Biden’s attack on refugees and the fight for the international unity of the working class

As the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for president, I denounce the action by President Biden to shut down the US-Mexico border to refugees. The action effectively ends the right to seek asylum in the US, contravening international and national law. It is an assault on the rights of international workers fleeing unlivable conditions produced by capitalist oppression and wars backed by the American ruling class.

Biden framed his remarks as an appeal for bipartisan unity with the Republican Party to militarize the border. He praised Republican governors while criticizing Trump for opposing, for electoral reasons, anti-immigrant legislation worked out with the Republican leadership in the Senate.

These same Republican officials are, in fact, backing Trump, who has pledged to mobilize the military to round up immigrants in concentration camps and deport students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza.

The action of the Biden administration confirms once again that the attack on immigrant workers is a policy supported by the Democrats as well as the Republicans. It exposes those like Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who cited the impact of Trump’s policies on immigrants to denounce socialist opposition to Biden as “privileged.”

The central priority for the Democratic Party is the escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia, and it has forged an effective coalition government with Republican congressmen, and particularly House Speaker Mike Johnson, a close Trump ally, to prosecute this war. The escalating global war, which includes the US- and NATO-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, is a principal cause of the global refugee crisis.

The attack on immigrants and refugees is an attack on all workers. The police-state methods used against all opposition to the policies of the corporate and financial oligarchy. This can already be seen in the wave of police repression targeting opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Socialist Equality Party and our election campaign fight for the unity of workers in the United States with our class brothers and sisters in North and South America and throughout the world. We call on workers to reject the lie that immigrants are to blame for rising unemployment, falling wages and attacks on social conditions.

It is not desperate refugees who are responsible for the social crisis in the US, but the corporate and financial oligarchy, which plunders society’s resources and hoards trillions of dollars in wealth–the product of the exploitation of workers all over the world. More than $1 trillion is spent every year on the instruments of death and destruction, while the ruling class claims there is no money to provide all workers with a secure job and other basic social rights!

The SEP fights for the repeal of all anti-immigrant laws and the disbanding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Border Patrol, not their expansion as proposed by Biden. We call for all undocumented workers to be guaranteed full legal rights, including the right to work and the right to travel to their home countries without the threat of being barred from returning and separated from their families.

Against the attempt to militarize borders and persecute immigrants, not only in the US but all over the world, the working class must uphold the principle of open borders—the right of workers to live and work in whatever country they choose with full citizenship rights.

The ruling class does everything it can to divide workers–by nationality, ethnicity, race and every other category. It does this in an attempt to prevent us from understanding that our interests are the same.

When united and conscious of its class interests, the international working class is the most powerful force on the planet. It is through our common struggle against inequality and exploitation, war and dictatorship, that workers will be able to create a global society based on equality and the satisfaction of social needs, not private profit–a society that abolishes war and all arbitrary national divisions. This is the fight for socialism.