No One Is Illegal, and the Workers’ Struggle Has No Borders: A Discussion Between Revolutionaries in Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S.

The following are remarks made by Left Voice member Julia Wallace at a tri-national event against Trump’s anti-immigrant offensive discussing the need for the working class and oppressed to unite across borders. The event was organized by La Izquierda Diario Mexico, a sister publication of Left Voice and part of the Trotskyist Fraction. Speakers included Marylin Hernandez of Guatemala, and Sandro Romero and Armando Chulín from the MTS in Mexico. 

Note: Remarks were initially made in Spanish. Reference to the campaign to free Mahmoud Khalil was subsequently added. 

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Thank you all for coming. As you can, this event is multinational, and it’s important that we see ourselves as fighting capitalism strategically across the globe and as a working class and oppressed people opposing imperialism and exploitation. Thank you to La Izquierda Diario Network which has been organizing with our network of the Trotskyist Fraction to fight for the working class and oppressed — without borders — and revolution and socialism. We are in 14 different countries and write in 7 different languages regularly. If you are interested in the politics presented here please reach out to us. 

Donald Trump has only been in office a month, and in this time, his administration has been attacking the forests, they have been attacking the democratic right to protest, specifically for Palestine. There was a sit-in at Columbia University and now immigrant students like Mahmoud Khalil are threatened with deportation. The Trump administration is attacking semi-colonial countries like Mexico, imposing tariffs just days ago, as well as threatening to expand the territory of the United States. In his speech to Congress, Trump vowed to continue to attack trans people and immigrants, and is seeking to cut social services and attack public sector workers. Trump vowed to take the Panama Canal. While one Democrat walked out, the rest were mostly quiet with a few weak boos. 

The Trump administration has bold imperialist aspirations. He won because of chauvinism, racism, sexism, and transphobia — in a word, bigotry: one of the oldest tools used by U.S. capitalists. Combined with a popular disgust and refusal to vote for “Genocide Joe” Biden, and the anti-immigrant rhetoric advanced by Kamala Harris’s campaign, both parties of capital labeled immigrants as “criminals” and “terrorists.” 

In Trump’s first month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made a spectacle of detentions. They are going to people’s homes and workplaces at all hours of the day. They literally tear people from their families, with children screaming as they see their parents handcuffed and detained. While Trump’s deportation numbers are still well below the Biden administration’s, he and his administration are continuously threatening mass deportations. 

The causes of mass migration are imperialism — specifically, U.S. imperialist intervention in the Americas. Their military intervention for the last decades during both Republican and Democratic administrations have forced families to risk their lives and flee their homes and migrate to the United States. The U.S.-Mexico border has been labeled the deadliest border in the world. It is not a coincidence that people from the Americas are coming to the United States, as the U.S. — through its multinational capitalist agreements — has impoverished countries like Mexico and Haiti, and supported brutal military interventions like in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. 

This is why people in the U.S. must organize against imperialism in the “heart of the beast,” using the methods of the working class: strikes and mass mobilizations. They must join the struggles in the streets, as well as support the struggles against U.S. imperialism elsewhere. 

Trump’s anti-immigrant chauvinism and bigotry is not new to the United States. It is an old tactic used by the capitalists to justify the enslavement of millions of Black people based on race. Anti-immigrant chauvinism has also been used against Asian and European immigrants and those indigenous to the United States. The purpose of the capitalists is the same: to obscure the exploitation of workers, to keep the working class divided, and have workers who vastly outnumber the capitalists buy into racist lies. 

Denying workers immigration papers means to intimidate them, to pay them lower wages, and use their labor for some of the most vital jobs in the United States. Agricultural workers in California are mostly immigrants. and although their jobs are critical to the entire country, they are paid poverty wages. Immigrants are vital to the economy, but they are hyper-exploited. 

Trump’s campaign stated that immigrants are the reason Black people are impoverished, as if there were scarce resources and immigrants were taking them. Immigrants are not the reason Black people are homelessness — it’s because of the landlords, and the developers who are raising rents even as wages stagnate. The Democrats and Republicans are both the party of the capitalists and the landlords. The working class and oppressed need to unite and form our own class-independent party to organize and fight for our interests politically. 

When wages have increased in the United States, it has been a result of the diverse working class rising up for its own interests. Black and Latino workers in the U.S. have a shared history of resistance, marching together for higher wages and organizing together during the 1930s labor movement and in the 1970s in the Rainbow Coalition created by Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. The Black Panthers, Chicano Brown Berets, white Young Patriots, and Puerto Rican Young Lords came together to address poverty, racism, and imperialism. When attacks on immigrants were carried out in 2006 there was a day of massive protests. In Los Angeles 2006, May 1 was a “Day Without Immigrants.” An unofficial general strike saw 1.5 million people protest in a city of four million people. 

The Democrats told people to only march one day and “vote tomorrow”. They told people not to march with the flags of their country but to wear white and only with American flags. The following year, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, in conjunction with the Chief of Police, carried out a massive brutal attack on the Day without Immigrants, beating up protestors, children and even the news media.  

California, a Democratic state, has positioned itself to challenge Trump rhetorically but has not stopped the ICE raids. The Democrats claim to fight Trump in the courts, but laws are written to defend the wealthy. To challenge Trump’s racist agenda, the working-class must form organizations of self-defense. To prevent raids, we must develop a class-independent strategy. The Democrats will not stop the raids. The courts are not stopping the raids. Only the self-organization of the working class can do that.

The resurgence of today’s immigrant rights movement has been spontaneous in character. It is multiracial, combative, and, so far, independent of the Democratic Party. In cities like Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego, and in Los Angeles in particular a resistance led by youth is continuing to grow. Many high school students have walked out of their classrooms and taken over the streets and freeways in Los Angeles continuously protesting for the last three weeks. The student walkouts are connected to the walkouts of the 1960s and 1970s. Led by the Chicano rights movement and inspired by the Black Power and anti-war sentiment during that time, students across California walked out of their classrooms demanding ethnic studies as well as fighting for Chicano nationalist sentiments and revolutionary ideas. The protests today are also influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement, which also took over freeways. The protests have been multiracial as well with Black, Indigenous, and Asian communities joining.

The other aspect of the movement is the anti-ICE raid community self-defense organizing. A coalition with about 150 people and growing has formed. Many Chicano nationalists, socialists, community members, youth, women, and rank-and-file union members joined this coalition based in Los Angeles. So far, they have been able to stop four raids from taking place. They patrol neighborhoods, and when they see ICE, they reach out to their networks and alert community members who surround the buildings where the raid is supposed to be carried out. 

Also active are rank and file members of the UAW 4811, the same local that organized a strike across California for Palestine and the right to protest in defense of Gaza. Teachers, healthcare workers, and public sector workers have vowed to defend immigrants from raids. Teachers are organizing in their classrooms, and are willing to be arrested to protect their students. Therapists and social workers are helping conceal their patients’ immigration status to prevent deportation.

The working class and oppressed must unite across borders with workers in imperialist countries like the U.S. to denounce the deportations, the tariffs, and sanctions imposed across the world. Unions and workers’ organizations must take up this struggle, and break from the Democrats who claim solidarity but call our community members terrorists and criminals. It is the capitalists, imperialists, and their defenders in governments, as well as the cops and landlords, who are the criminals. 

Down with ICE! We are in solidarity with the immigrants risking their lives from Africa to France, from Guatemala to Mexico, from Mexico to the United States. No one is illegal, and the workers struggle has no borders.