Down With Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Drive!

Pelosi, the Squad—Democrats Are Enemies of Immigrant Rights

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The sadistic treatment of immigrants at the border has once again become a political football for the two bourgeois parties. Tens of thousands of asylum-seekers are jailed in overcrowded and filthy detention camps, while military-style I.C.E. raids and deportations stoke fear, threatening to tear apart families and destroy livelihoods. The current Commander-in-Chief revels in unadulterated nativist bigotry, but Washington’s war on immigrants is thoroughly bipartisan. Barack Obama and his predecessors enforced the same racist program—from the militarization of the border to nightmarish detentions and mass deportations. The Democrats’ chastising of Trump for his brutality is a cynical attempt to cast themselves as the party of “decency,” aiming to dupe working people and minorities into supporting their bid for the White House in 2020.

The Republican and Democratic parties represent the capitalist class, whose rule is based on the exploitation of labor and racial oppression at home and the drive to strengthen imperialist domination abroad. Creating the desperate conditions that force countless migrants to flee north, the U.S. imperialists have for over a century ravaged their semicolonial backyard in Latin America and the Caribbean through economic subjugation enforced by military intervention, coups and puppet regimes. These are the workings of imperialism—a system in which a handful of the richest, most advanced capitalist countries have divided and redivided the world as they compete for control of markets, raw materials and access to cheap labor. Interimperialist rivalries have already resulted in two world wars.

The current feud in Washington kicked off in late June when four black and minority first-time Democratic members of Congress known as “the Squad,” opposed a bill funding border police facilities. Trump launched an anti-immigrant tirade against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, telling them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” (They are all U.S. citizens.) The four have received death threats, especially Omar, who, as a Muslim born in Somalia, is particularly targeted. (read on)