Peter Cherry and Edgar Lee
On June 4, many immigrants awoke to news of a new Trump decree targeting 12 countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East, from traveling to the United States. The ban went into effect June 9 and targets Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Other countries with heightened restrictions include Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
The ban represents an escalation of the inter-imperialist struggle against Chinese and Russian imperialism over the domination of the Third World. All but two of the countries subject to the decree trade with China more than the U.S. by volume. The exceptions are Venezuela and Haiti, with the former being subject to U.S.-applied sanctions since 2015 and requested to join the Russian- and Chinese-dominated BRICS economic and political group in 2024, and the latter being subject to increased overtures by China and Russia.
The travel ban hit countries that U.S. imperialism has violently targeted with bombs and sanctions. The U.S. argues the countries on the list all pose security threats as measured by the fact that “each country has a significant terrorist presence within its territory, has a high visa overstay rate, and lack cooperation with accepting back its removable nationals.” The U.S.’s so-called “war on terror” remains a decades-long policy aimed at suppressing national liberation struggles internationally and repression domestically, including surveillance and deportations. Workers and peasants are forced out of their country due to economic and political warfare imposed by the U.S., and when a small number migrate to the U.S. seeking relative safety, they are once again targeted with chauvinistic policies that increase their precariousness and heightens their exploitation while dividing the working class.
The travel ban represents a distinction in the tactics between the two party mafias, while both aim to maintain the U.S. as the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower. The Trump administration pushes the deceitful slogan “Peace through strength”, which attempts to dominate through brute force and make examples of others to enforce submission, a sign of the deepening economic crisis. Overestimating its strength, the Trump administration blunders from one conflict it has created to another, such as its trade wars or its war with Yemen.
The Democrats prefer the method of bribery, and have been desperately using the state bureaucracy to try to restore organizations Trump has gutted like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). However, both mafias make use of both naked aggression and bribery—most notably in their differing tactics on handling Russia in order to weaken China—in order to advance their agenda of imperialist domination. While the Democrats claim to oppose Trump’s travel ban, Former President Biden’s policies banning some asylum-seekers and migration through the southern border represented another form of utilizing immigration policy in an effort to offset the deepening economic crisis of imperialism.
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