Immigrants risk everything to come here because U.S. imperialism and Wall Street policies have destroyed their economies or installed military governments that guarantee profits for U.S. corporations. 10,000 children ripped from their families and imprisoned shows there is no limit to what U.S. capitalist rulers will do. Immigrants come here as refugees but they are not recognized as such because that would mean admitting the imperialist US government’s role in their displacement.
Take two examples: Mexico and Honduras. When the U.S. put in place the North American Free Trade Agreement, US agribusiness firms flooded Mexican markets with corn, the longtime staple economic crop of Mexico. Corporations reaped a windfall of profit while more than two million farmers lost their livelihoods and were stranded, hungry and homeless.
In 2009 the people of Honduras elected a government that wanted to enact some measures to help the people. The U.S. under Obama/Hillary Clinton financed and orchestrated a military coup against that elected government and put in place a repressive regime that has murdered and imprisoned thousands while impoverishing the masses.
Here in the U.S. workers and oppressed people are seeing low wages and all our public services gutted, while the for-profit military machine loots the treasury. Profit making prisons mean mass incarceration for immigrants and working class people, especially the Black community. The rich are getting much richer but we are not. They are taking it all and still come back for more.
To carry off this robbery of the people, the government, which represents Wall Street, is whipping up racism and homophobia, attacking women’s rights, and scapegoating immigrants. They want to divide the working class and turn our attention away from their thievery.
The reality is that whenever any group of workers, whatever their status or nationality, race or sexual identity, is unequal, it lowers the livings standards and rights of all workers.
Capital–that is, money accumulated from the sweat of our labor but owned privately by a few individual capitalists– can cross all the borders in the world to exploit people’s misery for profit. There are no laws preventing U.S. capitalist corporations from running away to other countries, no laws preventing them from hiding their profits offshore, no laws ensuring a good job or income for all. But human beings, our class sisters and brothers and children, are imprisoned.
We as workers are linked together globally. If the U.S. installs a dictatorship to pay workers $1 a day somewhere, it lowers our wages. There are no borders in the workers struggle. The government comes up with all sorts of lies to justify their wars for private profit. They can’t openly say they are trying to dominate the world to fill their bank vaults at any cost, no matter how many lives are taken.
In our fight to free the children and families we recognize that these crimes are not new to US policy but a continuation of the kidnappings that ripped apart families under slavery and that tore Native children from their homes. Every day, throughout this land of for-profit prisons, thousands of families, especially Black families, suffer under the US system of mass incarceration. Just as sheriffs originated as catchers of enslaved people, today ICE plays this role.
We must stand up for all the children, free all the families, abolish ICE, win equal political and economic rights for immigrants, and put an end to for-profit prisons and mass incarceration. These aims are in the interest of “citizen” and immigrant workers alike.