Since Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have returned from volunteering in the New Sanctuary Caravan Project at the U.S.-Mexico border in January, we are upping our efforts to build an international immigration campaign. Our goal is to recruit more people to go to the border to provide direct aid and to win many volunteers and refugees to see that a world without borders is possible. Many ties were made between refugees and volunteers. We developed these bonds with the understanding that workers around the world are all in this together, that we all have the same enemy and must unite to fight racism whenever it raises its ugly head.
Friendships and commitments were made that went beyond our short stay at the border. Volunteers became sponsors for people with no ties to family or friends in the U.S. (having a U.S. citizen sponsor is a plus in seeking asylum). The migrants received pro bono immigration lawyers. The working class of Tijuana also rose to the occasion, sharing whatever they had–food, clothes, and sometimes a place to sleep or to shower.
Meanwhile, the fascist U.S. President Donald Trump and the “Socialist” Mexican President Obrador are working together to stem the flow of refugees. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have prevented journalists, organizers, and volunteers from crossing the border, questioning them and holding them in detention for hours. Two U.S. attorneys working with the Tijuana-based group Al Otro Lado were denied entry into Mexico (San Diego Tribune, 2/11). And nine members of the borderland faith-based organization, No More Deaths, were arrested for the “crime” of leaving jugs of water and cans of beans for migrants passing through the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona, where more than 3,000 people have died making their way north on foot since 2000 (The Intercept, 1/17).
Volunteers in the Caravan Project learned many important lessons.  With no paid staff, no office space, and minimal resources–we were part of a 40-day campaign that attracted hundreds of volunteers, including local immigrant rights organizations and churches, who provided extensive assistance to thousands of refugees, including preparing asylum applications, food preparation and serving, transportation, childcare, health clinics, and other services needed by a community.
Caravan volunteers, who reported on their experiences at a National Writers’ Union forum, will report back at a local church in March and plan to speak on campuses and to community organizations. Our PLP club is organizing a study group on immigration and planning a fundraiser to help refugees, both at the border and when they settle in new homes. Understanding how imperialist states have historically created “borders” to justify ownership of resources, control the wages and movement of labor, and divide workers across borders by promoting “nationalism” and “racism” are all goals of the study group. We are also planning a dinner to build for the PLP May Day march on May 4. These activities are important elements toward building the ties and deepening understanding of how to bring about a communist society to smash all borders!
In short, the work at the border is a small school for communism. For cynics who claim that a society cannot function without money, the international village in Tijuana disproves that idea. The thousands of people fleeing Central America and the hundreds of volunteers coming to greet them are experiencing directly what it means to make decisions and allocate resources and human energy based on what the working class needs. The international solidarity and international friendships being forged show the potential of creating an egalitarian communist society to serve the needs of the all workers. While U.S. and Mexican bosses are united in attacking the refugees and immigrant workers, we propose an international Summer Project, for PLP members and friends to unite our class, the workers, on both sides of the US/Mexico border. One World, One Working Class, One Party! Join us.

New York City, March 3—Today 150-200 healthcare workers, medical students, Aids organizers, municipal and CUNY (City University) retirees and others picketed the big Pharma profiteer, Pfizer, and then marched through the streets of midtown Manhattan. Angry chants like “Pfizer’s greed kills” and speeches denounced the capitalist medical system which forces millions to choose between food, rent and prescription drugs. In addition, many protesters called for support for a single payer health plan (e.g., Medicare for all, paid by the government) to take “excess” profits out of the hands of healthcare profiteers. While it is important to call out the greedy healthcare industry, we in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) explain that a system that doesn’t meet the medical needs of the working class doesn’t deserve to exist. In the U.S., Black and Latin workers are the most likely to lack access to quality medical care and needed medications. It was disappointing to see that few Black workers took part in this demonstration, since because of racist conditions, Black and Latin workers face the worst health and health care coverage. Perhaps it was because the union movement was noticeably absent. Union misleaders have opted to divide the working class by merely protecting their members, who have medical and drug coverage, while largely ignoring the needs of workers who do not. Retiree organizers at today’s march are fighting against that kind misleadership, which weakens the working class and in effect helps, put more money back into the bosses’ pockets.
Some organizers of today’s march put forward a divisive chant, “Health care is a right, not just for the rich and white.” Instead of equating white workers with their bosses, we should be promoting struggle and unity. At demonstrations to stop hospital closings we’ve had better chants, such as “Health care is a right, fight fight fight” and “Men and women, Black and white to win better health care we must unite.”Moreover even a single tax payer system, or medicare for all will not guarantee good health for all, because under capitalism there is no incentive to maximize the health of anyone who is not working– be it the unemployed, disabled, old, or imprisoned.
Participating in the movement against medical industry profiteers is necessary as we fight to survive in this racist capitalist system and helps us show our friends why communist revolution is needed to insure equal access to medical care.

MARYLAND, March 6—Twenty five antiracists packed a courtroom yet again to support Kevin Sneed, a Black worker who has been held for two years on bogus charges of  attempting to kill a police officer.
Convenience store footage showing  his arrest smashes the bosses’ racist lies about Sneed. It shows officers climbing in through his car windows, beating Kevin senseless until the car begins to slowly drift when Kevin could no longer hold the brake pedal down. The ruling class and their system never miss a chance to smear workers, especially Black and Latin ones.
While none of the cops who beat Kevin sustained injuries, He was battered and bruised after being pulled over supposedly for a broken tail light. After the story appeared on the local Washington, D.C. area news and in response to several packed hearings, the county prosecutor offered Kevin a deal: plead guilty to disorderly conduct and agree not to file any charges or complaints against the police department!
In this case, grass roots activism by Life after Release, a group in which Progressive Labor Party(PLP) members participate, might help one individual in a sea of racist arrests and prosecutors leaving workers to rot in prison, but in the end, capitalism thrives on perpetuating incarceration and terror among the working class. In a system where cops are praised for arresting innocent Black workers–prosecutors are praised for keeping them behind bars until they plead guilty out of desperation–and a prison system that profits from being filled to the brim, we need more than piecemeal reforms. We need to smash the capitalist system that squeezes profit out of misery and build a system that won’t function on racism and money. We need communism, and every day that we don’t grow closer to achieving that vision is another day  our working class brothers and sisters remain locked behind bars.

Although a federal budget deal was reached between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress, workers should have no illusions that either party has our class interests at heart. President Donald Trump’s open, vicious, anti-immigrant racism and his fascist “state of emergency” is a big attack on our class. But both competing wings of the U.S. ruling class—the  main-wing finance capitalists represented by the Democrats, and the Fortress America nationalists fronted by Trump and his Republican base—serve the needs of U.S. capitalism. Both sides back the maximum exploitation of the working class, using whatever terror is necessary. Immigrant workers and children languish in torturous detention camps on the border with Mexico, and throughout the U.S. interior, with at least 22 deaths in the last two years (nbcnews.com, 1/6). Meanwhile Democrats and Republicans are quibbling over how many tens of thousands of bunks and cots the camps should contain!
Communists reject the bosses’ phony national borders, which are designed to control labor and resources while keeping our class divided. Communists understand that working-class solidarity knows no boundaries. The slogan of Progressive Labor Party is “One world, one class, one flag.” Workers share a class interest to smash the profit system, the fundamental cause of the misery and death inflicted upon us. Only a communist revolution can abolish profit and exploitation, enable workers to seize state power, and create a borderless world that serves workers’ needs.
On January 25, after a long impasse and a 35-day partial government shut-down over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for a border wall. Trump finally signed a budget bill pushed through by the Democrats. The legislation allowed for $1.3 billion for the wall and an additional $1.75 billion for surveillance technology and more immigration cops. Now Trump wants to take  more money for his wall from military construction and other funds. His declared “state of emergency” is dangerous to our class for several reasons. First, it is rooted in the racist “immigrant invasion” myth that plays into Trump’s white-supremacist base. Second, it expands the executive power that has marked the growth of U.S. fascism since the 1980s. Finally, it sets a precedent for extra-legal fascist rule in the bosses’ run-up to their war with China and/or Russia.  
   In the face of a furious inter-imperialist challenge by China’s bosses, the U.S. main wing will be pushing new forms of “multicultural” patriotism (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019). Unlike Trump, the finance capitalists know the U.S. needs to recruite immigrant fighters for an inevitable World War III. They continue to push for the DREAM Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which would funnel young immigrants into the U.S. military. Most of the U.S. population, including 92 percent of Democrats, are against Trump’s wall (Washington Post, 1/14/19).  But the Democratic Party’s opposition to Trump only highlights their own hypocrisy and a criminal history of attacks on immigrant workers.
Racist Democrats no friends of immigrants
In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law two bills passed by a majority Republican Congress: the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The first used the spectre of “Islamic terrorism” to justify “secret evidence” in deportation hearings. The second vastly expanded the list of federal and state criminal violations as grounds for deportation. Both laws led to today’s mass deportations and rising fascism. By empowering anti-immigrant racism, they also drove down working conditions for all workers.More recently, Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama deported 3 million immigrants during his eight years in office. Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate, recently warned Europe’s governments to “get a handle on migration” and “send a very clear message [to immigrants]–We are not going to be able to provide refuge and support’” (The Guardian, 11/22/18).Clinton previously backed her husband’s racist immigration reform policies. As a U.S. senator, she joined Obama and Chuck Schumer, the current Senate minority leader, in voting for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized 700 miles of border fencing (Washington Post, 1/10/19).
While Trump promotes open racist terror through forced family separation, renewed workplace raids, and extended imprisonment of asylum-seekers in his Nazi-style concentration camps, the liberals’ brand of fascism is more dangerous to our class. Some Democratic Party leaders, recognizing the rise of anti-capitalist sentiment among younger workers, try to pose as friends of immigrants. They use popular social democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to enhance their “progressive” image. But the social democrats records expose them for the liars they are.
When Ocasio-Cortez and others call for an end to ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), their plan is to reassign the immigration gestapo to other agencies that will continue to terrorize workers (The Atlantic, 7/11/18). None of these fake-leftists question the legitimacy of national borders. None of them are calling for the detention camps to be dismantled, or for freeing these victims of U.S. imperialism. None of them are friends of the international working class.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s willingness to make a deal with Trump shows that her objection to the “immorality”of the wall is nothing more than opportunist rhetoric. In 2013, Pelosi supported a bipartisan bill for more border fencing. She and other key Democrats want kinder, gentler concentration camps that allow parents and children to be jailed together, not separately. They want a smaller wall and more drones, surveillance, and cybersecurity—potentially greater threats to workers than anything Trump has imagined.
Anti-immigrant racism is nothing new in the U.S. It is deeply embedded in the country’s history.  From the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1796 to the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s to the eugenics-based national origin quotas of 1924, U.S. bosses have used their control of the state to divide the working class.  The latest bipartisan budget agreement continues the same pattern. Working class struggle may temporarily force changes to the rulers’ immigration policy.  But anti-immigrant terror, enforced by racist cops, has been a given from the beginning.
Workers’ power can shut down racist borders
Workers have the power to fight all of these racist attacks. As the caravan of thousands of workers from Central America moved northward to flee the capitalist horrors of poverty, gang violence, and state-sponsored fascism, hundreds of workers from Mexico and elsewhere responded to the call for working-class solidarity. They provided the travelers with food, water, clothing, and shelter. Despite the bosses’ racist anti-immigrant propaganda, many workers recognize how our own lives are tied up with those of our class brothers and sisters. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have joined this mass movement of support. We call on our comrades, friends, and all workers to join these heroic efforts now!