The Path to Socialism Requires Border Abolition
Although the Biden administration has attempted to differentiate its immigration policies from those of Donald Trump, the end result has been the same: deportations, abuse and negligence of children jailed in detention centers and refugees turned away at the border. What’s more, Biden’s refusal to allow in the refugees at the border has contributed to horrific human rights abuses. As Reuters reported, nearly 3,300 migrants stranded in Mexico have been kidnapped, raped, trafficked or assaulted since Joe Biden took office on January 20.
These conditions are the result of the continuation of most of Trump’s immigration policy under Biden, especially the infamous Title 42, a public health measure weaponized by white-supremacist Stephen Miller at the beginning of the pandemic. Title 42 has allowed the United States to use the pandemic to justify the categorical rejection of asylum claims. On Friday, June 25, Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that Title 42 would remain in place as long as needed, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would make the final decision. “It’s a public health decision…based on the well-being of the American public.” However, according to the New York Times, the CDC “has directed questions about the policy to the White House”. In other words, the continuation of the policy is a political calculation that Biden is making to position his administration as “tough” on migration.
In fact, the enactment of Title 42 violates international law and since the beginning, it has been used to attack refugees seeking asylum. According to a report from the Associated Press published in October 2020, Vice President Mike Pence and Stephen Miller pressured Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC director, to use his emergency powers to institute the law despite opposition from the agency’s scientists, who said that there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus.
Title 42 has turned away refugee families, which led the rise in unaccompanied minors reaching the border earlier this year. In the end, this is family separation by other means. For all their supposed differences, the Republicans and the Democrats are ruling class parties committed to enforcement-only immigration policies that safeguard the interests of US imperialism. Indeed, Kamala Harris’ “Do not come” statement is the Democrat’s equivalent of Donald Trump’s “Send them back!”.
When we argue for a world without borders, we don’t do so just for humanitarian reasons, but because we understand that immigrants’ rights are workers’ rights and because immigrant struggles are class struggle.
Socialists must oppose any immigration policies that do not call for the abolition of border regimes and the fascist institutions that enforce them. When we argue for a world without borders, we don’t do so just for humanitarian reasons, but because we understand that immigrants’ rights are workers’ rights and because immigrant struggles are class struggle.
US border and immigration policy: the result of Indigenous genocide and slavery
A cursory overview of US immigration policies and border regimes reveals a violent history of dispossession and exclusion that accompanied the process of imperial-state formation to guarantee the rights of a capitalist, white-supremacist, settler colonial state.
Today’s citizenship laws can be traced to the explicitly racist Naturalization Act of 1790, which conferred citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” (1). In addition, the criminalization of migration and limits to free movement, have been structured by the slave trade, and the policing and regulation of slaves through vagrancy laws and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
From the outset, Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists opposed western expansion because annexation of the West strengthened the Southern plantation economy—a conclusion also reached by Karl Marx. (2) After the American invasion of Mexico, the southern border was enforced by the army and Texas Rangers that carried out land grabs against Mexican and Tejanx inhabitants of the new territories. Furthermore, patrolling across the southern border continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, while the United States led campaigns of Indigenous extermination in the Southwest.
Since its inception, US immigration policy has been weaponized against Indigenous political and social formations. For example, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forcibly removed southern Native Americans from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma in order make way for white settlers in what became known as the Trail of Tears. In addition, through the Dawes Act of 1887, Indigenous people could become US citizens only if they agreed to relocation on reservations and the confiscation and partitioning of tribal lands (3). After annexation, the capitalist state became the main enforcer of these boundaries and laws through paramilitary formations like the Texas Rangers that led a campaign of genocide against the Comanche and Apache nations to clear the frontier for more white settlers.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, white supremacist federal immigration laws merged race-based exclusion with criminalization of sex work and drug prohibition through the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act. These laws were implemented by immigration agents by the turn of the century, and were later enforced by the newly created US Border Patrol in 1924, which recruited its first generation of agents from the ranks of the Texas Rangers, and Klansmen, laying the ground for the culture of racism and violence still prevalent in immigration enforcement agencies (4).
Throughout the twentieth century, immigration laws were selectively enforced to attack oppressed populations in periods like the Great Depression, when 1.8 million people of Mexican descent, many of them American born, were rounded up in violent, terrorizing raids and deported to open jobs for white workers. Anti-Asian racism also drove immigration legislation like the Immigration Act of 1917, which created the “Asiatic Barred Zone”, the Immigration Act of 1924 that limited Japanese immigration and other policies which eventually culminated in the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps.
US immigration policy has historically included “guestworker programs” like the Bracero Program, that brought manual laborers from Mexico to work on US farms during World War II. Nevertheless, these programs are a form of indentured servitude and they have been used to break strikes by unionized farm workers. Today’s guest worker programs are no different, they are used to undermine unionization and if foreign workers demand higher wages, they are easily replaced or lose their ability to renew their visa since they are at the mercy of their employer.
Much like the Bracero Program, Biden’s immigration proposal, the “US Citizenship Act of 2021, is a form of indentured servitude and according to Justin Akers Chacón, it “has a labor requirement that guarantees that capitalists can have direct access to three to eight years of cheap labor per person, in which wages and working conditions can be suppressed under conditions of noncitizenship.”
Current plans to expand guestworker programs under the Biden Administration reveal an increased dependence on imported labor in sectors like agriculture and high-tech, where US capital is able to externalize social reproduction costs to the home country, while at the same time importing this labor at a lower cost. Furthermore, as Justin Akers Chacón has argued, regimes of migrant labor repression and control work in conjunction with the process of displacement resulting from imperialist “free trade agreements” with Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. His research shows that these pacts have become an important source of wealth accumulation for US corporations that allows capital to concurrently exploit labor within and across borders.
To win socialism, we must abolish ICE and destroy the border
Given their bloody history and the nature of US borders as controls of land, labor and capital flows, they must be abolished to guarantee the free movement and protection of people, species and resources. Furthermore, the border and its accompanying legal-political superstructure must be abolished for the preservation and reclamation of indigenous lands and to establish the basis for genuine proletarian internationalism that puts life and humanity above the interests of US imperialism.
…the function of immigration-enforcement agencies, including the direct and indirect killing of migrants at the border and other forms of violence associated with apprehension, detention and abuse, are a continuation of historic Anglo-settler violence that only serves to control labor and validate xenophobic nationalism.
The new socialist movement must be categorically opposed to the immigration policies of Republicans and Democrats, as the border enforcement regime is not about “security” or “protecting US jobs” but rather serves as an essential method of imperialist state formation and the organization of people into social hierarchies. Border enforcement is labor repression, which through the aegis of access to state-determined citizenship, establishes patchworks of labor segregation based on racial and national exclusions. Furthermore, the violence of enforcement determines who gets to work without fear of arrest and deportation and who gets terrorized by la migra. Indeed, the function of immigration-enforcement agencies, including the direct and indirect killing of migrants at the border and other forms of violence associated with apprehension, detention and abuse, are a continuation of historic Anglo-settler violence that only serves to control labor and validate xenophobic nationalism. As Harsha Walia argues,
Exclusionary projections of who belongs and who has the right to life upholds ruling-class and right-wing nationalism, thus breaking internationalist solidarity and entrenching global apartheid. A political and economic system that treats land as a commodity, Indigenous people as overburden, race as a principle of social organization, women’s caretaking as worthless, workers as exploitable, climate refugees as expendable, and the entire planet as a sacrifice zone must be dismantled (5).
The resolute abolition of borders and ICE is an integral part of the struggle for socialism in the United States. Socialists must reject narrow bread and butter populism propagated by Bernie Sanders, caucuses like Bread & Roses in the Democratic Socialists of America, and any others claiming the socialist mantle that do not commit to border abolition–as the repression of migrant labor is central to the functioning of racial capitalism. The struggle for a world without borders is not abstract, it is a reality we must organize towards in the here and now. As Mariame Kaba teaches us, “There will be no magical day of liberation that we do not make”. Like prison abolitionists, we can organize a real movement to abolish the present state of things as we fight against Title 42, for reparations to those nations wracked by US imperialism, and against borders.
Sources:
1. Walia, Harsha. Border and Rule. Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books, 2020, p.33.
2. Ortiz, Paul. An African American and Latinx History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2018, p. 47.
3. Border and Rule, p.33.
4. Ibid, p. 70.
5. Ibid, p. 84.
6. Ibid, p. 31.
Héctor A. Rivera (He/Him) is a queer, Mexican-American, communist educator based in Los Ángeles, Califaztlán. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Tempest Collective. He writes about geography, history and politics in the US and Latin America.
