On Thursday, February 22, the College Republicans
group at New York University (NYU) organized a "game"
they called "Find the Illegal Immigrant". The Republican
students had someone going around the campus with a tag saying
"illegal immigrant". The object of the "game"
was to catch the "illegal immigrant" for a cash prize.
This "game" held by the NYU College
Republicans is nothing less than ideological training in the
mentality of slave-catchers hunting down runaway
slaves, or of "good Germans" turning in Jews who were
in hiding during the Nazi years. Indeed, it is training
people in the outlook of the Minuteman vigilantes who right
now carry out armed patrols on the Mexican border. Hundreds
of students from NYU and other campuses righteously protested
this outrage. And this was good, and needs to be built
on.
But this event is far from an isolated incident.
There is a whole fascist offensive going on that must be brought
to light and acted upon. Immigrants are being hunted
down and rounded up by the thousands, right now, all over this
country, both by vigilantes AND by the federal government.
For example:
On the same day as the event at NYU, federal
agents arrested over 250 immigrants working as janitors at 63
locations for a major cleaning company.
Last December, agents of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) arrested over 1,280 workers in a single day
at Swift meatpacking plants in several states. Officers stormed
the plants, all decked out in riot gear with military weapons.
They locked the doors, and then they hunted down immigrants
like animals. At a plant in Utah, in a scene reminiscent of
Nazi Germany, the agents gave the light-skinned and white-looking
workers blue wristbands and let them step out of line, while
darker-skinned immigrants were lined up to be interrogated and,
in many cases, arrested. Children were left at schools and day
care centers, waiting for parents who never showed up. A store
owner in a Colorado city, where another Swift plant was raided, said, "I
wondered if they were taking them to the gas chambers on those
buses".
Since May 2006, this same agency - ICE - has
rounded up more than 13,000 immigrants in a nationwide offensive
by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, known
as "Operation Return to Sender". Many have been
immediately deported.
Two human rights groups have just released a
report on two "detention facilities" where immigrant
families are imprisoned, and where kids are separated from their
parents. The Hutton facility in Texas,
run by a private prison company, now holds about 200 immigrant
children. Mich elle Brane, from the Women's Commission for Refugee
Women and Children, described the situation at Hutton: "At
night, some children do remain in the cell with their parents,
and others are separated into separate cells. It depends on
family size, space and the age of the child. But children as
young as six can be separated at night." Brane said that
at another facility in Pennsylvania, "All children over five sleep separately from their
parents. And at night, these parents cannot get to their children.
So, many parents talked of their children crying at night or
being sick at night and not being able to go to them."
(Interview on Democracy Now!,
Feb. 23)
These raids have caused tremendous suffering.
The government is bringing down a climate of intense fear and
terror on millions of people in immigrant communities around
the U.S. (See "
Gestapo Immigrant Raids in the Bay Area.")
Murder
on the Border, Abu Ghraib-Style Detention, and Fascist Vigilante-ism
Meanwhile, the federal government has stepped
up its militarization of the border. They have added more
troops, more walls and fences, and more surveillance equipment.
This has forced immigrants to make the crossing through even
more remote and dangerous desert areas. And this translates
into more immigrants losing their lives. According to official
statistics, 460 people died trying to cross the border from
Mexico into
the U.S.
in 2005, a 40% increase over the year before. These are murders by design, and there is blood on the hands of
every senator and congressman who voted for these measures.
Bush has also embarked on a huge expansion of
"detention facilities" for undocumented immigrants.
These prisons are to be used for people who have already been
branded as "criminals" without trials—as "aliens"
who don't deserve the most basic rights. And these concentration
camps are being built by the company KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton
- the same people who have major military contracts from the
U.S. government
for occupied Iraq and at Guantánamo.
Along with these government moves targeting immigrants,
"nativist" groups like the vicious and racist Ku Klux
Klan have been making a comeback by attacking immigrants.(See:
Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 9, 2007, "Anti-Immigrant Sentiments
Fuel Ku Klux Klan Resurgence") And then there's the
armed Minutemen, and their Young Republican backers and suckups
on the campuses. What makes all this even more dangerous
is the way in which it blends in with other fascist trends -
the Christian Fascists, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson,
the students who are aggressively trying to purge their faculties
of progressive professors, the anti-Black genocidal trends that
came sharply into focus around Hurricane Katrina - all of which
have backing, and sometimes open voicing, from the
powers-that-be.
Why?
The people who run this country have an international
agenda of endless war; they are attempting to be the unchallenged
- and unchallengeable - dominant power on Earth.
But this has run into opposition, overseas and increasingly
here within the U.S.
Meanwhile, every year witnesses great changes in society, economically,
socially, and culturally. Global capitalism forces wages down
within the U.S.
and shifts jobs overseas at the click of a computer mouse. These
same capitalists have increasingly penetrated and stepped up
their domination of Mexico and other countries in Latin
America, including in agriculture. These changes have driven
millions of peasants off the land and into a situation where
they must risk their lives to seek work in "El Norte".
The things people took for granted yesterday no longer hold
today, and no one can be sure of tomorrow. So the capitalists
aim to stamp things - and people - into place to "keep
it together" during a period of wild transition in their
global order.
This means many repressive things, and one of
them has been the clampdown on undocumented immigrants.
And now this is being ramped up. The capitalist rulers
have huge power over the millions of undocumented workers inside
the U.S. These workers lack
basic rights and are liable to be deported at any time.
But, at the same time, the fact that millions live "outside
the law" runs up against the rulers' need to impose a qualitatively
greater level of repression over society as a whole. The U.S. imperialists are also paying close attention
to things like the recent political upheavals that have rocked
Mexico. They fear that such
social and political turmoil - and even revolutionary upsurge
- could cross the border, and react back and forth with resistance
and revolutionary developments within the U.S.
Given this situation, all the forces
in the top power structure believe that the millions of undocumented
immigrants must be brought under much tighter control. The leaders
of both ruling class parties, the Democrats and the Republicans,
have been pushing for "immigration reform" that addresses
the system's continuing need for millions who are forced to
work for desperation wages. All of these "reforms"
aim to keep the immigrant workers in a caste-like status, that
is, oppressed in special ways, without rights. Both parties
aim to tighten up the border, and fortify measures to monitor
and suppress upheaval and resistance. And while the debate
over how to do this is not totally settled, all the branches of
government are nevertheless moving very quickly in a very suppressive
and fascistic way against the immigrants. And this whole thing
is so explosive socially that the top rulers are even using
threats against individual capitalist employers.
But you have to add to this another very important
factor. The rulers of this society were profoundly shook by
the big immigrant demonstrations last spring. They fear
the potential power of millions that they exploit should they
dare to rise up, a little glimmer of which was on display in
those outpourings. And these rulers fear this example
spreading to other sections of the people, both among the exploited
and oppressed as well as among people from the middle class
who are seething with anger at what is going on. So in
one dimension, the raids and repression are designed to take
revenge against the people for standing up and intimidate them
from doing so again.
What
Will YOU Do?
For immigrants and those who actively support
the just struggle of immigrants, now is not the time to give
in to despair and fear. A blow was struck last Spring, and now
there is a counter-blow being delivered. The rulers are hitting
back because in the end their fear is much greater: the fear
that those they oppress and exploit, those upon whom their power
and profit rests, will resist that exploitation and oppression
and eventually rise against them. And while the rulers fear
the rise of the immigrants, the revolutionary proletariat and
the revolutionary communist movement welcomes this - for this
brings strength to the revolutionary movement today and the
millions of immigrants will play a big role in building the
new society tomorrow. The ONLY hope in today's situation is
more struggle, more resistance, and - on that
basis - more unity.
For those sitting on the sidelines, now is the
time for a look in the news and a look in the mirror. Thousands
of immigrants are being rounded up and "disappeared"
from the cities, neighborhoods, work places, and schools of
this country. They are being locked up in prisons and deported
without any rights. Families are being separated. People are
afraid to go to work or walk the streets, because of the danger
of being swept up in raids.
Think about what it means that a whole section
of people are being scapegoated and targeted like this. Think
about what Martin Niemoeller, the German pastor who was imprisoned
under Hitler, summed up about the rise of the Nazis: "First
they came for the communists, but I didn't speak up because
I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade
unionists, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because
I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time
no one was left to speak up."
There are many parallels to the situation in
the U.S.
today. Whether people draw from and act politically on these
lessons from history can shape the future for hundreds of millions
worldwide. It was very positive that the cruel anti-immigrant
"game" at NYU was immediately challenged and opposed.
It is urgent that the whole chauvinist, fascist offensive against
immigrants be challenged and resisted by many, many people all
across this country. And it is time, and way past time,
that the whole system that gives rise to such monstrosities
be done away with.
Revolution
Newspaper.