Criminalization of Refugees Also Prepares Ground for Aggression Against Mexico

Demonstration in New York City opposing Biden's executive order to close the southern border and illegally block refugees seeking asylum. June 6, 2024.

One of the main propaganda points used by both presidential candidates for the election to be held November 5 are threats against refugees and people entering through the southern U.S. border with Mexico. Fomenting fear, using racist distortions of events, criminalizing refugees at the southern border, as both Harris and Trump are doing, are not only to sow racist divisions but to lay the groundwork for further aggression and a potential invasion of Mexico.

Historically, in 1846-48, this was the line of action used to forestall the U.S. Civil War and keep those who became leading Confederate generals in line.

When it comes to the treatment of refugees, in many ways Trump and Harris play out the "good cop, bad cop" routine police powers are infamous for. Trump uses more openly racist attacks and threats of brutality, while Harris criminalizes asylum seekers as "unlawful," when the International Convention on Refugees, signed by the U.S., and U.S. law, clearly say this is not the case.

Both presidential contenders present people seeking asylum from the economic and political ravages the U.S. has imposed on their countries as threats, to be punished -- not human beings with rights. Both promote wide scale deportations, with the White House currently bragging about removing (deporting) or returning (illegally refusing asylum to) "more than three-quarters of a million people, more than in any fiscal year since 2010."

The Biden/Harris administration is using the prison at Guantánamo on U.S. occupied Cuban territory to indefinitely detain Haitians and other refugees. In a letter dated October 16, 125 human rights organizations demanded the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center be closed and that asylum seekers be processed in "a manner consistent with U.S. human rights obligations. The U.S. government cannot continue to hide its diversion and mistreatment of asylum seekers by exiling them to Guantánamo, out of reach of their families, advocates, public consciousness — and the law." 

Harris and Trump have said nothing about closing Guantánamo while continually criminalizing refugees.

The current Biden/Harris ban on refugees using a closed border is far broader than any Trump imposed when he was in office. By promoting executive orders with their presidential impunity, and closing borders, the stage is set for justifying going into Mexico as necessary to keep the refugees out and the border closed.

Both presidential candidates ignore the fact that immigrants are an integral part of the U.S. working class. They play a very militant and significant role in the fight of the U.S. working class and people for rights. So too refugees become a contingent of the working class as soon as they set foot on U.S. soil. Efforts to use fear and threats to divide workers are being challenged. In actions at both Democratic and Republican National Conventions, working people were united in rejecting attacks on immigrants and those seeking asylum. Many actions have also taken place on both sides of the southern border and in border cities like El Paso and others across the country.

As with their rejection of the U.S./Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people, Not in My Name is the response of demonstrators to attacks and demonization of immigrants and refugees. This broad and firm resistance will certainly be a major factor against any attempts to launch an invasion of Mexico.

The reason U.S. rulers are considering an invasion of Mexico is to contend with the inability of the U.S. ruling class to unite the military and civilian bureaucracies and the industrial and financial private interests behind the presidency. It is seen as a way to preserve the Union at a time open violent civil war threatens to break out. Foreign policy failures of the Biden administration mean that attempts to use foreign wars to unite the military and civilian bureaucracy have failed. The U.S. under Biden has suffered one foreign policy defeat after the other: failures in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua plus Ukraine, Haiti and many more, including Lebanon and Yemen, China, the European Union, and individual European countries. And now, on the eve of the presidential election, the imminent failure to line up the Arab states behind U.S. schemes to create a Greater Israel is devastating to its striving to be world hegemon. Mexico is considered an easy target, but clearly U.S. rulers are again losing sight of the role of the peoples and their organized resistance.

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This article was published in

Friday, November 1, 2024

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/ITN2024/Articles/TI54443.HTM

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