Global migration has been on the rise, at this time estimated at 281 million people seeking safety and security, as well as basic survival. People’s homelands have been disrupted by war, climate change, the inability to live off the land, and fear of the actions of their governments. This is the story of the history of the United States, where 44.8 million total foreign-born are living. In the rest of the Americas, massive displacement of people also results from the years of U.S. imperialism & political meddling in countries like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, and others.
Corporations can go where they please without the hardships and suffering of the people struggling for the future of their children and themselves. Not too long ago, this quotation on the Statue of Liberty was viewed as the standard for our nation of Immigrants: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Today, the Southern U.S./Mexico Borderlands has become its opposite, where fascistic policies attack the human rights of thousands each day.
American residents are always under surveillance when crossing the border. So are immigrants, especially Central Americans, whose exodus from poverty and violence by drug cartels and governments is confronted at the U.S./Mexico border by militarized enforcement from both countries. Thousands are deported from the U.S. without any hearing before a judge. The unaccompanied children have been deported back to the violence that they fled from in the first place. Families live in tents and go without their basic needs. They face further violence for months and months, waiting for their number to be called, so they can receive an application to enter the U.S. The growth in arrests, detentions, and deportations only benefits corporations that exploit the desperate ones lucky enough to find a job.
Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent an estimated $324 billion on immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, for-profit prisons and immigrant detention centers were guaranteed increased public dollars, as were companies providing air travel to return deported people to their native lands. A recent report from the Migration Policy Institute showed that immigration enforcement agencies received $24 billion in 2018, or $4.4 billion more than they did in 2012. This amounts to 34 percent more than the $17.9 billion allocated for all other principal federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Secret Service, Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
Spreading Fascism to the Border
From 2003 to 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is responsible for immigration and for non-border enforcement, spending grew by 85 percent, from $3.3 billion to $7.4 billion. ICE chronically misleads appropriators, engages in fiscal mismanagement, and ignores attempts at congressional oversight. In their annual budget requests, ICE falsely claims additional needs, alleging rising immigrant populations in their custody. Besides artificially inflating operational needs, ICE routinely functions as an agency exempt from congressional oversight, as though taxpayers wrote the agency a blank check. ICE routinely overspends its budget for enforcement and detention, then pleads with Congress to financially bail out the agency.
In 1925, Adolf Hitler wrote of his admiration of America’s immigration laws in Mein Kampf. Under the new American fascism being developed by our ruling class, the treatment of immigrants is even worse. The colossal rise of funding for CBP (Customs and Border Protection) has steadily transformed southern border communities into a heavily militarized zone, where the number of border agents doubled from F.Y. 2003 to F.Y. 2016. A little-known 1953 law defined the border as a region covering 100-miles inland, where migrants and even citizens could be stopped and interrogated for immigration status.
Today, the use of that power is being escalated. This authority covers 200 million people in the U.S., giving ICE the ability to function as a fascist national police force. After the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, the border tactical police force (BORTAC) was deployed to protests there, in Washington, D.C., and in Portland, Oregon. United We Dream reports that ICE has agreements with 78 local law enforcement agencies in close to half of all states, granting the authority to enforce immigration law to 1,514 officers.
Exploitation
Immigration laws have always been used as a jobs control measure, guaranteeing the exploitation of migrants and thus holding down conditions for all workers. In particular, the ruling class has ensured its profits in agriculture by super-exploiting immigrant labor. The North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) caused the displacement of small farmers in Mexico off their lands, when Mexico was flooded with cheap corn produced with mechanical harvesters and government subsidies in the U.S. Midwest. Unable to compete, many Mexican small farmers became legal “guest workers” in the U.S. or joined the millions of undocumented.
Sonny Perdue (Secretary of Agriculture under Trump) explained the intention H-2A, the U.S. guest worker program for agriculture, in a January 2020 speech to growers. He said, “to separate immigration, which is people wanting to become citizens, [from] a temporary, legal guest worker program… That’s what agriculture needs, and that’s what we want. It doesn’t offend people who are anti-immigrant because they don’t want more immigrant citizens here.” This continued discrimination is clearly evident in the proposed Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021, to be voted on in the U.S. Senate.
Anti-immigrant propaganda ignores the financial contributions they make, on top of the wages they get underpaid. An estimated half of the nation’s undocumented immigrants are believed to be working under fake Social Security numbers, which means they are paying taxes into Social Security. The ITEP (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) estimates that state and local governments also take in $11.74 billion a year in various taxes and fees paid by undocumented immigrants. Yet, Social Security and other benefits are not collected by those who have paid into the programs — in essence, subsidizing U.S. retired workers.
In addition, the money sent to relatives back home by documented and undocumented immigrants has become the lifeblood of many developing countries, which would face even more poverty and emigration without it. Mexico received $36 billion in 2019, $40.6 billion in 2020. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador received a record $17 billion in 2019 alone. Worldwide, remittances have reached a level of $500 billion! Billions more are made by the companies that run this money transfer industry.
Trump’s wall was a political distraction and manipulation to consolidate his political base, especially its white supremacist section. However, we should also remember the anti-immigrant actions of Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton. His IIRIRA 1996 bill established the deportation machine, that Human Rights Watch says “eliminated key defenses against deportation and subjected many more immigrants, including legal permanent residents, to detention and deportation.” He also extended a 325-mile fence along the border between California and Mexico in 1993. Barack Obama’s administration deported 2.5 million people, more than any President, leading activists to call him the “Deporter-in-Chief.”
Whether Democrat or Republican administrations, immigration policies have always served the interests of the ruling class. In past eras, their goal was getting cheap labor in, then throwing them out. Today, immigration policy serves them as part of new fascist methods for controlling the dispossessed on both sides of the border. The separation of families and caging of children, the immediate expulsions without due process, and Title 42 exclusions blamed on COVID-19 are all part of an immoral system of exploitation and unnecessary death.
What Must We Do?
The attack on immigrants/migrants and refugees is not only immoral in and of itself, it’s part of the ruling class shift to fascist methods of rule. It might seem only to be an attack on the migrant population, but it is, in fact, an attack on democratic rights and thus on the working class as a whole. The public’s money has gone to technology and military corporations instead of to social needs. In class unity lies our strength.
There is growing resistance, such as the activism over “the right to remain” in homelands and the mobilizations at the US-Mexico border. We must support their demands and demonstrate our class unity by calling for abolishing ICE as a first step to ending all aspects of militarization at the border. We must demand the repeal of the Migrant Protection Protocols and ensure due process for asylees. The government must reunite all families that it separated and provide real immigration reform for all who have been living in and contributing to the United States.
People in America and across the world have the same needs and demands, and all are part of the same objectively revolutionary process. By uniting in defense of immigrants and against every fascist policy being used against us all, we strengthen everyone’s struggle to live free of poverty and government violence. We take a step towards a society free of exploitation, discrimination, and class domination. RC
May/June 2021. vol.31. Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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