No to Trump’s anti-immigrant poison and Harris’ warmongering

With the US elections three weeks away, it is time for workers and young people to declare their political independence from both corporate-controlled parties and their policies of social inequality, war and dictatorship. Only Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore and I are running in the elections to build a powerful movement to defend the interests of the working class, whether Trump or Harris gets into the White House. 

The stakes are very high. 

Trump is seeking to exploit the economic distress felt by millions of working people and the disgust with the Democrats to build a fascist movement and crush any resistance to the dictates of the corporate-financial oligarchy. Trump is backed by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and is using immigrants as scapegoats for an economic and social crisis that is due to the sucking up of virtually all of society’s resources by the super-rich. 

As for Harris and the Democrats, they are fixated on expanding the wars in the Middle East and against Russia and preparing for any even bigger one against China. Far from opposing the threat to democratic rights posed by Trump, the Democrats are suppressing anti-genocide protests on the campuses and working with the trade union bureaucracies to block any movement of the working class that cuts across their war preparations.  

Trump’s anti-immigrant snake oil

Trump has pledged to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants who have supposedly “invaded and conquered” the United States. According to him, millions of “animals,” “rapists” and “bloodthirsty killers” have been let into the US where they have “resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.” 

During a campaign stop in Detroit, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, a multi-millionaire venture capitalist, blamed everything from the high cost of housing and long waits at hospitals to overcrowded classrooms and unemployment on “people who have no right to be in America.” In Michigan, he said there were 85,000 public school students who are the “children of illegal aliens.” Feigning concern for teachers who have few if any resources, he said, when “you drop a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English, do you think that is good for the education of American citizens?” 

According to Trump and Vance, America is running out of resources because they are being monopolized by immigrants from Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti and other countries. Native-born workers would be doing just fine if immigrants weren’t stealing their jobs and wages and taking over their homes, schools and hospital rooms. 

But this narrative, aimed at inciting violence against immigrants, doesn’t hold any water. 

Let’s look at a few facts: 

• Labor’s share of national income fell from about two-thirds or 64.1 percent in the first quarter of 2001, to 55.8 percent in the first quarter of 2024, according to the latest estimates from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Between 1979 and 2019, the hourly productivity of US workers increased by 59.7 percent, but average compensation only grew 15.8 percent during the same period. Today, workers are being paid roughly the same as they were in 1973 in real terms, meaning inflation-adjusted incomes have essentially remained frozen for half a century! 

And it wasn’t immigrant workers who siphoned this money away. 

• Between 1978 and 2022, CEO pay soared by 1,209.2 percent, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker in 2022, compared to 21 times in 1965.
• The United States is home to the highest concentration of billionaires in the world, whose collective wealth, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, rose to $5.2 trillion in November 2023, the highest amount ever recorded. As of the third quarter of 2023, the top 10 percent of the US population owned two-thirds of total wealth, while the bottom half owned only 2.6 percent. 

In other words, the bottom half of the population, some 165 million people, controls 2.6 percent of the economic pie. Isn’t it convenient for the top 10 percent to have the majority cutting each other’s throats over a tiny sliver of the economic pie, while they laugh all the way to the bank? 

That is why, even more than immigrants and refugees, Trump is calling for violence against those who challenge the monopolization of the wealth by the real looters of society, the corporate and financial parasites, who do not contribute anything of value to society. 

The “bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump recently told Fox News, “sick people, radical left lunatics.” This “enemy” should “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” he declared. In other words, a military dictatorship should be established to crush workers demanding an increase of their share of the national income and to arrest socialists who call for the expropriation of the expropriators. 

The warmongering Democrats 

Far from opposing the anti-immigrant agitation by the Republicans, the Democrats only echo it. Harris has not traveled to Springfield, Ohio to denounce Trump’s incitement of neo-Nazi violence against Haitian immigrants who are legally living and working in the city. Instead, she traveled to the US-Mexico border and declared her willingness to sign the most restrictive anti-immigration laws in history. 

At the same time, Harris has welcomed the support of war criminals like Dick Cheney, the architect of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the kidnapping and torture of thousands of “detainees” in Guantanamo Bay and other black sites. The Democratic Party is so up to its neck in blood from the US-backed genocide in Israel, the escalating confrontation with Iran and US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine that Trump can falsely portray himself as a candidate of “peace.”  

Over the last four years, Biden has provided virtually limitless resources to Israel, Ukraine and other client states even as resources are drained from public education, healthcare, housing, disaster relief and other vital needs. Annually, both parties spend nearly one trillion dollars on the US war machine. 

The squandering of these vast resources—along with the multi-trillion-dollar bailouts in 2008 and 2020 to shore up the fortunes of the top 1 percent—are the real reasons for the declining value of the dollar and why public school teachers and healthcare workers do not have the resources to provide adequate services to the public—not immigrants!

Trump is not the first to scapegoat immigrants to divide the working class and defend the ruling elite. After brutally exploiting Chinese workers to build the railroads in the West, anti-Chinese hatred was promoted to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Facing the rising militancy of industrial workers following World War I and during the Depression years, the Ku Klux Klan and Black Legion were built up to terrorize immigrants and socialist-minded workers. The most notorious promoter of such vile poison was the antisemite, racist and Nazi admirer Henry Ford. 

The only way to pull the rug out from underneath fascist demagogues like Trump is to build a powerful political movement to unite every section of the working class in a common fight to guarantee the right to good-paying and secure jobs, free health care, affordable housing, high-quality public education and other social rights to every worker, regardless of their race, gender or country of origin. 

Workers around the world today produce more wealth than at any point in human history. If the working class takes the giant industries and resources into its own hands and organizes the world economy democratically and scientifically, the living standards of all the world’s people would be raised to unprecedented levels. This would end the struggle over scarce resources forever.