President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration, banning travel to the U.S. from seven mainly Muslim countries, has endangered and torn apart thousands of workers’ lives. A four-month-old baby from Iran was denied life-saving heart surgery. A breastfeeding Sudanese mother was separated from her 11-month-old child while both were detained at a Dallas airport. Countless refugees were trapped in life-threatening situations. Entry was denied to an Iraqi translator who’d risked his life for U.S. imperialism in the bosses’ war in Iraq; to an Iranian biologist working on a cure for tuberculosis at Harvard; to countless other scientists, doctors, researchers, and students.
While the U.S. bosses wage imperialist war, devastating millions of workers, they are also working overtime to prevent workers from escaping their death sentence (see box). No matter how the U.S. judicial process plays out, this racist policy serves only the needs of the capitalist ruling class. Sharpening imperialist rivalries—conflicts between bosses of different countries—are pushing the world closer to a wider global war. Whatever their internal differences, the U.S. rulers are using Trump’s anti-Muslim ban and “America First” nationalism to win the U.S. working class to their cause: the fight for U.S. capitalism and the bosses’ oil profits.
The difference between Trump and Barack Obama is less about ideology and more about political strategy. Obama deported record numbers but veiled his racist policies with lip service to religious and racial tolerance—a tactic to deceive and pacify the working class. Trump has taken an openly racist tack to mobilize his racist base. The good news is that anti-racist workers have responded en masse and fought back. Within hours of Trump’s signing his executive order, thousands of workers--Black, Latino, Asian, and white, men and women, young and old—rushed to join protests at numerous airports and dozens of cities throughout the U.S. and the world, from London and Paris to Manila and Jakarta. Workers set aside religious differences and joined in multiracial unity. This unity is essential for the working class to win a world free of racist borders, sexism, war and poverty, a communist world run by and for the international working class.
Ban: Nothing New
for U.S. Racism
These attacks on workers are nothing new. Trump’s racist fear-mongering comes on the heels of eight years of Deporter-in-Chief Obama’s racist immigration policies. (Between 2009 and 2014, Obama deported 2.5 million workers.) Trump’s “new” policy, in fact, is born out of Obama’s 2015 Terror Prevention Act, which listed the seven countries in question. Obama’s act, in turn, was a “turbocharged” version of President George W. Bush’s immigration policy (Nation, 6/27/16).
Fortified national borders—the better to divide and exploit the working class--are essential to capitalism. In the 1930s, under liberal Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the U.S. bosses deported hundreds of thousands of workers to Mexico. During World War II, they turned away mainly Jewish refugees, sending them straight to the Nazis’ death camps. More recently, the bosses have used anti-Muslim racism to justify countless invasions, pillaging, and destruction in the Middle East (see box). For workers, crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico has become more and more deadly for workers. During the Obama administration, children sent by their parents as a last effort to flee conflict in Central America were sent back—even though it was effectively a death sentence for some (New York Times, 7/16/16).
Trump’s immigration ban was significant as well for the countries it excluded—most notably Saudi Arabia, the leading source of cheaply extracted oil and a source of huge profits for ExxonMobil, where U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was CEO until last December: “In his order...Trump invoked the Sept. 11 attacks three times. Yet Saudi Arabia... home to 15 of the 19 attackers, was not included on the list of countries...[This] reflects the deep economic and security ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia” (NYT, 1/30).
The Courts and
Liberals Won’t Save Us
So what does it mean when the courts and many politicians—both Democrats and Republicans—are denouncing Trump? It reflects the rulers’ disarray as they try to get their capitalist class in line and protect the faltering U.S. empire. To that end, they will not blink at killing millions of workers around the world. Although Trump is less predictable and perhaps less easily controlled than other recent presidents, he will either deliver the pro-war movement the bosses need or they will find another racist politician to take his place. The judges temporarily blocking Trump’s order are the same forces that target Black workers for racist mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the real criminals on Wall Street are stealing billions from our class.
We cannot vote or petition our way out of capitalist oppression. The only way for the working class to get what we need is through mass revolutionary violence and the seizure of state power. To win the world, the international working class, organized by Progressive Labor Party, will have to take it! Only communist revolution, led by PLP, can smash exploitation and mass imperialist murder for all time.
Smash All Borders
The thousands of anti-racists who have taken to the streets and the airports send an important signal of resistance to the bosses’ attempts to divide the working class. They show the potential of multiracial unity to fight back. But fighting for a “fairer” immigration policy is a losing battle for the working class. Borders are created by capitalism; they serve only the bosses. Meanwhile, capital flows freely from one country to the next. The international working class has no need for these artificial lines. Smashing nationalist borders and building a revolutionary mass working-class movement is the only way forward.
Every time the bosses attack, we, the international working class, must be organized to fight back  and confront them with multiracial unity. On Friday, February 3, more than a thousand New York City bodega owners went on strike against Trump’s ban and in solidarity with the detainees. Marchers protesting the racist police murder of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx joined the bodega protesters. To move this unity to the next level, we must turn reform battles into a fight for communism. The international working class deserves a better world--a communist world, led by PLP!

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The bosses’ media has used anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism to paint war in the Middle East as part of an endless conflict between Muslim sects. But the real cause of the horrors inflicted upon our class is inter-imperialist rivalry, as can be seen in the seven countries targeted by Trump.
In Iran:
U.S. bosses remain locked in a struggle with China and Russia, the main backers of the Iranian regime, for control over the Middle East’s vast energy wealth, an increasingly deadly struggle for the working class.
What US bosses fear most is the encirclement and isolation of Saudi Arabia and its oil fields, the grand prize for U.S. imperialism, by Iran and its regional allies.
In Iraq:
The U.S. has a long history of attacks on the Iraqi working class, most recently killing more than one million in the second Iraq War.
Iraq is emerging once again as a focal point for U.S. rulers. U.S. bosses remain locked into Iraq’s petroleum-soaked politics.
ExxonMobil’s vast and growing operations in the country are aimed at controlling Iraqi oil sources, which are of growing importance to rival Chinese bosses.
In Syria:
For millions of workers, the horror of wider war is already a reality. The U.S. proxy war with Russia has left cities demolished, displaced millions of refugees, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands workers.
Trump’s order includes a total and indefinite ban on Syrian refugees.
In Libya:
Using the phony “responsibility to protect” excuse for waging wider wars, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engineered a U.S. invasion in 2011. Bombing and missile raids by the U.S. were supposedly aimed at saving Libya’s citizens from dictator Muammar Qaddafi. In reality, however, the invasion was designed to consolidate oil deals the imperialist powers had made with the unreliable Qaddafi and each other.
In Sudan:
China first supported the Sudanese government in Khartoum fighting against separatist rebels in the south, who were funded by the U.S. But when the rebels succeeded in freeing their oil-rich province from control of the Khartoum regime, the Chinese skillfully switched sides to sustain their gas and oil projects.
China helped develop the South Sudan oil industry, which now exports 80 percent of its oil to China.
Chinese troops are part of a UN “peacekeeping force” that protects the oil wells and pipelines.
In Yemen:
Yemen is being torn apart in a proxy war between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the pro-Saudi/U.S. regime. A Saudi-led coalition has conducted indiscriminate air strikes across the country, killing thousands of workers. The finance capitalists fear any threat to U.S. control over the world’s foremost profit center in neighboring Saudi Arabia.
In Somalia:
The working class is caught in the crossfire of the imperialists’ fight to control Middle East oil. Over the last several months, the U.S.’s rampage has increased to six raids a month (Telesurtv, 10/16). Obama folded these raids into the perpetual war waged under the “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” the Congressional legislation signed into law one week after 9-11.