Originally published on the Daily Worker
By Driss El-Hassan & Che Nuñez, League of Young Communists USA, Red Patriot
The current immigration crisis at the Mexican-American border has been a widespread disaster.
The dehumanization and abhorrent treatment of migrants and asylum seekers have been central to the foreign policy of the Trump and Biden Administrations respectively. President Joe Biden has inherited and further progressed Trump-era immigration policies despite proclaiming campaign promises to do the opposite.
Recently we have seen a major influx of migrants and asylum seekers from across Latin America crossing the Mexican Border into the USA. Biden’s incompetency has led to local politicians challenging Democratic Party support in Texas, widespread American disapproval and Republican politicians capitalizing on the situation by using it to justify advocacy for more extreme immigration policies.
In January of this year, while Texas Governor Greg Abbot illegally built hundreds of miles of barbed wire on the Southern border, Biden included stricter immigration measures in a larger bill to appease reactionary lawmakers to successfully pass a budget that allocates billions of dollars of hard-working American money to aid foreign imperialist wars in the Donbass and Palestine.
Instead of attempting to truly resolve this deep-rooted issue, Biden is scraping for potential voters. This month Biden passed an executive order that would effectively close the border for migrants seeking asylum when the average daily number of border encounters surpasses 2,500. The action includes deportation of “individuals who cross the southern border unlawfully or without authorization…”Any migrants without a “credible fear” when they apply for asylum will be immediately deported, and border officials “anticipate that we will be removing those individuals within a matter of days if not hours.”
Now with the 2024 presidential election closing in and Biden’s approval rating plummeting, it is clear that the imperialist establishment is growing more desperate and belligerent. Biden is currently facing discontent from both progressive and conservative voters and a 30-point deficit with registered voters on the question of border security and immigration.
This seemingly perennial issue is brought up by both parties to criticize the incumbent every election cycle, but the issue is never truly resolved. This is because neither party has an interest in solving the issue as much as they want to use the crisis as leverage to entice potential voters. The culture war propaganda portraying these migrants as ‘foreign invaders’ is simply a tool to further divide American workers and neglect people who deserve a life of dignity.
