TIJUANA, Mexico November 20—Some of the first migrants from the current Central American caravans have arrived in this border city. U.S imperialism and its Mexican capitalist lackeys have welcomed them with more xenophobia, racism and obstacles. Only the international working class, following the communist leadership of PLP, can organize a future for our sisters and brothers. Only our class can offer them the solution to get out of this capitalist hell together.
In Tijuana, in unprecedented acts, the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) mayor Gastélum has used the media to encourage protests and xenophobic and racist attacks against the migrants. This achievement represents a great danger for the international working class. It is a bosses’ victory in their constant battle to keep us divided.
Our victories will be accomplished by confronting and crushing all expressions of anti-immigrant racism. In fact, there were protests and actions of solidarity with the migrants, but they have to grow andstrengthen to be able to beat the racists.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) say that workers migrate because of the same reasons, they facing a capitalist-made tragedy. That is why we organize to change this criminal system. The PLP in Mexico organized a collection of food and clothing to support the caravans, but mainly we have taken them our communist alternative: revolutionary politics in the form of literature demonstrating the need for workers’ power to overthrow all the capitalists.
The bosses’ racism and nationalism are capitalist strategies to hide exploitation and dispossession. The imperialists for centuries have carried out these crimes in the main regions of the world where the great waves of migrants come from: Latin America, Africa and Asia.
 Migrants try to find a better place to live with dignity, but with the capitalist economies’ crises and the imperialist wars that they cause, this is becoming more and more difficult. The caravans of Central American workers, mainly from Hondurans, show the tragedy experienced by our class sisters and brothers who flee poverty, oppression and violence in their places of origin.If this were not the case, no one would expose themselves to the horror of crossing Mexico to reach the United States. During this journey many of migrant workers are robbed, abused, kidnapped to work as slaves or hit men, women are raped or sexually exploited.Many of our class brothers and sisters are killed by criminal gangs, others are extorted by immigration authorities and the police.
In addition, hundreds have died or been mutilated in the dangerous journey they make on the train known as the Beast. Others, get sick without being able to receive any kind of assistance. They do not receive aid because nationalism has encouraged the population to see the migrants as enemies, they are seen as the ones that take away jobs, and in effect, they work for less than the minimum wage and without social security, under the bosses’ threats of termination, or deportation.
Faced with the migration generated by the crisis of their system, the capitalists and their governments close the borders with their armies, police, their criminal bands and their borders, while fomenting racist hatred against the migrants. For this, they use their media to blame them for the increase in crime, to steal from local workers the precarious and nonexistent jobs, to break the laws.
Working-class solidarity
But, in spite of this racist campaign, workers demonstrated their solidarity in the communities where the caravans have arrived. Despite the precariousness with which they live, people organize themselves to receive their class sisters, they prepare food for them, they give them accommodation, they also provide them with medical care and clothes and support them with transportation.
This solidarity can become an internationalist class consciousness to unite the workers of the world to fight against the cause of their problems, the capitalist system.Migration is provoked because capitalism is an unequal system at the local and global level. In Latin America and especially in Central America, workers have suffered chronic and millennial misery, it is a region that produces mainly raw materials and cheap labor, the precariousness and scarcity of work together with the violence of criminal groups has forced the migration of hundreds of thousands in recent years, mainly to the U.S.
 Migrants are part of the labor force that capitalists use to perform the worst jobs, the heaviest and the worst paid, which means super profits for the bosses. But that situation affects all workers because it causes a general decrease in wages and working conditions.Migration is a phenomenon that occurs between countries and within the same country. It may have a political or economic origin.
For example, in Mexico, thousands of families have been displaced from their places of origin by the violence of drug trafficking groups, by land conflicts, by lack of work and livelihoods, by armed or electoral political conflicts, or by religious conflicts. These problems are generated by the capitalists, because in addition to providing them with cheap labor, it ensures the division of the working class, which limits our class’ ability to fight and face the attacks of their system.
The expulsion of workers also allows bosses to control the territories to take over the land for the mines, the extraction of gas or oil, also of the lakes, forests and rivers, and the richness of the biosphere.  Because of all this, capitalism will never be able to provide our class with a decent, and stable future. Only the working class can change our situation with a communist revolution. That way, we will crush all borders as well as all the racist divisions that separate us. Solidarity with the caravans! Crush anti-immigrant racism! Join the PLP!

NEW YORK CITY, November 8—Progressive Labor Party participated in a mass march against the destruction and slaughter in Yemen. Although the protest was small, half the protesters blocked the doors of the Saudi Consulate, risking arrest. Comrades distributed dozens of CHALLENGE, hoping to spread an internationalist outlook.In 3 years of civil war there, the Saudis, together with the U.S., UK, and the UAE, have killed more than 10,000 of our working-class sisters, brothers and children and left more than half the population starving. They have blockaded the port of Hudaydah where relief supplies could enter the country.
Some U.S. politicians have expressed “concern” about the Khashoggi killing and U.S. support for the genocidal war in Yemen, but one thing is clear. The U.S. ruling class is not going to give up the hugely profitable arms deals with Saudi Arabia, nor the role the Saudis play for U.S. imperialism’s power and control of oil in the Middle East.
Stories from protesters
After the protest, I got together with four women friends, originally from Yemen. As usual we talked about our families and cultures and Yemen. I want to share some of their stories with CHALLENGE readers. Many of them talked about how the 2017 Anti-Muslim ban (the racist title of this executive order says it all: “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”) issued by president Donald Trump effectively separated and devastated families.
I have eight sisters and one brother in Yemen. We can’t visit our family there and our brother, who needs to get a job to support our sisters, can’t get a visa to the U.S. because of the ban. They live in a village in Yemen. There are no jobs. The cities are destroyed.
I am an American citizen, born in Yemen. I got married one and a half years ago in Malaysia and returned with my husband to his family in Yemen. After the ban, I quickly returned to the U.S. to apply for a visa for my husband. We only lived together as a married couple for four months and now he can’t come to the U.S. and we have no possibility to have our own home and family.
I have family in Djibouti. It’s expensive to live there; a one-bedroom apartment costs $2000 a month. Yemen refugees there are waiting for years. They’ve sold homes and businesses to survive and now are not able to get enough to eat and are drinking dirty water.  
Comrades, we have to continue this fight. We are one international working class and we must destroy imperialism!

November 9,Newark, NJ—150 protestors and supporters rallied outside of the Federal Building today, demanding the release of Jorge Chajón who has now been detained, for over a year now. At the tender age of thirteen, Jorge made the perilous trek from Guatemala to reunite with his family in New Jersey, accompanied by a caravan of 75 workers, fleeing the capitalist violence,that is all too pervasive in his homeland. For over a decade now this has been Jorge’s new home. Here, he graduated High School, and had it not been for his immigration status at the time, he would’ve attended Rutgers University, he later married, and recently became a father to a baby girl.
Despite sorting out his immigration status, and qualifying for DACA (Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals). Jorge’s status as a dreamer was brutally crushed when he was detained by ICE, costing him half a million dollars, and 15 months in detention facing inhumane treatment. Today at our demonstration. many blamed the Trump administration for ongoing fascist policies. Yet criminal separation of children from parents within the borders of the U.S is part and parcel of decades of systematic U.S sponsored oppression in Central America. Rulers here reap even more benefits by dividing immigrant from “citizen.”
The fear of deportation--of even more than the 2.5 millions of Obama’s regime--drives wages lower for “citizens”, too, who are pitted against immigrants for jobs. What Jorge’s experience shows us is that the capitalist bosses can only offer workers nightmares not dreams of a better life. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stands in solidarity with Jorge Chacón’s family but takes a further step into the future. We recognize that fighting for an egalitarian world has to combat policies like Reagan’s genocide in Guatemala of the ‘80’s that planted the seeds of violence Jorge and other workers in Central America fled, and continue to flee today.
The crowd today included members of Unitarian Universalist Faith Action, NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice, Make the Road NJ and members of  PLP. We held a banner displaying 2500 signatures demanding Jorge be released, and reunited with his wife and two young children. Unfortunately our rally resulted in no “justice ( the hearing is postponed to November 20). His previous hearing was scheduled for June 26th, but ICE officials failed to transport him to that hearing as well as to a previous hearing!
 Members of PLP and workers engaged in this fight say Enough to false promises! We vow to continue fighting alongside immigrant workers like Jorge, for a new system free from exploitation, that would ultimately smash the profit system and its deadly borders.

BROOKLYN, November 21—At this year’s Progressive Labor Party College Conference, a PL’er told Kingsborough Community College students and staff that “we lead by taking matters into our own hands” (see college article). This KCC contingent didn’t waste any time jumping back into action as soon as classes began on Monday! And since then we’ve been talking about the possibility of a communist future.
Here KCC students who attended the Conference describe what they did.
All for one, one for all
On Monday morning, a freshman student came to our group and explained her problem. She’s a CUNY Accelerated Study in Associates Program(ASAP) student like me, which means our tuition and books are covered. Because ASAP sends the checks to our home, this student didn’t find it strange when she received one. Then the college told her they had overpaid her for ASAP and placed her on academic hold, preventing her from registering for classes next semester.
I see students like her all the time, shy or unsure of how to stand up for themselves. At Kingsborough, some staff test your patience. They ignore you and only help when they absolutely have to.
First we went to Financial Aid. They tried to make it sound like it was the student’s fault for cashing the check. We asked to work out a payment plan; they said no. The money would have to be immediately repaid. The whole point of ASAP is to help students who don’t have money to pay for college. We struggle to pay for basic expenses. What students who need ASAP have hundreds of dollars lying around for whenever the college makes a mistake? Next we went to the Bursar’s office. We were told there was nothing they could do, and told me to mind my own business.
Standing up is our business
After it was clear we weren’t going anywhere, the staff member took a waiver form and said “ok fine, let’s just do this.” Just like that, they wrote it out for half of the amount owed!  While she still has to pay back half, why did we have to go through all that?
I asked them that, and I demanded to know how many other students this “mistake” had happened to? Will they all be receiving these special waivers? Why are academic holds placed on students, affecting their futures, when it’s the college’s mistake? And why is it our responsibility to account for the college’s money? They had no answer.
I didn’t just stand up because she’s my friend. I did it because this is wrong and more of us need to stand up. We discussed it with friends who read CHALLENGE and went to the conference. This student has to write a short essay as a part of the waiver deal. We talked about turning her short essay into an open letter protesting the college’s “mistakes,” and posting it around campus.
Always bring a crowd
On Thursday, a student’s expensive laptop charger went missing during lab. Her friend said she witnessed who took it, maybe by accident. No one wanted police involved, but the office in charge of the lab completely ignored the students’ request to look into it. We discussed it and eight students and faculty supported the student by walking back to the office and demanding that phone calls be made and the issue followed up. We said we’d return and follow up on the situation next week.
A young Caribbean student new, to communist ideas, and a PLP member had just been reading a CHALLENGE article together and talking about what it means to be a communist on a day to day. We take matters into our own hands - and when we do, we bring a crowd!
Small struggles prepare us for larger battles
None of these struggles will end the war in Yemen, lift the siege of Gaza, end racist administrators or racist police terror. Not today! However if we build a communist movement, brick by brick, and struggle by struggle united we can put an end to these evils.
From small skirmishes for waivers to mass struggles like improving public transportation, we’re training ourselves to become the leadership we need to one day run the entire world.