The end of Title 42 has set off another round of bitter fighting and harsh accusations within the U.S. ruling class. During what amounted to a televised hour-long fascist rally on CNN last week, Donald Trump said that Biden’s policies mean that “You’re gonna have tens of thousands of people pouring into our country. We don’t want them being in our country.”
Trump and other leading fascists head a movement built (in part) around the utter demonization and criminalization of entire nationalities of people, racist lies, and insults against immigrants. These fascists have welded together a social base that gleefully delights in frenzied cruelty towards oppressed people. This movement’s leaders bellow things to their stupefied fascist mobs like, immigrants are “taking our jobs, destroying our culture, bringing in drugs, overwhelming our border.” The fact that this is all one big lie doesn’t matter; the lies are intended to foster a sense of aggrievement and a desire for revenge essential to further cohering a “make America great” fascist movement. The bigger the lie, the louder they rant it.
Rolling Stone magazine reported that Trump has told his “advisors” that he wants to attack Mexico militarily if he becomes president again. The magazine quoted one of these advisors saying, “‘Attacking Mexico,’ or whatever you’d like to call it, is something that President Trump has said he wants ‘battle plans’ drawn for. He’s complained about missed opportunities of his first term, and there are a lot of people around him who want fewer missed opportunities in a second Trump presidency.”
Fighting Over How Best to Maintain a System Based on Exploitation, Enforced by Oppression
Greg Abbott, the Christian fascist governor of Texas, has sent busloads of immigrants to New York and other northern “sanctuary cities.” Now, the crisis brought to a head by the end of Title 42 has sent political tremors rippling to parts of the country far from the border, and dominated by Democrats. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, declared a “disaster emergency” and mobilized National Guard troops; in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot issued a “declaration of emergency” order because of what she called a “flood of migrants” possibly being bused to the city.
Biden faces intense criticism from within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Eric Adams, Democratic mayor of New York, said his city is “being destroyed by the migrant crisis.” He denounced the “irresponsibility of the White House for not addressing this problem.” He wants to send people from the city to areas in upstate New York. A Republi-fascist leader in New York predicted a “standoff … because I just got word that the city said, ‘screw Rockland and Orange, we’re sending these people up.’”
Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to pound Biden and the Democrats and claim that his policy is to create an “open border.” In fact, Biden has driven more immigrants out of the U.S. in two years than Trump did in four—even as Biden denounced Trump for his “cruelty and exclusion at every turn.” His administration has enforced massive amounts of repression and brutality along the border. He just intensified that repression with his administration’s response to the end of Title 42.
A Volatile Question
So… if both the Democrats and the Republi-fascists agree that harsh repression needs to be the cornerstone and leading edge of their “border policy,” why is this such an explosive question between them?
On a very basic level, both parties represent the interests of the predatory system of capitalism-imperialism. Both parties are instruments of the class that rules a system which is based on and requires massive exploitation of billions of people, and brutal violence to enforce that exploitation. But they have clashing views over how to defend, sustain and develop that system at a time when it is being challenged by other imperialists—and at a time in which the ways that the imperialists have held things together within the country have been coming apart.
As Revolution wrote previously:
Immigration is one acute expression of the way divisions at the top of this society are tearing apart all of society, and of the fact that the “norms” that have cohered the U.S. for 150 years are shattering. Bob Avakian’s Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution provides valuable insight into the conflict dividing the rulers of this country into bitter opponents. In it, he notes that the fascist program centers around
“restoring” America to its mythological “greatness” on the basis of aggressive white supremacy, crude and brutal male supremacy and suppression of LGBT people, xenophobia (hatred and persecution of foreigners and immigrants, particularly from what Trump infamously referred to as “shithole countries”), forceful assertion and chauvinistic trumpeting of American dominance and “the superiority of western civilization,” along with willful rejection of science and the scientific method, especially where it would interfere with unrestrained plunder of the environment, as well as people.
On immigration, Trump, Abbott, and the Republi-fascists are cohering a rabidly violent and hateful social base to advance their interests. The Democrats use “legitimating norms” to cohere a base of support. They use norms that involve a sham pretense of legal hearings; that describe their harsh approach with sweet words like “compassion” and “humane”; that make some paltry concessions to allow a few approved immigrants to enter the country on “parole” while beating back millions and carrying out vicious repression.
These norms are aimed at quieting the consciences of those “decent people” who have some sense of the violent domination and economic parasitism through which the U.S. secures the comfortable standard of living many of them enjoy, but who don’t want to think too hard about—nor do anything real to put an end to—the horrors that domination brings.
Those “decent people” must be challenged.
[A]s “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.