Bosses Hide Behind Attacks on Immigrants

Jul 22, 2024

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are carrying out a massive propaganda campaign to convince U.S. voters that immigrants are the root of our problems.

In his speech accepting the Republican nomination, Trump repeated the claim that immigrants are carrying out an “invasion, the worst that’s ever been seen anywhere in the world.”

The worst invasion in the world, really? The U.S. has invaded 84 countries in its history and been militarily involved in 191 out of 194 countries! These invasions, bombing campaigns, and interventions, in the interests of the U.S. capitalist class, have helped cause the crisis of migration around the world. Millions have fled Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti—all countries the U.S. has been militarily involved with recently, including under Trump.

He claimed this “invasion” is “killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”

Crime does kill thousands a year in this country—but it’s not brought here by immigrants. The capitalist class creates the conditions for crime by destroying jobs, stealing the money for education, and denying young people a future.

And the capitalists are themselves the biggest criminals. For instance, opioids have killed a million people since 1999—but they were pushed by U.S. pharmaceutical companies, not immigrants. The capitalists steal the money needed for health care; poison people with chemicals in the air and water; drive workers to killing paces in the heat—they are the criminals!

Trump also said that other countries are emptying their prisons, mental institutions, and asylums into the U.S. He claimed that the crime rate is going down in Venezuela and El Salvador, while it’s going up in the U.S., “because they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them in our country.”

This turns reality on its head. The gang Trump mentioned by name—MS-13—was literally created in the U.S., and then spread to El Salvador when its members were deported!

The U.S. also helped create the cartels in Mexico and Central America to fund its dirty wars in those countries. And the U.S. destroyed the economy of Venezuela with sanctions—begun under Obama, made harsher under Trump, and maintained under Biden—which created a wave of crime in that country like nothing ever seen here. That is one of the reasons so many are fleeing.

Trump highlighted three women he says were assaulted and killed by “criminal alien(s).” It’s as if he’s channeling the worst of the old promoters of lynching in the Jim Crow south.

And Trump said, “That’s why to keep our families safe, the Republican Platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of this country,” citing Eisenhower’s mass deportations in the 1950s. But the mass deportations of the 1950s weren’t aimed at keeping families safe. The U.S. deported millions of people to Mexico—including U.S. citizens born in this country—even as it was bringing millions in through the Bracero Program on temporary work permits. Those deportations kept workers desperate and dependent, helping companies super-exploit them and use them against the entire working class.

The Republican attack on immigrants is a giant con job, aimed at getting workers to blame other workers for the degrading society we see all around us—and in so doing, they cover for the capitalist class that is really responsible.