Trump’s Nazi Assaults on Immigrants Aren’t a Repudiation of America’s History and Values—They’re a Concentration of Them!

They Must Be STOPPED! This System Cannot Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown!

| Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Trump and his cohorts are justifying their war on immigrants by viciously demonizing them as “rapists” and “vermin” from “shithole countries” who are “infesting” America. This is the same language Adolf Hitler used to target and dehumanize Jews, Roma people (gypsies), and others in Nazi Germany.

Laura Ingraham of Fox News recently chimed in to the fascist chorus, expressing her outrage that today millions more nonwhite immigrants—especially Brown people—live in the U.S. compared to past decades: “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” she complained, whining that “Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”

Who Is Stealing from Whom?

Motherfucker, did the people of Mexico vote for America to steal half their land in 1846? Did El Salvadorans and Guatemalans vote for the U.S. to arm death squads and military juntas that massacred well over 150,000 people during the 1980s, turning their countries into uninhabitable hellholes? Did these millions of people “like” that? Did they “like” being forced to trek thousands of miles, risking their lives, to escape near-certain death?

Ingraham’s poison is a version of the America First lie that immigrants are “taking advantage of” America and “stealing” from “real Americans.”

Stealing? You stole this whole country from the Native peoples through genocide! You stole the Southwest—including Texas and California, now two of the U.S.’s largest and wealthiest states—through war with Mexico. You stole Hawai`i and Puerto Rico through invasions and war. And you bartered with other colonial predators to get the rest: You grabbed the Mississippi and the continent’s heartland from France and Alaska from Russia. And just to be clear, the Louisiana Purchase from France and the 1846-48 war on Mexico weren’t about expanding “freedom”—they were about expanding the slave system!

You stole the very lives of Africans who’d been captured and brought to America in chains! You built up this country on the backs of enslaved Black people, and made millions buying and selling human beings like so much cattle, splitting families up whenever it suited the slave masters and slave traders—a savage practice that echoes today in how you’re ripping immigrant families apart at the border.

Then you accumulated more wealth by brutally exploiting wave after wave of immigrants—in cotton and agriculture, building the railroads, in your factories—people from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. (In the early 1900s, a quarter of the entire workforce exploited by U.S. capital was made up of immigrants.)

White Supremacy and Xenophobia: As American as Apple Pie

Through all this, Black people, Native American people, and nonwhite immigrants have been subjected to white supremacist oppression—treated like pariahs who aren’t fully or really part of the so-called “American people.”

When the needs of capitalism-imperialism and maintaining white supremacy demanded it, immigrants were terrorized, vilified, and stripped of their rights—like the Chinese after they worked like slaves building the railroads; the Japanese-Americans who were forced into concentration camps during World War 2; or the 1.3 million Mexicans who were driven out of the country during the 1950s after having been the backbone of the Southwest’s economy since the 1920s. Black people toiled in your fields as slaves and then as sharecroppers, then toiled some more in your factories—the last hired and the first fired—only to be cast out in recent decades when it was more profitable for the capitalists to exploit people in oppressed countries around the world.

A Worldwide Refugee Crisis Driven by Imperialist Destruction and Plunder

The U.S. and other, mostly Western, powers grew into imperialist empires, stretching their tentacles around the planet. The workings of capitalism-imperialism led to an enormous concentration of wealth and power in a handful of wealthy First World countries, and mass poverty, dislocation, and oppression in the Third World countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. This global system of exploitation and oppression, its wars, and the accelerating impact of climate change have generated massive migrations of millions seeking refuge and a way to live.

Faced with this, America’s rulers (and those of other Western imperialist powers) are increasingly relying on militarized borders and mass deportations to maintain their oppressive order and hold on society. This is why, even before the Trump/Pence regime escalated the assault on immigrants to new, fascist levels of brutality, Obama deported far more immigrants than any of his predecessors, all the while touting “border security.”

Did the many millions and millions enslaved, crippled, killed, or dislocated by U.S. capitalism-imperialism—inside or outside U.S. borders—have any choice, any voice or any “vote” in any of this?

No! Blaming immigrants for problems in America is like a rapist blaming his victim—or in America’s case, its millions upon millions of victims.

Exploitation and Abuse of Immigrants: Woven into U.S. History, Society, and Capitalism-Imperialism

Trump’s fascist assault on immigrants isn’t a repudiation of America’s history and values—as the Democrats and the media mouthpieces for this system claim. It’s an extreme concentration of that history and this system’s “values” now taken to the level of outright fascism and genocidal ethnic cleansing. Capitalism and white supremacy have been inseparably woven together throughout U.S. history right up to today. The oppression of immigrants and the creation of refugees are built into the very functioning of this whole system.

This is the America that Laura Ingraham the rest of the fascists—and yes, the Democrats—know, love, and want to maintain—even as they have sharp differences over how to do so.

The Democrats Are No Answer

Look at how the Democratic Party’s leadership is responding to the Trump/Pence regime’s fascist rampage against immigrants. They raise some criticisms of the regime’s immigration policies, but frame them in terms of what will “really make America secure” or “strong.” They refuse to make Trump/Pence’s Nazi assault on immigrants the moral and political dividing line it is. Why? Because the system they, too, represent can’t do without white supremacy and the abuse of immigrants, and a serious effort to challenge glaring injustices, much less uproot them, would unravel America’s oppressive social fabric. So instead, their focus—especially during elections—is on “jobs, the economy, and healthcare.”

In short, in the name of “political realism,” they are training millions to see things through the lens of “America’s interests,” to conciliate with racism, xenophobia, and fascism, and put American lives and their own economic well-being first—as immigrant children are being tortured and migrants are being sent to their deaths.

It DOESN’T Have to Be This Way—All This Suffering Is Completely Unnecessary

There’s nothing legitimate, much less emancipating, about any of this. As Bob Avakian (BA), the leader of the revolution and the architect of a new communism, has said, “There is nothing sacred to us about the USA, as it is presently constituted, or about the borders of the U.S. as they are presently constituted. Quite the opposite.” (BAsics 3:20)

In short, the horrors being inflicted on immigrants and refugees are intolerable and utterly unnecessary. People must NOT be forced to live this way—and they don’t need to live this way. The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian, provides a sweeping vision and concrete plan for a radically new society built on a fundamentally different economic and political basis. A liberating society that aims to overcome the great divides that exist between those who work in the realm of ideas and those who mainly work with their hands, between men and women, and between different nationalities and regions; that protects the planet’s ecosystems; and that is aiming to advance revolution worldwide to uproot all exploitation and oppression in order to emancipate humanity. As part of this, “The orientation of the New Socialist Republic in North America is to welcome immigrants from all over the world who have a sincere desire to contribute to the goals and objectives of this Republic, as set forth in this Constitution and in laws and policies which are established and enacted in accordance with this Constitution.” (From the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, Article II, Section 3, H. Immigrants, Citizenship and Asylum.)

The Fight Right Now for an Actual Revolution

Creating such a new revolutionary society is possible, but ONLY on the basis of overthrowing this system and dismantling its institutions through an actual revolution. We need to be building the movement for this revolution now, so that this system can be overthrown, as soon as the conditions for that momentous, historic struggle have been brought into being. This movement welcomes immigrants, refugees, and all oppressed peoples—in fact it’s urgent that thousands and ultimately millions join in.

We need to Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution—mobilize people to fight like hell right now to beat back and STOP these vicious attacks on immigrants as well as other key outrages of this system. As the Revolutionary Communist Party statement on strategy, HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution (HWCW), states:

We need to oppose and disrupt the moves of the ruling powers to isolate, “encircle,” brutalize, mass incarcerate and murderously repress the people who have the hardest life under this system and who most need this revolution. We need to “encircle” them—by bringing forth wave upon wave of people rising up in determined opposition to this system.

All the while we’re doing this, we need to lift people’s sights to revolution by spreading BA’s pathbreaking leadership, HWCW, and the website revcom.us far and wide, and concretely organize people into the movement for an actual revolution. As we’re doing this, we also need to unite with a great many people coming from very many different perspectives to step outside the killing confines of politics as usual—as defined by the Republicans and Democrats—and drive out the fascist regime that imperils humanity and the Earth itself.

And as for the “debate” about who are the “real Americans”—people have to STOP thinking like Americans and start thinking about emancipating humanity!

STOP the Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants and the Militarization of the Border!

Immigrants are full human beings, not “illegals” or criminals to be demonized, terrorized, hunted down, locked up and thrown out.

Revolution—Nothing Less! This System Cannot Be Reformed, It Must Be Overthrown!

 


Hundreds protest at the U.S. Senate against the Trump administration's inhumane policies of separation of children from immigrant parents, Washington, DC, June 28.  ( Photo: AP)

Now, sometimes you see these fools get up, you know, like these ranchers and all this kind of shit, and you can imagine “W” down there on his ranch. And they say things like “I’m a self-made man. Nobody gave me anything. I did it all myself.” Yeah, you’re a “self-made man.” All the clothes you’re wearing, everything you’re using is made by other people. The machinery you’re driving around, the rifle you own was made by other people. Everything you have and use is made by other people. And right now, you’re exploiting Mexican immigrants on your ranch. And you’re sitting on land that was stolen from native peoples in the first place. But you’re a “self-made man."

Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:16

“Why do people come here from all over the world?” - clip from Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian given in 2003 in the United States.

“Make America White Again”: The Trump/Pence War on Immigrants

“Make America White Again” is at the core of the whole Trump/Pence fascist program. They see the “browning” of America as an existential threat to the system of capitalism-imperialism—and they mean to carry out ethnic cleansing. The attack on immigrants is a linchpin and battering ram for imposing their whole fascist agenda.

The Trump/Pence regime is aggressively stepping up arrests and detentions: ICE made 37,734 noncriminal arrests in the 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year. The number of immigrants detained on a given day in 2017 was six times higher than in 1994.

The regime is also whipping up an atmosphere of terror, making it extremely difficult if not impossible for immigrants to even go about their daily lives. As Atlantic magazine notes, “Through deprivation and fear, the government can essentially drive undocumented immigrants out of the country.”

Here are just a few recent examples:

Denying children food, medicine, heat. A new Trump/Pence rule change would make it near-impossible for immigrants who now legally receive basic food, housing, and medical aid to obtain green cards. Their children, who are often citizens born in the U.S., depend on this aid. A million people could be impacted in New York City alone.

Lies and entrapment. ICE and the Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) have conspired to bring immigrants married to U.S. citizens in for interviews—supposedly about their marital status—in order to arrest and deport them.

Tearing apart families. More than 500 of the 3,000 children ripped from their parents remain locked up. Of those 500, two-thirds are children of parents who have already been deported, which means their children may never see them again.

Torture and abuse. In one Virginia detention center, immigrant teenagers as young as 14 have been strapped to chairs and had bags put over their heads. Some were beaten while they were handcuffed and locked in solitary confinement for extended periods—even left nude and shivering in concrete cells.

Cruel, arbitrary arrests. On August 17, ICE agents in San Bernardino, California, took away Joel Arrona in handcuffs when he pulled his car into a gas station. He was driving his pregnant wife, Maria Venegas, to the hospital to give birth to their son. She had to drive the rest of the way to the hospital herself.

***

For more on the war on immigrants, see Refuse Fascism’s “The Trump/Pence Regime: Indicted for Terrorizing and Attacking Immigrants and Refugees.” Part of a series of indictments of the regime’s crimes on various fronts, this is a concise but comprehensive presentation of the evidence of the horrors being committed against immigrants and refugees. No one of conscience can remain silent after reading these indictments, and getting them out broadly can have a huge impact throughout society.

from Refuse Fascism

The Trump/Pence Regime: Indicted for Terrorizing and Attacking Immigrants and Refugees

Immigrants are full human beings, not “illegals” or criminals, to be demonized, terrorized, hunted down, locked up, and thrown out.

Read more.

American Crime

Case #67:
1848-1900: Brutal Exploitation and Ruthless Oppression of Chinese Immigrants

Between 1850 and 1900, Chinese immigrants were super-exploited in the mines, fields, and railways, and were subjected to savage discrimination and repression, including lynch-mob pogroms. Read more.

 

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