Workers Vanguard No. 1118
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22 September 2017
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Trump Kills DACA, Democrats Push Border Security
No Deportations!
Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!
The lives of some 800,000 younger immigrants, their families and communities were thrown into chaos earlier this month when the Trump administration pulled the plug on the Obama-initiated Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The repeal of DACA, which granted a temporary reprieve to a small layer of undocumented immigrants brought into this country as children, puts “Dreamers” at the mercy of immigration authorities and threatens their livelihoods and those of the extended families they financially support. Wasting no time, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo encouraging DACA recipients to pack their bags and leave by next March, when DACA permits begin to expire. Already, there are reports of detentions at the border and racist attacks on DACA students in colleges.
By launching this latest anti-immigrant attack, which has sparked protests nationwide, Trump was playing to his nativist base. Coming on top of the recent presidential pardon of arch-racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the decision by the Supreme Court to temporarily allow partial enforcement of the anti-Muslim travel ban, the demise of DACA has the forces of reaction riding high. In their crosshairs are not only immigrants and Muslims but black people and the working class as a whole. The same racist invective that emboldens the border vigilantes and immigrant-bashers emboldens fascist killers like those who mobilized in Charlottesville in defense of the former slavocracy.
The move to scrap DACA predictably afforded Democratic Party politicians a cheap opportunity for some theatrical grandstanding. First and foremost among them was Barack Obama, who pronounced Trump “cruel” for rescinding the 2012 executive order that established DACA. The previous president certainly knows a thing or two about cruelty. Among his many crimes as CEO of American capitalism, Obama deported more people than any previous president in U.S. history. In fact, despite a spike in arrests, the rate of deportations under Trump to date does not match even Obama’s slowest year.
Obama prepared a very well-equipped deportation machine that Trump wants to kick into even higher gear. DACA provides a tool to that end. Central to DACA, which was introduced by Obama during the 2012 election as a cynical ploy to shore up the Latino vote, was the provision that applicants would hand over all their information to la migra: fingerprints, photographs, bank accounts, school and job records, even the addresses of parents (the overwhelming majority of whom are themselves undocumented). In short, everything the government needs to hunt them down.
Obama was clear from the outset about DACA: “This is not amnesty. This is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship.” DACA deferred deportation for those who had lived virtually their whole lives in the U.S. and who met certain criteria (e.g., having graduated from high school and no criminal record). Today, cases abound of immigrants who lost their DACA status—whether it was stripped from them under some flimsy pretext like supposed gang affiliation or it lapsed due to their inability to pay the $500 renewal fee every two years—only to be rounded up and thrown out of the country. DACA was a deferral, and that was all it was.
A week after the program was rescinded, leading Democratic Party lawmakers Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer began negotiations with the Trump White House: a restoration of DACA in some form linked to a package of enhanced border security measures. While the reality of a deal remains in question, the enthusiasm of the Democrats for both its components is not, with Schumer bragging on the Senate floor about the “great sensory equipment” manufactured in his home state of New York. More Border Patrol agents, more ground sensors, more drones, more manned flights, more border infrastructure—there is a lot of common ground for bipartisan immigration enforcement. It’s the Democrats’ version of Trump’s wall.
At a September 18 press conference in San Francisco on DACA, Pelosi was shouted down by undocumented protesters carrying signs reading, “Democrats are Deporters” and chanting, “We are not your bargaining chip.” While DACA recipients are often referred to as “Dreamers,” it was the failure of the Dream Act to pass through Congress that provided the backdrop to Obama’s 2012 DACA executive order. The Dream Act would have allowed immigrant youth to petition for permanent residency after completing two years of college or military service. But with the costs of college prohibitive and immigrants barred from Pell Grants, it was clear the bill would have mainly provided a huge pool of potential military recruits. The Pentagon enthusiastically supported it. We opposed the Dream Act because it was a trap for immigrant youth, who would be signed up as cannon fodder for the U.S. military.
No less than the Republicans, the Democrats represent and serve the American capitalist order, which is based on the exploitation of the workers and rooted in chattel slavery and the continued racial oppression of black people. DACA recipients represent a wide range of social backgrounds—from college students and low-wage service workers to those in relatively well-paying tech jobs. It is their bottom line, not benevolence, that has Silicon Valley and major corporations rallying behind DACA, which offers no job protection, no assured immigration status and no right to any kind of welfare. With DACA holders overwhelmingly Mexican-born and concentrated in Texas and California, some construction outfits are bemoaning Trump’s decision for casting uncertainty over their low-wage labor options in the profit-driven rebuilding frenzy after Hurricane Harvey.
DACA is based on the premise that its recipients are “deserving” immigrants who entered the U.S. through “no fault of their own.” The notion promoted by the Democrats of “good” versus “bad” immigrants or in the words of Obama, “families, not felons,” is a set-up for greater state repression against all immigrants. In urban centers across the country, cop terror against black people and Latinos is a daily reality. Those youth who get ensnared in the criminal “justice” system are for all intents and purposes branded for life, and undocumented immigrants become prime targets for deportation.
Labor Must Fight for Immigrant Rights!
The integrated trade unions should be in the forefront of the struggle in defense of immigrant rights. But the labor movement is crippled by its flag-waving leadership, whose fundamental loyalty is not to the workers but to the profitability of American capitalism. When Trump decided to kill DACA, he had his notoriously racist attorney general Jeff Sessions make the announcement. In his remarks, Sessions recycled the old racist canard of “job stealing” immigrants, claiming DACA “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
Such lies have long been echoed by sections of the trade-union bureaucracy that promote “America first” protectionism, which reinforces anti-immigrant bigotry. While today AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka denounces the repeal of DACA and says that immigrant labor should be “celebrated,” earlier this year he applauded a speech by Trump for having “talked about legal immigration being used to drive down wages.” It is the capitalist bosses, not any sector of the working class, who drive down wages in order to ratchet up the exploitation of all workers. And it is the labor tops’ class collaborationism, politically expressed mainly through their ties to the Democrats, that has disarmed workers in the face of the bosses’ relentless anti-union attacks.
Take the SEIU service employees union, which has a significant immigrant membership and has engaged in protests against deportations. In response to DACA’s elimination, its International executive vice president Rocio Sáenz issued a statement vowing to “mobilize on an unprecedented scale to resist these racist attacks.” Their answer to Trump? “Drive a turnaround in 2018”—that is, get the Democrats into office in the upcoming midterm elections.
What’s needed is militant class struggle based on the understanding that the capitalist bosses and the workers share no common interests. Defense of the rights of immigrants, black people and all the oppressed is vital to the defense of the labor movement itself. Key to this perspective is the forging of a class-struggle leadership in the unions committed to mobilizing the power of labor in a fight to stop deportations and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
This is decidedly not the perspective of reformist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Following DACA’s repeal, the ISO called to “revitalize the fighting movement that stopped mass criminalization of the undocumented in 2006 with its incredible ‘mega-marches’ and that won DACA in 2012 by relentlessly pressuring politicians of both parties, including Barack Obama” (Socialist Worker, 7 September). In 2006, one of the main demo slogans was “Today we march, tomorrow we vote”; six years later, it was Obama who used the “Dreamers,” not the other way around. Despite the ISO’s caveat that the movement should not be “one that subordinates our demands to getting Democrats to take over Congress and the White House,” that is exactly what their “movement” building is all about. They admitted as much at the time of the 2006 demonstrations during Bush Jr.’s presidency: “Potentially, the movement can break the logjam of U.S. politics, in which the Republicans launch attack after attack with little or no response from the Democrats” (Socialist Worker, 31 March 2006).
For a Workers America!
The driving force behind the desperate efforts of so many people to get into the U.S. is the imperialist subjugation of the neocolonial world. With their systematic looting of wide swaths of the planet, not to mention their plunging sections of it into the devastation of war, the advanced capitalist powers impose inhuman conditions on the vast majority of mankind. The 1994 NAFTA agreement brokered by the Democrat Clinton was a free-trade rape of Mexico that wiped out the livelihoods of a great mass of poor rural workers, peasants and others, compelling them to attempt the dangerous border crossing to the North in order to eke out a basic existence. Everything from the U.S.-engineered dirty wars of the 1980s to Washington’s economic plunder has torn apart multiple Central American countries and sent refugees into the U.S., where they have faced large-scale detention.
The U.S. capitalists view Mexico and Latin America as destinations for capital export and a vast reservoir of cheap, vulnerable labor to be tapped or returned as dictated by the demands of the economy. At the same time, immigrant workers play a vital role in the U.S. economy, including by filling some of the most dangerous and lowest-paying jobs. Today, these jobs are overwhelmingly non-union. To keep it so, the bosses fan the flames of anti-immigrant chauvinism and racial hostility. Whipping up racial and ethnic hatred—pitting white workers against black workers; native-born against immigrant—has long served America’s capitalist rulers.
We fight for the unity and integrity of the multiracial working class against chauvinism and racism. The starting point for defending immigrant rights must be opposition to all the political parties and state agencies of the capitalist rulers. Our aim is to win the working class to the understanding that it must oppose the whole capitalist system. It is only through the victory of world socialist revolution that material scarcity can be abolished for good, laying the basis for the withering away of the state and therefore of borders. Only an egalitarian socialist society can provide a decent life for those who now live in the teeming slums and rural villages of the neocolonial world, as well as for the black, Latino and white working masses of this country. The Spartacist League seeks to forge the revolutionary workers party that is necessary to lead all the exploited and oppressed in sweeping away the U.S. imperialist behemoth.
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