Thousands of furious workers are protesting the detention and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student and green card holder, who began life as a Palestinian refugee in Syria and led demonstrations at Columbia against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Khalil committed no crime but is being called a security threat and terrorist supporter, terms that have been used to violently silence workers throughout the U.S.’ genocidal, blood-soaked history. As U.S. imperialism weakens against rival Russian and Chinese imperialism and world war looms on the horizon, the Trump regime threatens this will be the first of many deportations to come.
The deportation apparatus Trump is using today to target Khalil and hunt additional antiracist students was built by liberal presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden, but this isn’t new for the U.S. capitalist class; the U.S. has been forcefully removing workers since its inception. The bosses use racist mass removals and deportations as tools to increase profits, lower wages, build racism and nationalism, and dampen working class opposition (Multiracialunity.org, 5/7/16).
Below, we will discuss the history of U.S. deportations, current events at Columbia, the limitations of a nationalist outlook, and why joining the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and overthrowing capitalism is the only solution.
Racism and deportations – established U.S. practices
Since 1882, the U.S. has forced the removal of nearly 57 million people, more than any other country in the world. The vast majority were “voluntary” departures, meaning ordered by federal authorities. In the last 100 years, more people have been expelled than have been allowed to stay in the US permanently.
As the U.S.’ genocidal “manifest destiny” and decades of mass exterminations during the “Indian Wars” were winding down, the U.S. capitalists were consolidating their stranglehold over the continental U.S. — and the modern deportation mechanism got rolling, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. By 1870, twenty percent of California’s workforce was from China, but they were no longer needed as the native-born population grew. The Act not only restricted immigration but denied citizenship or the right to marry a non-Chinese, even to longtime residents.
Over 22,000 immigrants had their citizenship revoked from 1906-1967, most often on a political basis. Terrified by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, U.S. leaders targeted left-wing leaders. Perhaps the most famous case is that of anarchist Emma Goldman, and nearly 250 leftists were deported to then-communist-led Soviet Union that same year.
Thousands were deported under the Nationality Act of 1940, and in 1952 during McCarthyism, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, that required citizenship applicants to prove their Constitutional loyalty. One of the best-known victims, the Trinidad-born communist Claudia Jones, was expelled in 1955.
Despite undocumented immigrants being vital to the agriculture, construction, and home health industries, Trump is building racism and nationalism by resurrecting the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allowed a President to remove non-citizens during a “declared war,” including those who are long-term residents, without any hearing or due process. The Supreme Court has said in the past that the Act can be used only during an “invasion or predatory incursion,” but that’s exactly what Trump calls immigrants – an invasion – especially those who cross the southern border.
Mahmoud Khalil and anti-imperialism
Whether a student expresses verbal sympathy for Hamas or not is currently not a legal basis for arrest, academic sanctions or deportation. Khalil, however, actually said in a CNN interview, “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other.” Although we do not know Khalil personally and do not know if by this he means he supports a single binational state with equal rights or if he thinks an Islamic state under Hamas is desirable for Palestinians, he at least does not believe that a state of continual occupation and war benefits either Israelis or Palestinians.
PLP fights beyond the positions of the groups leading the Columbia and nationwide student protests for a mass party for communism – the only force that threatens imperialism and genocide. Most of these groups are committed to the “right of self-determination,” which is a common position of most groups on the “left” today, but lacks a class analysis of capitalism. “Self-determination” or “nationalism of the oppressed” essentially argues U.S. capitalists are bad, but capitalists in Palestine, Sudan, Haiti or China are okay, with no distinction between workers and bosses.
Capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of the working class by a small group of owners, and both imperialist nations and colonized nations are so divided. Even within the “imperialist core” nations, the vast majority of the population is exploited and repressed. Columbia students know this, as does anyone who protested for George Floyd or with the coal or with the coal miners in Alabama. Workers in imperialist nations have far more in common with workers of colonized or formerly colonized ones in the so-called Global South. PLP endorses Marx’s revolutionary slogan, “workers of the world, unite!”
The second fallacy, however, is that these same class divisions do not exist within colonized or oppressed nations, like Palestine, Sudan or Haiti. For example, the pro-Palestine movement outside of the occupied territories expresses unmitigated support of Hamas, mostly on the basis that they are the leaders of an oppressed society and thus cannot be criticized.
However, the institutions and representatives of the imperialists are always deeply implanted in these nations’ political and financial institutions, whether before or after battles for liberation. In every state where national liberation struggles have been victorious, from South Africa to Algeria to El Salvador and many, many more, conditions are as bad or worse, despite having ruling classes of the same ethnicity as them. The local economic structure remains tied to international imperialist institutions like the IMF – or increasingly to China — and the economies remain limited to resource extraction.
In Palestine, Fatah, the openly corrupt ruling party of the West Bank, is in league with Israeli rulers and their rabid police. Hamas, the Islamic group that rules in Gaza, has accepted millions of dollars from Israel both at its entry into Gaza in 1987 and in recent years, so Israel could promote Palestinian divisions. Hamas ruled Gaza by taxing the general population at exorbitant rates and suppressing its opposition. Many leaders lived in wealth in Qatar, while most of the population is food insecure. And although many Gazans may admire the courage of Hamas fighters, there is a widespread dislike of the consequences.
The communist movement we deserve
It’s misleading to declare that all rulers who oppose the U.S. have the interests of any workers at heart, even their own. All workers in imperialist and oppressed nations are victimized by capitalism and, we must unite as class sisters and brothers to overthrow it. As the U.S. loses ground to China in productivity and influence in much of the world and as inter-imperialist war grows closer, fascist repression will be needed no matter which politicians are in power. Join PLP, and fight to link these struggles together into a mass anti-imperialist movement for communist revolution!
