The swell of workers looking to enter the U.S. ,and take refuge below the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas has grown to more than 12,000 people (CNN.com 9/20). They are suffering from overcrowding, extreme heat, illness, lack of food and unsanitary conditions. The chaos of capitalism in crisis forces workers to flee for survival, and makes our lives ever more disposable. On both sides of the border workers suffer the brutality and incompetence of capitalism along with racism and a general disregard for the lives of workers. The terrifying photo of a border patrolman on horseback, whipping a rope while chasing down a Black worker from Haiti, along with the miserable conditions in the camps, evokes images of slavery and fascist internment. Only communism, a system based on the needs of the international working class, can abolish borders, and organize the world for the good of the masses of workers.
The migrant camp of Reynosa in Tamaulipas, Mexico across from Hidalgo, Texas, concentrates two to five thousand people with only 18 portable toilets. Workers are charged 10 pesos to use the showers and sinks (NYT, 8/30). The situation in Tijuana is more of the same. The workers in camps there have denounced the overcrowding and violence reporting extortion, theft, and kidnapping. Many have been sent back from the U.S. with their asylum paperwork in plastic envelopes. The missing laces in their shoes reveal their time at a deportation center making them easy marks for criminals who take them to “safe houses” until their relatives in the U.S. pay sums of up to $2,000 for their release (hrw.org, 6/2/2020). Without question, these conditions are inhumane.
Capitalism is criminal and anti-worker whether its lackeys are openly fascist and anti-immigrant like Donald Trump or liberals like Joe Biden or Mexican President  Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). Essentially, the increasingly fascist policies of capitalism in crisis condemn millions to die in poverty trying to cross the bosses borders.
The current situation at the border between Mexico and the U.S. began with an agreement between Trump and AMLO at the end of 2018. The government in Mexico agreed to the “Remain in Mexico” plan under pressure of a U.S. threat to increase taxes on goods imported from Mexico. Since then, Mexico agreed that workers from countries other than Mexico who had been stopped crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico would wait in Mexico while the U.S. courts evaluated their asylum petitions.
While Trump built support with his base by pushing anti-immigrant policies and the Democrats built support from their base by attacking Trump, the crisis of capitalism – exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the paralyzing divisions within the ruling class – has intensified. Even when businesses in the U.S. claim to lack workers and workers are traveling thousands of miles in search of employment, the capitalist class is incapable of overcoming their internal divisions even to satisfy their own interests, let alone the needs of the working class.
The horrors that migrant workers are facing are a consequence of the crisis of capitalism and a sign of fascism—the form that capitalism in crisis takes. The concentration of thousands of workers condemned to live and die in detention camps is reminiscent of fascism in the past and a glimpse of the future under this system. No capitalist government or political party can guarantee the needs of the working class. The situation facing workers at the border shows that in the face of crisis, capitalism resorts to fascism. Workers become disposable, left to live or die in squalor.
It is only because of working class solidarity that workers in the camps receive any support in the form of needed water and food, clothes, mattresses, medicine and tents big enough only to provide some protection from the rain and cold nights. Only the power of the working class, organized in a fight for communism will ever be able to provide for workers of the world.