Last week, we reported on Biden's vicious Executive Order basically “suspending” the right of refugees to seek asylum in the U.S. As we wrote:

This is an extreme measure—the most extreme anti-immigrant policy that a Democratic president has ever signed into law. And it will result in more suffering and death. 

Biden’s Order takes away the right to apply for asylum from most of the immigrants who come across the U.S.’s southern border. Instead, refugees will be rapidly deported...without asylum hearings or any other legal process. And once deported, they may well face felony charges if they attempt to return within the next five years.

Biden claims this is a “temporary” measure that only kicks in during immigration “surges” when the number of immigrants known to have crossed the border tops 2,500 per day for a 7-day period. And that it will be suspended when it drops to 1,500 immigrants a day. 

But last week, at least 3,500 people per day entered the US, and the last time the number was as low as 1,500 was in 2020. So effectively this Order is not “temporary”—it is the new “normal.”

We don't yet know what the full impact at the border will be: in some places, Border Patrol are still releasing migrants into the U.S. with a future date for an asylum hearing as they were before. Others are being immediately deported back into Mexico. We don't know if people are being detained, or for how long. Mexico is also intensifying its anti-immigrant crackdown, preventing people from even reaching the U.S./Mexico border by transporting hundreds to the south of Mexico after they've made the difficult trek north—forcing them to begin a dangerous and life-threatening journey for a second time. 

What we do know is that this order will lead to many more people dying in an attempt to cross the border—in more far-flung deserts or in more turbulent waters, in order to evade Border Patrol. And, because unaccompanied minors can still apply for asylum, it means that desperate parents will send their children to cross the border alone! 

There are now 120 million people around the world who have been forced to flee their homelands—a record breaking number… 120 million people on the move—fleeing gangs and warfare, droughts and floods, extreme heat, unlivable poverty and hunger—all products of the system of capitalism-imperialism. And the only answer that “the most enlightened” brand of imperialism can offer is slamming the door shut. This same vicious cruelty is being echoed across Europe and even Australia. 

The Fascists Attack

Even though this was the most restrictive immigration policy ever enacted by a Democrat, Trump and the fascist movement he leads immediately went ballistic that this was nowhere near restrictive enough, telling insane lies about what this order actually does. In a speech in Las Vegas, Trump bellowed: “Last week, crooked Joe signed an executive order that is pro invasion, pro child trafficking, pro woman trafficking, pro human trafficking and pro drug dealers. It's a pro drug dealer bill... What he signed means nothing. In fact, it makes it easier, in my opinion, it opens the border still further.” And in response to Biden's bill, Trump got the whole crowd chanting, “bullshit.”

Trump is unleashing a fascist social base of millions to unthinkingly accept that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” From the massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 targeting Latino immigrants with 23 people killed, to the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 which was targeted by a fascist who said that Jewish people were funding mass migration, to the tiki-torch carrying nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanting, “You will not replace us,” there has already been a wave of mass anti-immigrant violence—and Trump is aiming to unleash this on a whole other level, with an all-sided all-out assault planned for immigrants that would amount to ethnic cleansing. 

Sharpening Divides Among the Rulers

This is one of the volatile expressions of the sharpening split between the rulers of this system and the divides throughout society: between the Democrats and the Republi-fascists. This is not just election-year posturing—a way to get votes. This is about the fundamental questions of what this society will be. This is a microcosm (a small picture that represents the larger situation) of something that you cannot understand without engaging the analysis of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA).

In his social media post, Revolution #11, BA says:

A big part of the population, and a major section of the ruling class, represented by the Republican Party, has become fascist: based on open and aggressive white supremacy, male supremacy and other oppressive relations—refusing to accept the outcome of elections it does not win, determined to gut and pervert “the rule of law,” trample on people’s rights, and adopt what amounts to an undisguised capitalist dictatorship, ready to use violence not only against masses of people but also against its rivals in the ruling class. This fascist section of the ruling class no longer believes in, and has more or less openly abandoned, what have been the “cohering norms”—the regulating set of beliefs and processes—of this system.

The other section of the ruling class, represented by the Democratic Party, is trying to maintain the “democratic” form through which this system exercises political power—an actual dictatorship—over the masses of people in this country, in order to maintain its system of brutal exploitation and murderous oppression, backed up by mass slaughter, which this ruling class continues to carry out all over the world.

The presidential election this year, 2024, will be a sharp focus of the fight between these ruling class parties—Democrats and Republicans—a fight that is very likely to break all out of the bounds of the “normal way” they exercise power over the people, and keep their whole system going.

This could lead to armed clashes between the opposing sections of the ruling class, which could even develop into large-scale military confrontation—a new kind of civil war. In any case, this kind of profound crisis within the ruling system is bound to affect every part of society, and every major institution of this system, including its armed forces—with the real potential for major splits in those institutions.

We've already seen outlines of this in the opposing armed forces being deployed at the border with Biden directing Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and the fascist Texas Governor Greg Abbott giving orders to the Texas National Guard to defy the CBP. This has not yet led to armed clashes—in part because Biden has given orders to the CBP not to push on Abbott's outright defiance of Biden's federal jurisdiction (control and responsibilities over a certain area). But as things intensify at the border—and throughout society—we don't know how all this will unfold. 

It is clear that these fascists will not allow any “appeasement” or compromise from the Democrats—they will use every opportunity to go after them as a completely illegitimate force that is “threatening to destroy America.” And it's clear that the Democratic Party “compromise” is itself an ugly attack on the masses of humanity.

We Don't Have an Immigration Problem, We Have an Imperialism Problem!

As long as this system stands, people will be driven from their homelands in droves only to be met by brutality, barbed wire, detention and death. But a radically different system could handle this in a fundamentally different way. On the basis of building a whole different economy, a socialist society would be able to put the collective labor and resources of society to meet people's needs and advance the struggle for revolution around the world. It would do so in a way that develops socialist sustainable development and, to the maximum degree possible, works to repair the destruction of our planet. The concrete vision and blueprint for this society is spelled out in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America authored by Bob Avakian.

This Constitution makes clear: “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....”

To bring this society into being requires an actual revolution... and the opening to make this revolution could be wrenched in this time, and through the sharpening clashes throughout society. 

The strategic orientation and practical approach, REVOLUTION: Building Up the Basis to Go for the Whole Thing With a Real Chance to Win, quotes this “crucially important guideline from Bob Avakian that has special significance now”: 

When conflicts among the different sections of the bourgeois (capitalist) ruling class become so deep and hostile that they are no longer able to rule in the “normal way” they have for generations, “that is a sign of extremely deep and acute cracks and fissures in the entire established order; and such a situation must be seized by the oppressed not to side with one section of the bourgeoisie against another... but instead to rise in revolutionary struggle to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie altogether.

If you want to see a world without border walls and barricades, be part of working now to making this revolution.