Migrant caravan presses on toward the U.S. by foot.
Racism and refugees from hegemonic capitalism
By Jorge Majfud: The refugee crises on the southern border of the United States are not the consequence of any foreign invasion that endangers National Security. They are not even the consequence of "soft policies of Washington", as the politicians and the mainstream media of this country repeat ad nauseam. They are the consequence of the intersection of different contradictions of current hegemonic capitalism.
On the one hand, we have the law of supply and demand and, on the other, a long tradition of interventionism by the superpower that, since the 19th century, relentlessly and in the name of the fight against corruption, promoted the corruption in "the chaotic republics of blacks." In the name of freedom, democracy, peace and human rights, it imposed a prolific list of protectorates, civic-military dictatorships, paramilitary terrorism and death squads even in the so-called democracies. The border crisis, as it is repeated and magnified by the press and politicians, is not a crisis for the United States. It is a crisis only for the poor and displaced by the same system of hegemonic capitalism that demonizes them.
To resolve the contradictions of capitalism, the undesirable effects of the revered Law of Supply and Demand are the laws of politicians at the service of corporations and in the name of the defense of an entire country. In this sense, all laws are anti-capitalist, since they contradict, limit or prevent the immediate expression of supply (immigrant labor) and demand (national consumption). It is here where imperialism appears to try to resolve the contradictions of its own ideology and, apart from its laws, the narratives of “our borders” appear that must be “defended from the invasion” of the poor and the altruistic “disinterested struggle for the freedom ”through interventions beyond the borders of others. In the fictitious freedom of the market, freedom is only accepted when those who have power impose their freedom on their liberated. For these same reasons, in countries like the United States, laws have been written by capitalist corporations for more than a century, to protect themselves from the unintended consequences of the freedom of the free market and, above all, to protect themselves from the freedom of those of below, that is to say, of the poor, of the inferior races, of the peripheral countries.
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Once the excuse of communism is over (none of those "shit countries" is communist but more capitalist than the United States), one returns to the racial and cultural excuses of the century before the Cold War. In every dark-skinned worker you see a criminal, a rapist; not a human being, not an opportunity for mutual development. The same immigration laws panic the working poor. Anyone who has applied for a visa knows that before going to a US embassy, anywhere in the world, he must remove the word work from his personal vocabulary. He can be a perfect drone with money, and brag about it, but never a poor worker.
While in the United States Social Security and Public Health continue to be under media attack, under progressive underfunding by governments in order to transfer their resources to the Pentagon and to promote private health and security coverage, more than 60,000 Americans die each year for drug addictions, mostly for opioid prescriptions. In 2017, according to the US Government's National Institute on Drug Abuse, 47,000 people died from opioid overdoses. The epidemic of this drug had started in the 90s when the powerful pharmaceutical companies assured doctors that their product was not addictive, despite studies that contradicted this claim. The doctors' propaganda and manipulation campaign closely resembled the one invented by Edward Bernays half a century earlier to sell cigarettes, eggs, bacon, and coups.
But nobody remembers anything. They only see a few thousand ordinary poor men, threatening to destroy the most powerful country in the world with their penises and vaginas. As the private prison business (which receives millions of dollars from the federal government) flourishes on the southern edge of the country, illegal immigration and legal refugees are criminalized for being poor and for the sin of not being Caucasian. The business, like any other business, has the sole objective of increasing the number of customers. The problem is that the clients here are poor men and women in search of a decent life, in search of a little peace and hard work, which is the only terrible thing they know how to do. When they are not refugees. As the despair of others and their own indignation is a business, prison companies inflate the days and weeks and months and criminal candidates, even if they are children, who must be detained unnecessarily, against international laws, but in compliance with the laws of the country of laws.
Since 1980, desperate emigration from the Northern Triangle has increased tenfold. Not because borders have been opened or because travel conditions are now better, as migrants continue to use their legs as their main means of transportation and borders have been exponentially militarized. The paramilitary terrorism financed by the corporations of the North, the wars of Washington in the eighties and its coups d'état 2.0 in the new century have produced an immediate and persistent effect. By 2020, the flow of migrants trying to escape the violence and misery of the ultra-capitalist neoprotectorates of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) will add up to almost 90 percent of the total. Since communism cannot be blamed (for worse, only seven percent of migrants come from the “Nicaraguan regime”) and the ultra-capitalist neoprotectorates are not blockaded countries, their ailing culture is blamed. When not directly to the cursed race. In response, Washington is reluctant to receive these dangerous refugees, be they children or poor women. Not by mere accident, the superpower of compassionate Christians receives one hundred times fewer refugees per thousand inhabitants than Lebanon and even six times less than the impoverished and blockaded Venezuela.
With no signs of change, politicians in the United States continue to warn of the danger of terrorists among the poor seeking asylum. There is nothing better than scaring the people with a non-existent invasion not to mention the violence and the historical massacres of white supremacist terrorism. Nothing better than scaring the middle class with the danger of the dark-skinned poor so as not to see that two men, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, already possess more wealth than forty percent of the superpower's population, while being homeless and the precariousness of wage slave labor continues to grow. Everything that produces the furious defense of those from below to the benefactors above with clichés such as "the lazy people want to invade us to live off the government", "the poor rob me with taxes" and "the solution is not in taking out the rich but to help them prosper ”, as if the rich had not kidnapped enough of all the progress of history and all the work of those below who support and defend them as if they were gods.
Racism, the business of exploiting those below, is neither created nor destroyed; it just transforms.
Jorge Majfud is a Uruguayan-American writer. Professor at Jacksonville University.
