Why It Is Suicidal To Rely On the Democrats To Fight For Immigrants

January 18, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The Democrats claim to be the champions of the immigrants while they hinge everything on how much they will concede to Trump, while the persecution of immigrants and their leaders becomes more blatant, intimidating, and unapologetic every day.  They are more concerned with working out a deal with fascists who get more aggressive and open about it every day than they are about actually defending in the concrete the masses of people suffering this.  Their “deals” will go in the familiar pattern called out by Bob Avakian years ago in “The Truth About Right-Wing Conspiracy…And Why Clinton and the Democrats Are No Answer.”

Ask yourself: who backed NAFTA, which further distorted Mexican agriculture and drove more than a million off the land … with nowhere to go?  Who backed other measures of globalization, which had similar effects?  Who backed Bush in the Iraq War and who undertook their own wars in the Middle East, which further drove people into exile?  Who backed the War on Drugs, which in turn gave rise to the explosive growth of gangsterism throughout the hemisphere—including its integration into the state and the horrific violence among the masses that arose in its wake?  Who, in fact, deported the most people of any administration, even if they did it out of sight and on the down-low?  Who militarized the border just as much if not more than the fascists?  If you answered the Clintons, Obama, and the congressional Democratic leadership to the above questions, you would be right.

The Democrats differ with the fascists over how best to exploit, control, and—when they deem it necessary—drive out the immigrants, and not whether to exploit and control them.  They will make whatever compromises they think serve their larger interests—which at the end of the day is the preservation of the capitalist-imperialist system which they share with the fascists, even as they differ (sometimes sharply) over how.  They pose as friends and call for some reforms in large part to try to control and derail battles waged by immigrants, and other groups fighting oppression; they will not hesitate to sacrifice those fights when they see it is in conflict with what they deem to be “larger” interests.  Even now, we hear talk of going along with Trump’s demands for the sake of the elections for the Senate and for the House of Representatives in “the Republican states.”

“Realistic action” on this right now is not busying yourself with registering people to vote and raising money for candidates.  “Realistic action” is thousands, then millions, of native-born Americans and citizens—including especially white people—putting something on the line to stand with the immigrants, in demonstrations and other forms of solidarity.  Without this, the juggernaut will roll on relentlessly.  “Realistic action” is drawing the links between this and the need to drive out this whole fascist regime, as soon as possible, by bringing forward and mobilizing an aroused people at least more determined than the fascists and racists who have been marshaled by Trump and Pence.

Even more “realistic”—in the sense of actually dealing with reality, as it is and as it could be—is this: asking yourself whether a world divided into a handful of nations that fight among each other over how to divide and plunder the planet and the vast majority of humanity that is exploited, uprooted, driven from home and all they know, and then persecuted and exploited again is the best we can do.  In fact, what we have today, with all the horrors bound up in a world where hundreds of millions are uprooted and persecuted in search of survival, is NOT the only possible way that humanity can organize itself.  There is a blueprint for a totally different world embodied in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America and there is a body of work and method and approach brought forward by Bob Avakian that gets into the reasons behind that Constitution and the path forward for humanity.

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