White Racists “Love America”…and Hate Third World Immigrants

Laura Courtney, a presumably white woman of Louisiana, writes the following to her local newspaper: “It is our job as Americans to protect the very fabric on which this great country of ours was built. It is time to put an end to the illegal immigrants and the threat they pose to our country’s heritage and way of life.” Putting aside the genocidal implications of putting “an end to” millions of people, this statement sums up the thinking of many millions of white people in the United States concerning immigration from third world countries. These people believe that the influx of people from third world countries threatens the social, political, cultural, and economic dominance of white Americans; that is, the whites’ “American way of life” is thereby threatened.



The sign shown above says “European Immigrants Made the U.S.A.” Think about that for a moment. Firstly, the sign should be commended in the respect that it implicitly acknowledges that there is no such thing as an indigenous white person in the U.S. But it is not nearly descriptive enough in this regard. His sign would be more on the mark if it said “European Settler Colonialists Made the U.S.A.” The Europeans who came to the U.S. did so leaving a wake of indigenous people’s blood and enslavement wherever they settled, right from the beginning of the colonization in 1492.
But, more fundamentally, one must ask: What did the Euro-Americans “make?” The Euro-American ruling class did indeed “make,” and thereafter dominate the social system practiced in the U.S. There is no doubt about that. And so the sign should in fact say “European Settler Colonialists Made the U.S.A. Social and Economic System.” That is something for which a parasite can rightly be proud. And a parasite is what, in class terms, a large portion of the social base of the white “anti-immigration movement” is.
Bush, in his political campaigning, refers to the concept of “ownership society.” What this really represents is a strategic attempt on the part of the ruling class to extend the social basis for imperialist rule by creating more system “stakeholders.” In recent years, there has been an increase in individually-managed stock portfolios, for instance. The relative privileges accruing to the upper section of the white working class have contributed to its crystallization as a “labor aristocracy” and as a potential mass social basis for fascism. (For one expansive view of the labor aristocracy, though not necessarily entirely correct, see the “Eighth Route Readers Club” class analysis at: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/texts/ClassStructure.html ) Bob Avakian says the following in his work Conquer the World: “But it's (economism) so much the worse when you're talking about it in an imperialist country with not only a powerful labor aristocracy, but broad, thoroughly bourgeoisified strata, where it would be stretching it to even describe a lot of the so-called economic struggle as struggle and certainly stretching things to call it any kind of significant struggle.” It is the bourgeoisified stratum of white workers that is at the heart of the racist anti-immigrant movement.



Many leading liberals in the U.S. are cynically attempting to straddle the divide between the white anti-immigrant nativists on the one hand, and those defending the rights of immigrants on the other, by simultaneously criticizing Republican proposals to enhance criminal penalties for immigration law violations and calling for a crackdown on those hiring the labor of undocumented immigrants. They hope in this way to simultaneously appear as being “anti-illegal immigration” and “anti-racist,” and to win support for people of color and racist whites at the same. But, at the most basic level, many of them share a belief that there is indeed an “illegal immigration crisis,” and that it threatens the allegedly legitimate interests of the relatively privileged sectors of the non-immigrant working class. They share a position of defending the U.S. borders as being just and legitimate, and they certainly share a desire for the U.S. to continue its international hegemony.



The movement for the rights of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, stands opposed to the basic class interests of the bourgeoisie and its allies in the labor aristocracy, both in their “Democratic” and “Republican” expressions. Progressives must strongly support unconditional amnesty for all immigrants. Revolutionaries and communists must also recognize that the U.S. border is an imperialist border, an oppressive border, and that it has no legitimacy. They must be anti-imperialists and must recognize that “Oppressed Nation Labor Made the U.S.A. Material Wealth.”