In his racist, divisive State of the Union address, President Donald Trump did his best to scapegoat immigrants for the deepening crisis of U.S. capitalism amid sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry. To convince the U.S. working class to go to war over Middle East oil and other ruling-class interests, the bosses must increase racism against workers in other countries. Just as Hitler blamed the depression in Germany in the 1930s on Jews, Trump is trying to blame violent crime and job loss on immigrants fleeing U.S.-supported terror regimes and the economic instability of capitalism.
But workers cannot be fooled. The international working class has no borders. “Immigrants” are simply super-exploited workers who are forced by the profit system’s failures to move beyond the rulers’ arbitrary boundary lines. In the face of these attacks by Trump and the bosses he serves, we must build a revolutionary communist party to smash all walls and fences that serve the money-sucking capitalists. We must create a new world that honors workers’ labor and serves workers’ needs.
Two Brands of Fascism
U.S. capitalism is in decline relative to China and Russia. In a desperate effort to hold on to their top dog position, the U.S. bosses have plunged into wars from Syria to Afghanistan to Yemen, all in preparation for the broader global conflict to come. But the U.S. rulers are also contending with significant divisions in their own camp. The domestically oriented section of the ruling class is less invested in a prospective war over Middle East oil. It’s promoting a smaller, less expensive, predominantly white military trained as racist killers.
But the dominant finance capital wing understands that it needs a “multicultural” army for the World War III to come. These bosses see immigrants as invaluable cannon fodder, and are willing to hold out the carrot of U.S. citizenship as an incentive to recruit immigrants into their killing machine.  As former President Barack Obama noted, the young immigrants known as Dreamers “start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love” (cnn.com, 9/5/17).
The upshot of this debate means more fascism, whether it comes with an overtly racist face or a liberal veneer. Trump’s address—offering a “path” to citizenship for 1.8 million “Dreamers” while excluding family members, accelerating deportations, erecting a wall, and demonizing other immigrants as criminals—might have been a clumsy attempt at compromise between the bosses’ warring camps. The incoherence of his immigrations plans, which seem to change by the day, is a symptom of the Klansman in Chief’s volatility and shortsighted outlook. But they also reflect an essential contradiction for the capitalist class. On the one hand, all bosses need to use anti-immigrant racism to divide workers, to push down wages and stave off the mortal threat of a united working class. On the other hand, all bosses need immigrants as a source of cheaper labor. As immigration scholar Mae Ngai noted in the New York Times (1/29):
Migration is propelled by irrepressible human desires for family unification, economic improvement and physical safety….In truth, undocumented migration is not an aberration of “normal” immigration. It is the inevitable result of any general policy of immigration restriction. Restriction creates two streams of immigration, lawful and unlawful. It is a conceit of the sovereign power to think that it can have only legal immigration.
Immigration Reform: Just Another Attack on Workers
Under Trump, the attack on immigrant workers has shifted and intensified.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are acting more aggressively—detaining and deporting any undocumented immigrants they find, not just those convicted of committing crimes, as under Obama.  Trump has halted the DACA (Dream Act) program, subjecting to deportation 800,000 undocumented people who entered the U.S. as children.  He has done the same to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from countries that sustained natural disasters (including Haiti and El Salvador) by ending their Temporary Protected Status.  Trump also wants to end the visa lottery program, which grants green cards to 50,000 immigrants a year from countries with low immigration numbers, and to stop immigrants from legally bringing in family members beyond spouses and dependent children.  Trump’s plan for “merit-based” immigration from countries like Norway is a transparent move to fuel anti-immigrant racism by drawing a line between “good” immigrants—white, English-speaking people with college degrees—and everybody else. He aims to divide the working class while encouraging the white-supremacist base that elected him in 2016.
Democrats Cannot Be Trusted
History shows that the working class cannot trust the Democratic Party to defend and protect immigrant workers. In the 1990s, under Democrat Bill Clinton, the U.S. Border Patrol initiated operations called “Gatekeeper” and “Hold the Line,” which concentrated agents and technology to make “a ‘show of force’ to potential illegal border crossers” (cbp.gov) and oversaw the “first major federal move towards constructing a border fence” in Texas, Arizona, and California (cndls.georgetown.edu). The Clinton administration deported a record 12.3 million immigrants and pushed for laws that established “new grounds for deportation, penalties for the crimes of illegal entry and re-entry, mandates for detention of deportable noncitizens, and a framework for cooperative arrangements on immigration enforcement between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies” (Migration Policy Institute, 1/26/17).
More recently, Obama deported more than 2 million people and criminalized more immigrants than any president before him. While Trump’s crude appeals to white supremacists are more openly vile, and he has pushed to ban immigrants from mainly Muslim countries, his racist stance on immigration is essentially no different than that of his predecessors, Democrat or Republican (New York Times, 1/29). In fact, Trump deported fewer people in 2017 than Obama did in 2016 (politifact).
Fight Back Against Anti-Immigrant Racism
As communists, we welcome immigrants as fellow workers who have been among the most militant fighters against capitalist brutality and exploitation. Thousands of groups are now fighting Trump’s deportations. Union teachers have formed anti-deportation committees. New York-area lawyers demonstrated to eject ICE agents from the court system. “Sanctuary” movements are protecting immigrants and publicizing their stories. In Norwalk, Connecticut, Nury Chavarria, a mother faced with deportation to Guatemala after 24 years in the U.S., won a stay after several hundred supporters demonstrated on her behalf. An undocumented Boston student, locked in an ICE jail, was granted bail after a “go-fund-me” movement of students at his school raised the bond money. Every day, volunteers leave food and water in the Sonora Desert to save migrants from death from dehydration and heat stroke.
Communist Answer
The Progressive Labor Party calls on all workers to defend our brother and sister immigrants against deportation, and to fight Trump’s racist lies. Smash racist deportations! Let’s train ourselves and our class to fight for a world where of “no more deportees.”