NINGUNO! Neither Abbott, Trump nor Biden! ¡Ni Abbott, Trump ni Biden!
Outrage, excitement over Abbott-Trump visit to RGV part of capitalism's two party rule
Former President Donald Trump visited the Rio Grande Valley last Wednesday as a guest of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, with whom he held press events across Hidalgo County. The visit came as Abbott recently signed a disaster declaration regarding immigration and as the Biden Administration has come under fire for their handling of the border. It was much anticipated as opponents repudiated the planned events and supporters hurled them as “great.” Both camps, regardless of differences, reinforce the lie that working people must support one of the bosses’ twin parties — a false choice key to maintaining capitalist rule.
As tens of thousands have arrived at the southern U.S. border every month since January, Biden has been caught in political frenzy. Republicans criticize Biden for encouraging migration to the U.S. during the presidential campaign and for undoing some of Trump’s border policies. Democrats, in turn, blame Trump for (as they claim) leaving the immigration system in disarray. The truth is both parties are responsible for the chaotic and torturous U.S. immigration system. Nevertheless, and in direct response to these criticisms coming from the left as much as the right, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to handle the border in late March.
Vice President Harris launched a “root causes” campaign, holding phone and in-person discussions with heads of government where large portions of migration to the U.S. originates, discussing economics, violence, etc. After months of being slammed for not visiting the border Harris finally announced a trip to distant El Paso, which everyone saw as a cop-out, landing 800 miles away from the epicenter in the Valley. Horrendous conditions exist for migrant youth at a detention facility in Donna, where thousands are held, some on suicide-watch; even Democrats like Henry Cuellar called-out the administration’s unwillingness to deal with reality on the border. This and similar sites in the RGV the White House totally avoids, for if attention were brought to them, the big lie that Democrats spread since Trump (that they’re more ‘humane’ to migrants in federal detention than Republicans) would dissolve into thin air on TV.
The ever-savvy Trump, always ready to exploit a media vulnerability in the Democrats’ armor, announced a visit to the border as a guest of Governor Greg Abbott before Harris announced hers. It was soon revealed they’d visit the RGV. Immediately liberal pressure groups tied to the Democratic Party’s “foundations” (known as ‘nonprofits’) in the RGV sprang into action, opposing the visit of a disgraced businessman under multiple criminal indictments who holds no political power or social media influence. La Union del Pueblo Entero and the Texas Civil Rights Project (organizations I’ve worked for in the case of LUPE and worked with in the case of TCRP) attended an Hidalgo County Commissioner’s meeting June 25 to ‘demand’ they not cooperate with Abbott’s emergency declaration nor his visit to the Valley with Trump. Robert Lopez of TCRP, who I personally know and thus pained me to hear during public comment, said, “We need active opposition against [Abbott-Trump’s] visit.” As Trump received tens of thousands of votes in the RGV, and Greg Abbott is an elected governor, and the witch-hunt against Trump by security agencies stands as an affront to civil liberties, effectively calling to ‘cancel’ Trump as they did violates basic free speech principles.
Since entering office, Biden has deported just as many undocumented people as Trump, has already dwarfed the number of Haitian refugees Trump expelled in his entire term, and his Justice Department seized 6 acres of land in Mission (belonging to a TCRP client!) to continue building “Trump’s Wall”, to mention a few items. The only protest these groups, with whom I’ve organized dozens of no border wall and pro migrant protests, have taken against Biden has been an "open letter" and a mixed report-card, in a region that in the last years saw thousands protest attacks on immigrants. It was then that I was mostly involved, from 2017 to 2020, helping organize mass demonstrations in Mission, McAllen, Pharr, Alamo in opposition to border wall construction and conditions at detention centers. Protests can be easily held outside the Donna facility as we did in McAllen, and peaceful protests outside the Southern District of Texas federal courthouse to protest DOJ land seizures, as has been done dozens of times before, could also easily be organized.
As of yet protests have been reserved for a former president who has no power, while those in power actively causing harm in the WH get a pass. Abbott’s declaration is worth protesting, though Hidalgo opted out of it which Abbott recognized. It enables Department of Public Safety officers to interview minors, among other measures, but overall was political theatre. The plans to build a wall don’t require confiscating land from unwilling landowners, and the arresting of migrants relate to the extent they happen to walk on ‘private property’ where landowners have allowed the state to build a wall and patrol it. Abbott is also likely to encounter legal issues with respect to reallocating money for a wall, as Trump did when he declared an emergency.
LUPE and TCRP held a townhall in San Juan where they gave a platform to Hidalgo County officials, and to other Democratic Party hopefuls the day of Trump’s arrival. Trump, Abbott arrived in Edinburg, where Anglo and Latino supporters from the Valley and surrounding Texas greeted them. From Edinburg, they flew to the McAllen airport where more supporters met them. From McAllen, they flew to Weslaco for a briefing with law enforcement officials who drew attention to the problem of elicit drugs entering the U.S. through the southern border. They proceeded with a tour of the border wall the Trump administration built in Pharr, near Eli Jackson Historical Cemetery. Trump, Abbot (unprotected by Hidalgo County deputies, protected by Pharr P.D., Texas DPS, U.S. Border Patrol) attacked Biden’s border policies. The day ended with a FOX News townhall hosted by Sean Hannity in Edinburg.
In recent months, tens of thousands of immigrant workers from countries that have been decimated by domestic capitalist rule and foreign imperialist intervention (from Guatemala to Sudan) have been arriving on the southern U. S. border in search of jobs and safety. The U.S., and its imperial allies, are beneficiaries of the spoils of small countries they dominate and domineer under Democratic and Republican admins. The predictable result is invariably economic exoduses of working families who cannot find work in their country or safety or justice from gang activity, terrorism, war — a direct consequence of capitalist, imperialist plunder. Most central and south American countries are either client states of multiple imperialisms or are illegally blockaded by them as in the cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela. Absent revolutionary leadership, there’s no place for working families in Latin America to flee than the U.S.
The U.S. government, the most powerful empire and most repressive state apparatus in human history, sadistically starts wars and then blames the victims of these atrocities for coming to the U.S. without permission when they flee. For the U.S. capitalist class and their state, immigration is about labor demands: Do bosses need cheap, exploitable labor? If so, can this limited, temporary, super-exploited foreign labor be deported when no longer needed? This is the calculation every capitalist government makes on immigration. It can’t be reformed to do otherwise.
Capitalism also cannot exist without antagonisms between workers using religion, nationality, skin color, job competition. We must transcend these divisions, each party peddling their own race-baiting: Republican officials demonize immigrants, while Democrats vilify ‘white’ workers. This is what they’ve done since making their first ‘bipartisan’ alliance when they allowed Radical Reconstruction Governments to fall to the KKK, ordering the Union Army to retreat, ushering in Jim Crow, betraying the Second American Revolution. Documented, unionized workers should demand amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S. to unify the labor movement, according to the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a Marxist tendency in the US labor movement. They propose alternatives to the duopoly’s ‘reforms.’
SWP founder James Cannon, summarized the function of the duopoly in a letter from a federal penitentiary (D) Franklin Roosevelt put him and other American Trotskyists in for continuing strike activity during the Second Imperialist War, refusing to surrender the right to strike as American Stalinist-Communists did:
There are differences in the Republican and Democratic parties, in my opinion, though not in the sense that . . . the Republicans are more “reactionary” than the Democrats. This is an illusion entertained by many workers and fostered by the bulk of the labor bureaucracy, the Social-Democrats, and the Stalinists. … Big capital rules through the mechanism of the two parties as far as fundamental issues are concerned, but not always directly in response to their unanimous commands.
Whatever the differences between Democrats and Republicans, they’re between two capitalist factions. Republicans (Trump, Abbott) say unemployment and crime are high because immigrant workers invade ‘our country.’ Democrats (Biden, Harris) make cosmetic changes to immigration policy, maintaining the brutality of the system, and call it “progress.” In the end both parties, no matter who controls the WH, will run immigration policy in accordance with the interests of the capitalist rulers. Only working people united independently from the bosses and their parties can wage a winning fight for immigrant rights and jobs by forming our own party, a labor party.