Immigration at the US-Mexico border hit an all-time high at the end of 2023, and into this year has been a key issue on the minds of working-class people. Attacks on immigrants from prominent Republicans, from Trump’s ramping up of anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail, to Governor Abbott’s repulsive eviction of over 37,000 migrants to sanctuary cities across the US, have sought to exacerbate anti-immigrant sentiment that pits asylum-seekers fleeing economic hardship and political repression against US-born workers facing a struggle to stay afloat.
In the wake of these attacks, many people are left hoping that the Democratic Party will take a sharp turn away from further riling up xenophobia and take decisive action in favor of strengthening immigration protections across the US. Instead, Biden has displayed the exact opposite of this. In a stark parallel to four years of vicious Trumpian gutting of immigrant rights, Biden has signed an executive order aimed at further eliminating options for asylum seekers in the US.
On June 4, Biden used his executive authority to set new policies that would highly restrict asylum-seeking migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border. The order prevents migrants who cross the border illegally from seeking asylum, as long as the daily average of border crossings remains over 2,500, a threshold that is currently far exceeded. Already faced with a dehumanizing and inhumane immigration system, migrants will now be turned away by the thousands, instead sent back over the Mexico border or to the very home countries they are desperate to flee. This is a flagrant attempt from the Biden administration at enacting a near-total ban on immigration.
Shortly after this draconian executive order, Biden put through another executive action protecting undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation. While this will no doubt come as a huge sigh of relief to those roughly 500,000 immigrants, it is clearly an attempt to draw fire away from the bulk of Biden’s immigration policy ahead of the election, which has overwhelmingly sought to “project strength” at the US-Mexico border.
Though his 2020 campaign was full of lip-service pointing to an era of “pro-immigrant” democracy in the United States, Biden has consistently proven his commitment to furthering Trumpian anti-immigration policies, even continuing construction of Trump’s border wall. In May 2023, Biden adapted Title 42 – a holdover Trump-era policy stifling immigration – into his own cruel array of red-tape measures, barring asylum-seekers from legal protections unless they had already been denied asylum from another country they traveled through. This is a no-holds-barred attack on migrants, who are then left forced to seek asylum in countries with bleak and outright dangerous conditions for immigrants.
Migrants who have been allowed to stay in the US over the last year have often been put through the dehumanizing experience of being shunted from city to city by bus, taking up shelter in makeshift tent cities or wherever they can. Public money allocated to house, feed, and clothe migrants has been mopped up by a cottage industry of private contractors, lining the pockets of their executives. The reality is that it doesn’t have to be this hard: migrants seeking asylum need housing and well-paying jobs, as do millions of US-born families.
We urgently need to tax the rich to build hundreds of thousands of units of high-quality, publicly-owned affordable housing and fund a huge public jobs program. In fact, thousands of well-paying jobs could be created simply by putting adequate resources into aid and processing for asylum-seekers at the border. A massive public jobs program creating affordable housing for all would make Biden instantly popular as he seeks re-election, but as a staunch representative of the political establishment and the ruling class, he never would – instead, his plan is to absorb some of Trump’s voter base by projecting a “strong border.”
With the Democratic Party upholding its role as the party of deportation, war, and big business, we desperately need an organized political alternative to xenophobia and austerity. Immigrants fighting to defend their human rights desperately need the strength of an independent working-class party behind them. Come November, we need to drop all reliance on the two capitalist parties and instead rally our votes behind the strongest independent left presidential candidates, Jill Stein and Cornel West. Neither Biden nor Trump, who have both spent entire Presidential terms (and in Biden’s case, his long political career) attacking working people, deserve our votes. Voting instead for the strongest independent left candidate can show millions more people in the US that it’s time to build something fundamentally new.
The working class has nothing to gain from giving in to the divide-and-conquer politics of capitalist politicians. When the ruling class and its political parties pit native born working-class Americans and immigrants against each other, we all stand to lose. The only way out of this endless cycle is by breaking from it and building a mass movement uniting native-born and immigrant workers for our united interests, and building a new party entirely – a party that stands boldly alongside workers and oppressed people everywhere.
Socialist Alternative says:
- The crisis at the border should not have to be a crisis for working people: there is more than enough money in the hands of the billionaires to ensure good lives for all of us.
- We need to rebuild a movement that unites immigrants and native-born workers against the billionaire class to fight for good union jobs, social housing, and education for all.
- No migrant detention and deportation! No limits on asylum-seekers! No border wall expansion! We need full legalization and citizenship rights for all migrants!
- We need to wage an international, working-class struggle against capitalism’s imperialist wars and exploitation, which have forced millions to leave their homes in search of safety and stability.