When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he said he would build a “border wall” to keep out Mexican people. He called Mexicans “rapists.” Fascist mobs chanted “build that wall” at his rallies. He ordered construction of the border wall soon after he took office. Protests against it were held all along the border, in both the U.S. and Mexico. The wall was a despised symbol of Trump’s racist hate and open contempt for people from what he called “shit-hole” countries.
Joe Biden, on his first day in office, stopped construction of Trump’s border wall. He revoked the declaration that authorized it. But last week Biden announced that he is expanding the “border wall” Trump began but didn’t finish. Biden ordered the building of about 20 miles of wall in a South Texas portion of the border, along the Rio Grande, the river that borders Mexico and the Texas portion of the U.S. border. Biden’s wall is a few hours’ drive south of where Greg Abbott, the Republi-fascist governor of Texas has installed murderous razor-wire barricades in the river and on its banks.
The official Texas policy places 1000-foot chains of floating river barricades in the Rio Grande, buoys wrapped together with barbed wire, July 2023. Photo: AP
A Raging Fascist and a “Compassionate” Hypocrite, Both Enforcing Massive Repression
Some basic facts about Biden and his policy towards immigrants: Biden has expelled more than five times as many migrants at the border as Trump did—and he still has a year to go in his term. Biden intensified several of Trump’s anti-immigrant measures, like “expedited removal” and “asylum bans.” And now he's ordered a “Biden wall” at the border.
One obvious thing this tells us is what a blood-soaked hypocrite Biden is. But while Trump and Biden differ in how they think “border and immigration control” should be exercised, and how they mobilize support for their policies, neither is capable of any humane response to a problem largely created by the system of capitalism-imperialism they both represent. Not because of their personalities and temperaments—one a raging fascist filled with hate, the other a “benevolent” hypocrite always ready to strike a sympathetic pose. It is because, as Bob Avakian (BA) said in an interview, they and the system they represent
… have no answer to this, other than more horror: brutal apprehensions, detention camps of unspeakable misery and cruelty, family separations, border enforcement that spawns migrant smuggling rings that morph into trafficking for forced labor and sexual exploitation.
As Title 42 Ends... We Say: We Don't Have an Immigration Problem, We Have an Imperialism Problem
This imperialist system has no economic use for most of these immigrants at the moment, at least in the massive numbers that so desperately seek asylum. Nor can this system integrate them into the “social fabric” of this parasitic imperialist society. And they fear the consequences of the hundreds of millions of refugees who are being and will continue to be driven from their homes by climate catastrophe and social collapse for which their system is overwhelmingly responsible.
Bob Avakian, "Why do people come here from all over the world?"
The tidal waves of human suffering that are pressing up against the Rio Grande and the entire border are intensifying. People are fleeing due to the nightmare of climate change, hunger, war and repression—caused most of all by U.S. imperialism (go the American Crime series at revcom.us on what the U.S. has done in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, and other countries; here to read about the catastrophe the U.S. has created in Venezuela; and the revcom.us environmental crisis page to learn about the U.S. role in climate change). Right now, hundreds of thousands of people from Mexico, Venezuela, Central America, and countries all across the earth are trying to reach the U.S. Their number is climbing steadily. NBC News reported that a record number of people—more than 200,000—crossed the border in September. The Washington Post reported that more than 103,000 parents with children crossed the southern border without papers in September, the highest number ever.
Which Side Are You On?
A basic question must be asked: where the hell are the protests and outcry against Biden’s wall, like the ones that righteously opposed the Trump wall? Where are the outpourings of opposition in the streets? Where are the organizations mobilizing people to come to the defense of the immigrants now in the cities who are being scapegoated and demonized?
A sharp challenge confronts everyone in this country. Are you going to go along with, maybe even join in on, the savage persecution of immigrants seeking a livable life... or, are you going to fight against the attacks on immigrants at the border, and throughout the entire country? As the Declaration from the revcoms, We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System, states that people everywhere need to be confronted and challenged to stand with “the billions in all parts of the world who are denied a decent life and a future worth living in, or any future at all: threatened with literal extinction because of the destruction of the environment by this system and the danger of nuclear war between the U.S. and its rivals in Russia and China—all of them ruthless imperialist powers.”
We need to do this as we fight to put revolution on the map, for real, this year. This Declaration needs to get out and be taken up everywhere, along with the revcoms’ Proclamation: “We Are the Revcoms: We Are Working for A Real Revolution, and a Whole New, Emancipating Way to Live.”
A better world is possible, but it must be fought for.
Down with the Biden/Trump Persecution of Immigrants!
No Human Being Is Illegal!
We don't have an immigration problem; we have an imperialism problem! This SYSTEM Must Go.
NOW'S THE TIME TO GET ORGANIZED FOR AN ACTUAL REVOLUTION!
