The migrant today experiences all that the American Empire has cast across the globe. In his home country, he feels the pangs of hunger after his social services have been cut. The U.S. decrees that her nation is poor and can no longer provide food. His village is invaded by a U.S. corporation, and to eat he’s told he must work his fingers to the bone. Her schools are demolished. His churches are replaced. Her governments are captured, and when she dares to raise her head to the sky and demand better, she is met with fire. It is between imperialist death, whether by hunger or by bomb, that the migrant chooses to leave their home country.
Where do they go? The profits reaped by the U.S. make it a rich land, a land overflowing with cheap commodities. The mind conjures images of bankers on yachts — the so-called “American Dream.” Yet this dream only belongs to the very people who terrorized the migrant to begin with. Instead, the migrant flees the bottom of the international labor market only to find themself on the bottom of the domestic labor market. They pick oranges, package meat, assemble appliances, and mop floors — conditions that are only tolerated because the alternative is the very terror that they originally fled. It is through racism at home that the U.S. reaps the second profit of imperialism: domestic super-exploitation of migrants.
This racism, this product of imperialism, is not just prejudices in the minds of men. It is all those things that force our migrants into the fields and fear into their hearts: ICE snatching construction workers on lunch break, forced English primary education, bureaucrats revoking visas from those who protest genocide, planes carrying dozens to mega-prisons in countries not of their origin. Prisons abroad, prisons at home — Biden built a new detention facility and Trump is filling it. Racism is the grease on the capitalist machine attempting to crush 14 million undocumented people, their families, and their communities. Our communities. And so, it is the people’s duty, our mission, to smash this machine.
The GDC takes this fight on both its fronts, at home and abroad. Against the escalating threat of ICE locally, we have formed the People’s Assembly of Southwest Detroit. Against the ongoing blockade of Cuba by the U.S., we help lead the Michigan Action for Cuba Committee (MACC).
The People’s Assembly, formed late last year, has brought hundreds of people into the fight against ICE. We have built three committees to carry out the Assembly’s mission, each charged with a crucial task: Mutual Aid, Migra Watch, and Political Education. Mutual Aid supports those that are targeted and detained. Migra Watch monitors, documents, and disrupts ICE activity. Political Education builds the political knowledge and consciousness necessary for the long road to liberation. Our goal is to form resilient, combative, and revolutionary mass organization, and to build our communities into liberated zones where ICE does not dare to enter.
Cuba has withstood the U.S. blockade for 63 years, and MACC’s mission is to help them end this blockade. First, we send material aid to the Cuban people and labor brigades to assist with necessary projects. Second, we organize in our communities against all U.S. efforts to crush the Cuban people, from the “State Sponsor of Terrorism” list to the blockade itself. This is done in coordination with the National Network On Cuba Coalition, forming a unified movement across the U.S..
These efforts, along with our work in the Palestine solidarity movement, are the GDC’s commitment to the world. This commitment understands that the fates of migrants here are entwined with all those across the globe who also suffer under U.S. imperialism; that to fight for one we must fight for all.
Originally published in:
