Trump’s Mass Deportations are a Response to the Economic Crisis of Imperialism

Editorial Board

The right-wing extremist Donald Trump is making every attempt possible to fulfill his campaign promises to attack migrant workers—among the deepest and most profound sections of the US proletariat. Trump’s campaign promised mass deportations at an unprecedented scale, seeking to outdo former President Biden who deported more than Trump’s previous term in office. Such deportations are directed mainly at migrants of Caribbean, Central and South American origin—workers from Third World countries oppressed by US imperialism.

The southern border of the US is a focal point for all at the helm of the reactionary liberal bourgeois state. It is a release valve for the control of the flow of cheap labor. The introduction of cheap labor to the “labor market” does two things: first, it secures maximum profitability for industry owners, and second, it depreciates wages all around. This is felt among the broadest masses, resulting in a harsh stratification of the working class with the worst and lowest paying jobs going to those without legal status, without democratic rights, and without organizations to fight for their daily demands. All of this results in a concentration of poverty, subjecting migrant workers to predatory landlords, money changers and a gray market.

There are close to 30 million immigrant workers and around 11 million undocumented workers in the US, and the majority of these, including their children born in the US, are under attack by the ruling class. Construction and agriculture—among the least-regulated industries, with low pay and high worker fatality rates—boast the highest number of foreign-born workers without legal documentation.

While the wages are relatively higher than the worker was able to obtain in his or her country of origin, they are almost always lower than the average in the US. With an entire industry built on exporting money back to their families and wages too low to meet the average cost of living in the US, such workers are forced into the most crumbling and neglected areas that tend toward overcrowding and deprivation. Often in debt to criminal gangs and in fear of reprisals from the old-state, the promise of a better life evaporates into thin air. According to the ruling class, such conditions are not the result of imperialist crimes against the people of the world, but merely due to the people themselves. The backward among the masses in increasing numbers get drunk off these illusions and end up blaming the migrants for every abuse they have experienced at the hands of the ruling class.

The ruling class seeks to portray two types of immigrants: those who are highly skilled from imperialist countries—the “good type” the country “needs”—and those who receive their unrestrained racist hatred, those with proletarian and peasant backgrounds, the poorest sections of the Third World. This offers an illustration of the fact that behind all the jingoism and vile rhetoric is a class position, one of the rich against the poor, the owners who buy labor-power against those forced to sell it who have nothing else.

The fanatics among the ruling class, who have raised Donald Trump as their obnoxious icon and rallied the most backward elements behind him, have managed to spread their lies among average workers too. A cornerstone to their agenda is increasing the hatred of immigrants and migrants. They have elevated their jingoism to the point of increasing the power of their own criminal gangs, and fanned the sails of fascist organizations and their fellow conspirators. In the coming years, fighting back against the extreme Right can only express itself in internationalism and nothing else. The entire proletarian movement in the US will advance or take a beating based on its ability to stand with its foreign-born class siblings who comprise one of its most oppressed and its most exploited section. It will earn its honors in this fight, on whether or not it will be able to wrest leadership from the opportunist liberal bourgeois agents of the Democratic Party, who in spite of deporting more people than Trump, are eager to traffic in the just struggles of the masses while moaning for “peaceful protest.”

The Increasing Desperation of Reactionaries

Trump is poised to outrun Biden’s deportation record and promises to do so in the most dramatic way possible. He wants to stir his criminal social base and ensure his party fulfills the needs of the imperialist ruling class: to destroy the means of production (including the workforce) in order to stop the fall in profitability and overcome the cyclical crisis of overproduction. The only way for US imperialism to save itself now is to continue to concentrate power around the president, restrict democratic rights, and savagely attack the working class, while principally increasing its domination and oppression of the world’s people. In this interest he has promised to expand the torture chambers of Guantanamo Bay to imprison migrants. For this we can blame Joe Biden, who like Obama promised to close this death camp on occupied Cuban land, but had absolutely no intention of doing so. The prison is divided between the military-run and immigration-run sections, and the immigration section imprisons mainly Haitian and Cuban migrants. Trump chooses this location, not because it is the most suitable, but because it is the most terror-inducing.

The resistance and national liberation forces in the Greater Middle East (GME) have placed US imperialism on a defensive footing and forced them to take the approach of attrition, indicating clearly that the GME is a grave to those who force their way in. At the same time as their embarrassing defeats in the GME, the US imperialists encounter flair-ups in the inter-imperialist contradiction with China, who they more and more seek to “contain.”

US imperialism runs into trouble all over the world. This has increased the pressure to secure its strangleholds on the Americas and explains Trumps intentions and boasts to dominate and oppress, claiming the intent to take over the Panama Canal, annex Canada, and take possession of Greenland. Within this flurry of bombast is both the need to compete with other imperialist powers for domination of the thawing Arctic, as well as the very urgent needs of the US imperialists to increase their domination over Central and South America. This region of the Third World is gaining significant importance in the contradiction between imperialism and the countries oppressed by imperialism. Without this domination over the so-called “backyard”, US imperialism would be weakened to the point of irrelevance. Latin America is as essential to the plans of preserving US imperialism’s sole hegemony as reactionization is, and the two trends develop in tandem. It is no coincidence that as this situation becomes increasingly volatile, new fighting will emerge and new people’s wars will be initiated—it is Latin America where the most advanced expressions of the ideology of the international proletariat are put forward, and it is the growing ranks of the revolution in these countries that US revolutionaries must prioritize supporting.

The struggle for our class siblings facing deportation, deprivation and abuse at the hands of the old state is simultaneously cultivating the revolution at home and an act of internationalism. It is through such work, compelling the broad masses of proletarians to fight for both the civil rights of migrant workers as they would their own, and the fight against the worsening economic conditions inflicted on them as a whole that we spread class consciousness step by step among the workers.

On a world scale, the imperialist crisis has reached explosive proportions and revolution develops unevenly, with the greatest resistance erupting where there is the greatest concentration of oppressed masses. The resistance in the imperialist countries will grow at a much slower rate, emphasizing the importance of combating simultaneously and implacably the combination of reaction and revisionism. Revolution is the main trend; the bombast, rhetoric and extreme aggression of the right-wing extremists are not signs of strength but desperation, and like a cornered beast US imperialism lashes out in all directions.

For US workers, the most important leap in understanding will come from their experience, that the factions of the US imperialist ruling class are mainly in agreement against the masses of toiling people in the entire world, and that the phony progressives must be exposed in this battle. The solidarity of the class must be increased across all borders. The situation is trending toward world war, which must be met with world people’s war, all of which hastens revolution in the epicenter of world imperialism.

Photo: Chained migrants are led into a US military aircraft for deportation in this photo posted by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) taken by ICE.

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