EDITORIAL
Capitalism Blames Migrants for Violence It Creates

Aug 19, 2024

We are being bombarded with images of so-called “migrant crime,” fentanyl deaths, and violence put out by Trump and the Republican Party. Harris and the Democrats, on the other hand, bombard us with images of top cops and border patrol agents, while Harris brags that she prosecuted “transnational gang members.” While their rhetoric is different, by arguing over who will police the border better, both push the idea that immigrants are a threat.

But this idea that immigrants are criminals, responsible for the violence facing working people, turns reality on its head. They don’t run this country, or this world: it is run by the capitalist class. That capitalist class is responsible for the increasing violence of the world we live in—that class is the real criminal.

The capitalist class creates the conditions for crime by denying a future to millions of young people, destroying jobs and underfunding schools. Its “legitimate” pharmaceutical companies are the drug dealers who pushed opioids—and fentanyl is an opioid: blaming immigrants covers for the crisis they caused.

This same U.S. capitalist class is also behind the catastrophes that have displaced hundreds of millions of people around the world, including the migrants trying to get to this country. The vast majority of these migrants are themselves victims of the world’s largest criminal enterprise: U.S. imperialism.

U.S. imperialism is organized to ensure that the lion’s share of the wealth produced around the world flows to U.S. banks and corporations. Those corporations exploit workers in every corner of the globe, employing local henchman who get a percentage to keep the profits flowing. The U.S. state apparatus backs up this system of exploitation with the deadliest military apparatus in the history of the world. It can inflict death and destruction in any corner of the globe within minutes.

The same imperialist system that is attacking workers here, has made many poor countries totally unlivable. That is why so many have braved trackless jungles carrying their small children, tried to cross the sea in makeshift boats, or walked across the desert, risking the violence of both cartels and the border patrol.

In Mexico, still the biggest source of immigrants, almost half of the population is stuck in poverty, while U.S. corporations extract untold billions from the labor of the poorly paid Mexican working class, backed up by the Mexican police and army that protect U.S. investments above all else. When the second biggest source of immigrants, Venezuela, tried to keep a little more of its oil wealth in its own country, the U.S. imposed crushing sanctions that have pushed Venezuela’s economy to collapse and one third of its population to flee. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were wrecked by U.S. funded and trained death squads and terrorist groups in the 1980s and 1990s and have been run by U.S.-backed repressive regimes ever since.

Yes, there are gangs and cartels in these countries, and U.S. politicians should know about them: after all, the U.S. helped set up many of these gangs to fund its dirty wars. In many countries, these gangs, the police, and the army are one and the same. Far from being against the gangs, the U.S. state apparatus has worked with gangs all over the world to keep populations under control.

So no, the migrants aren’t the criminals—they are the victims of U.S. imperialism’s crimes. They are fleeing the ravages of a system based in this country, that has destroyed the lives of people all over the world in order to maximize the profits of a tiny club of millionaires and billionaires—the same club that is ravaging our standard of living in this country. Yet the leaders of both parties who run this gigantic murderous enterprise of U.S. imperialism have the nerve to portray those fleeing U.S. imperialism’s crimes as a threat, and expect workers here to fall for it?

Most migrants were workers where they come from, and they will be workers if they make it here. They are part of our class. Blaming part of our class excuses the capitalist criminals that are responsible for the problems facing workers here and all over the world. But even worse, it weakens the one force that can stop the capitalist onslaught: the unity of the working class.