EDITORIAL
Border “Protection” Is a Trap for All Workers

Jun 25, 2018

All the justified outrage from a large part of the population about separating children from their parents led Trump to change course. He said he wouldn’t do it anymore.

But–in his typical fashion–right after saying it wouldn’t happen anymore, he set out to prove that he was right in the first place. He insisted that immigrants endanger all of us. And to demonstrate this, he put families on display whose children were supposedly killed by undocumented workers. And he talked about the “death and destruction caused by people that shouldn’t be here.”

This was all a show. A really big show to defend a really big lie.

It’s a lie that violent crime increases when the number of immigrants living illegally in a community goes up. Every statistic on U.S. crime shows that undocumented immigrants, as well as documented immigrants, are less likely to commit violent crimes, including murder and rape, than native-born U.S.-ers. (See the journal, Criminology, March 2018.)

Trump uses figures that he makes up. Total, complete fiction. And, he is doing this from the White House, as President of the United States. Supposedly it gives him credibility.

Trump says those crossing the border are criminals. No, they are crossing the border to have a better life–or a life, period. That’s their only “crime.” And that’s a crime only because immigration was criminalized.

Trump is making propaganda. He has an agenda. And his agenda is not to keep us safe from those who would cross the border. He wants to make the U.S. a safe place for billionaires, like himself, to make tons of profits off workers.

Trump uses national borders and nationalism as a way to convince workers of the idea that what matters, what defines people, is nationality, not class. He wants us to believe that we have more in common with a billionaire who has declared bankruptcy six times–six times–just to weasel out of paying wages to his workers!

We have nothing in common with this president or with his fellow billionaires, or with their agendas. We don’t live in the same neighborhoods. We don’t send our children to the same schools. They are ones exploiting us.

To believe for even one second that Trump’s wall will protect us is a huge mistake. A wall will not stop the bosses from cutting jobs. A wall will not stop the bosses from cutting wages, retirement, health care. Strong borders will not protect us from the biggest criminals–the bosses.

The only thing that will protect us is a unified fight for the things we all need, a unified fight by large portions of the working class together. But Trump’s poisonous propaganda splits us up, dividing immigrant workers from native-born workers.

Unless we organize, unless we fight, we have no way to defend ourselves from the exploitation of the bosses. To believe the lies about immigrants would disarm us, at a time when the bosses everywhere have stepped up their attacks on us.

For nearly 40 years, the bosses have attacked us. Slashing jobs, wages, retirement, health benefits. All the things a person needs to have a decent life. And they mean to step up these attacks. They want us to continue to produce all the value in this society, but for the benefit of the bosses who own everything.

Our only answer to these attacks is to fight. And that means starting right where we are. In whatever workplace, we start organizing ourselves and fight. It may sound like it is not big enough to change things. It’s not. But others will see the logic and make fights in their workplaces. The fight will spread.

Our safety depends on each other, on organizing, on our ability to fight together for a better society.