in favor of immigration reform and a path towards the normalization and legalization of undocumented workers and their children throughout the country. Clearly on this as with a myriad of other issues the American people and the American government are not in step with one another. Where the thinking of the American people must begin to move, however, is in their thinking that these children are separate and unique from their own. When Mike Mcaul, the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, says that he “saw some 17-year-olds that I thought looked more like a threat coming into the United States” he speaks also too against the Trayvon Martins and Kelly Thomas’s of the world, the propertyless and assumed penniless whose hunger day by day appears to be more and more threatening.
As the polarization widens between those who own and those who do not, the owning class must turn to fascist means and in turn normalize their fascist measures to the point where children are being scapegoated for their own captivity. The depravity and cruelty of the global owning class knows no bounds. More than ever they are a global class. More than ever so are we.
These children are our children. Our children deserve better. Our class must awaken to break these chains along these borders, along all borders and eventually against borders themselves. These children are ours. The children of the world within and without our borders are our children. We must fight for a better tomorrow. Their future is up to us.
