Immigration Fact Sheet

Marxist revolutionaries call “BS” on Trump’s lies and on liberal illusions

Here’s the BS	Here’s the Truth
● There is an “immigration crisis” on	● Actually, immigration is at a 40-year low. There is net
the U.S. border with Mexico.	negative immigration with Mexico. There is a refugee crisis.
	The U.S. drug market and decades of imperialist support to
	murderous right-wing military dictatorships have destabilized
	Central American societies and created the refugee crisis as
	desperate families flee gang violence and government terror.
● Immigrants are “bringing crime,	● Immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born
they are rapists” (while “some are	Americans. Immigrant neighborhoods are safer. MS-13 is a
good people”). They are sending in	Los Angeles gang deported to El Salvador.
MS-13 “animals.”
● Separating families is un-American.	● Separating families is as American as racism. Slave families
This is not us.	were broken up and “sold down the river” accompanied by
	Biblical quotations. Native American families were destroyed.
	Racist mass incarceration, foster care abuse, and juvenile
	prisons continue to devastate families and communities.
● Electing Democrats will fix the	● The Democrats are a huge part of the problem. Obama
problem.	deported 8+ million, earning the title of “Deporter in Chief.” Labor
	bureaucrats’ ties to the Democratic Party cripple independent
	labor/immigrant struggle that could stop deportations.
● “We know where every child is and	● The government has no idea where thousands of the
we are uniting families.”	children are, nor do they have a plan to unite them with
	parents. Under their “zero tolerance” policy many parents have
	been deported while their children, including babies and
	toddlers, are shipped all over the U.S. like Fed Ex packages.
● Children are resilient. Holding them	● Actually, children were tossed into cages in prison-like
at the border is “like summer camp”	conditions and internment camps. Child psychologists and
(Laura Ingraham).	pediatricians say the trauma of being ripped from parents and
	imprisoned can last a lifetime.
● The U.S. has always been a	● The U.S. has a shameful record and history on accepting
generous haven for refugees.	refugees. The U.S. accepted 30,000 out of 5.5 million Syrian
	refugees. During the Nazi Holocaust, the U.S. infamously
	blocked entry to a shipload of Jewish survivors, and the Senate
	voted to refuse entry to Jewish children of the Kindertransport.

Here’s the BS	Here’s the Truth
● Now that Trump is stacking the	● There is plenty to do. Don’t rely on the capitalist courts. They
Supreme Court with certified	are historically reactionary: Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson,
xenophobes there is nothing we can	Japanese internment, the Muslim ban. Build labor-centered
do.	mobilizations and sanctuary schools to stop ICE deportations.
● The border is the only place	● As horrible and cruel as is the situation on the border,
children are weeping.	millions of other poor, homeless children in the U.S. are
	suffering similar toxic stress for longer periods. The U.S. leads
	the advanced world in child poverty. More than 20 percent of
	all U.S. children live in poverty and comprise 20 percent of the
	homeless. In New York City more than 60,000 homeless crowd
	into the dilapidated shelter system every night, more than a
	third are families with children. More than 100,000 students in
	the NYC public schools are homeless. There are primary
	schools in the city where half the children live in shelters.
● Immigration depresses wages,	● The U.S.’ capitalist economy needs more not fewer
absorbs social resources, and hurts	immigrants. Contrary to popular belief, immigration has
the economy.	benefited the U.S. economy and had little effect on the overall
	wage gap and job market, according to a report by the National
	Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
	"Immigration enlarges the economy while leaving the native
	population slightly better off on average," they wrote (Christian
	Science Monitor, 24 September 2016). And immigrants pay
	billions of dollars in taxes to support social services that they
	do not receive.
● Maintaining civility of discourse	● “Incivility” is not the problem. Children and their mothers are
about immigration should be a	sobbing at the border, ICE is raiding workplaces, DACA
political priority. Incivility just helps	“dreamers” are threatened, and desperate refugees are being
energize Trump’s base.	arrested on misdemeanor charges and deported, ripped away
	from their children. More than a little “incivility” may be in order.
	For those who think we should be trying to persuade hard-core
	racist anti-immigrant Trump supporters, read Frederick
	Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July.” Then
	contact us.

We demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants and asylum for refugees from the wars and devastation caused by imperialism. The oppression and brutal exploitation of immigrant workers is inherent in capitalism. No “immigration “reform” will change that. What’s needed is to build a class-struggle workers party that can lead the fight for international socialist revolution.

If you're an education worker and like what we're saying, get in touch with Class Struggle Education Workers. We also recommend that you (and others reading this who like what we're saying) check out the Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth at www.internationalist.org, email internationalistgroup@msn.com)

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Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.