Defend Haitian Refugees! Citizen Rights for Immigrant Workers!
Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)
“Our labor movement represents workers from all backgrounds and from all regions of the world,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “We not only advocate for dignity on the job; we are champions for universal human rights. So we are wounded when we see human beings being treated deplorably, without due process—let alone having the ability to stand up collectively and advocate freely for themselves.” (“The AFL-CIO on Haiti Humanitarian Crisis”, 10/01/2021).
So says Sister Schuler, who otherwise has done nothing and spent none of our dues to mobilize the Union in defense of the refugees driven back into Mexico from under the elevated highway in Del Rio, Texas in September. Schuler is a 24/7 Democrat and you will not be able to insert a piece of paper between positions she takes and what Biden says. Fobbing off the membership with exhortations to rely upon and elect more Democrats in pursuit of policy changes is where our money goes. The above AFL-CIO statement is nothing other than an expression of pressure from the union ranks, emphasis on the nothing! The union bureaucracy will no more mobilize the power of Labor to defend immigrants than they will mobilize Labor to defend our unions, which are decimated. We are not “other” than Haitians!
An awareness of Haiti’s history is essential when considering the current crisis at the Texas border where thousands of Haitian workers gathered in hopes of emigrating to the U.S. for a better life. We see the Biden administration bending to the racist anti-immigrant sentiment and political base of the fascist petty bourgeoisie. In many respects, and exactly in the mass expulsion of Haitians in the last month, he follows Stephen Miller and the Trumpsters; only his press is better. He has castigated the Border Patrol horsemen for whipping the refugees on camera, but he deports them in numbers that remind us of Obama, the “deporter-in-chief”.
Every discussion of Haiti, Haitian refugees, Haitian politics and the current conditions in Haiti must start with the history of slavery and underdevelopment. American public education has a miserable record where teaching real history of U.S. international relations, Black history and the slave trade are concerned.
We Are Historical Materialists!
After taking the island by force and wiping out the indigenous people, Spain ruled the Island of Hispaniola (now divided and known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic) for two centuries; ceding the western third of the island to the French in 1697. Tobacco and indigo were the initial cash crops cultivated primarily by white indentured labor. The transition to plantations, African slavery and sugar production was perfected by the French in the early 18th century. With mono-cropping, trade with the 13 colonies was essential to feed the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people captured in Africa and forced to work the Haitian plantations.
On average 14,500 Africans were robbed of liberty and brought to Haiti annually during the 18th century. By 1790 the 450,000 African slaves outnumbered the 30,826 whites and 24,262 free blacks and mulattoes. It was the unpaid labor of these hundreds of thousands that enriched the rising French bourgeoisie and provided the economic basis for their rebellion against the ancien regime. The sugar they produced distilled as rum was also an essential leg of the “triangle trade” that enriched plantation owners, North American merchants and slave traders alike. Likewise the U.S. shipbuilders, their customers and their hull and cargo insurance companies. The possibilities of discussing this real history of profit-by-barbarism with public school youth has sections of the bourgeoisie trembling, even apoplectic.
Many enslaved Africans escaped from Haiti’s plantations to the interior, formed communities known as Maroons and conducted raids on the plantations for decades. The class conflicts, factional battles among the free populations that resulted in the revolutions of 1776 in the U.S. and 1789 in France did not resolve the ultimate contradiction of slavery, which the victorious bourgeois and merchant class depended on for their wealth and survival. This contradiction could not stand forever and while it took another ‘four score’ years to explode in the U.S., the brutality, relationship of forces and emergence of an effective revolutionary leadership in Haiti defeated slavery by 1804.
On August 22, 1791 the uprising of hundreds of thousands of slaves was launched with the burning of plantations and cities. Thirteen years of revolutionary struggle defeated the French and sent shivers of fear across the slavocracy from Virginia to the north to Brazil in the south. Indeed the victory in Haiti inspired slave revolts across the Americas.
Nevertheless, victorious Haiti was dependent on trade to continue with both France and the U.S. to sustain its people. Although defeated, the dependence on trade and the military might of France saddled Haiti with burdensome indemnity reparations, such as the demand for 150 million francs in 1825 in exchange for recognition. This drain on capital stock set the stage to subordinate the former colony to the position of a semi-colony with a population immiserated in perpetuity.
Such debts could not be paid in full, and France sent warships to collect in 1838, ultimately negotiating the indemnification to 90 million francs (equivalent to U.S. $21 Billion in 2004 dollars). France was not paid off in full until 1893, and that was accomplished with loans secured in the U.S.. The interest on those loans was finally paid in full in 1947 to the predecessor bank now known as Citibank. With debt transfer from France to the Banks of Wall Street, the formally independent nation became a semi-colony of the U.S., which has used the Island as a destination for ‘run-away’ shops escaping higher wage demands on the mainland for the miserable wage-slavery maintained until today by decades of U.S. military interventions and brutal dictatorships. All attempts at formal democratic rule were crushed by coups and military occupation under the weight of trade deficit; external debt stability is not possible under capitalism.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have emigrated across North, South and Central America and remittances from their labor form the primary source of Haiti’s foreign exchange. The recent extension of protections for Haitians living in the U.S. (the Temporary Protective Status) (https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/temporary-protected-status) was the news event that inspired tens of thousands of Haitian expats to migrate north in September. Already stuck in Northern Mexico, tens of thousands of Haitians who were rejected for entry under Obama in 2016 joined the gathering in Del Rio, Texas. Central America post 2008’s world capitalist crisis not having been or even today being a great place for employment opportunities, this was made worse by earthquakes in 2010. Upheaval by assassination of the executive, with U.S. and Colombian drug involvement, was followed by another earthquake this summer. Haitians have every justification for leaving home, justifications second to none!
How do the North American Capitalists see Haiti?
James Dobbins, a Rand corporation fellow and former Clinton “special envoy” to Haiti put it this way, “Haiti is a burden…not an asset.”
When effectively controlled by brutal dictatorships, small investors and “runaway shops” could count on the brutal Tonton Macoutes to keep the workers in line. Today, on a world scale of ease to conduct business, Haiti is ranked 174th. Not only is labor running away but Capital is not interested. Liberalism, a la Aristide, and the expectations the masses had in La Vallas party, could not abide the needs of imperialism to ensure payment on foreign debt and protect investments and was not long tolerated. Today in the failed state, chaos, corruption and ‘wild west’ conditions reign as a result of the underdevelopment that slavery, perpetual debt peonage and brutal enforcement brought. Internecine warfare among corrupt wings of the native bourgeoisie resulted in the murder of President Jovenel Moise.
Haiti has always been a source of cheap labor, much of it oppressive in the extreme. Perpetual poverty breeds perpetual corruption. This can make for high costs of doing business, yet there is renewed commercial penetration by “the Core Group,” a consortium of interests of the U.S.-led & European imperialist bloc. The U.S. is the main import partner with 39% of Haiti’s trade. Likewise there is sudden inter-imperialist competition from China, which already has a 22% share.
The inter imperialist component, U.S. vs China and our class obligations
From the standpoint of the worker in Port Au Prince or industrial towns, what the nationality of his absentee employer/exploiter is is a detail, yet inter-imperialist friction can be expected to impact every aspect of the life of the working class and that of the island’s poor. Haitian workers and farmers must not become cannon fodder in future U.S.-China warfare.
The U.S. working class has the twofold obligation to defend Haitian workers against such a war and fate, while at the same time demanding freedom of immigration and no favoritism or immigration quotas based on nationalities or ethnicities. The obtaining U.S. laws are 1965 rehashes of the 1923 system enacted when open Ku Kluxers were prominent in the U.S. government. The U.S. left has failed the Haitian workers miserably in this latest Del Rio test and we must ask whether organizations like DSA or movements like Black Lives Matter have been so Biden-honeymoon-coopted as to refrain from even suggesting expression of mass outrage at the treatment of Haitian refugees, Central American refugees and the still separated families and kids in cages!
The aftermath of the world capitalist crisis of 2008 saw the Dominican Republic’s ruling class enact Haitian-excluding citizenship laws to try to reserve jobs for hereditary Hispanic citizens. This although a great chunk of Dominican wage labor is ethnically Haitian, i.e. of post-1929 immigration across the island. We say this situation mirrors the political crisis and underdevelopment across the region and cries out for a Caribbean-wide socialist federation, with workers-led governments organizing a rational economy of meeting human need and development driven by human liberation.
The Haitian masses can never achieve liberation as a semi-colony within a world capitalist system. National liberation and the democratic aspirations of the masses can only be won through workers’ revolution. This is the program of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution: that the unfinished tasks of democratic revolutions, long ago completed in the imperialist metropolises, cannot be accomplished as any separate, preliminary “democratic stage” of liberation. The national bourgeoisie in colonial/sem-colonial nations are tied in thousands of ways to their imperialist masters and cannot conquer national independence of any significance. They cannot transgress their private property in land, in factories, in bank capital, in trade agreements, in military affairs, or at all in the era of imperialist decline. Democracy can only be conquered today as workers’ democracy, carried to fruition inescapably and uninterruptedly, as a component of the socialist revolution.
Haiti needs a revolutionary workers party, a section of a new revolutionary international that leads the world socialist revolution. A Haitian workers revolution would have to spread and not be isolated, or eventually it would end up defeated like Cuba through internal counterrevolution or just outright crushed by U.S. imperialism. The revolution would necessarily have to spread throughout the Caribbean, to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico especially to survive.
Haitian-American and migrant workers in the United States are a bridge of consciousness to the American proletariat, as are Puerto Rican workers. A Black-led socialist revolution in Haiti could spark the fight for Black liberation in the United States against racist cop terror and the brutal segregation of the black population under American capitalism. The fight for Black liberation in America is tied to the fight for socialism in thousands of connections, in flesh and blood.
Social progress in America has always made the most gains when the fight for the democratic rights of Black people has been taken up and championed, from the abolitionist movement, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the labor struggles of the 20th Century, to the Civil Rights Movement. These struggles have driven social progress and the fight for democratic rights for all, such as the women’s and LGBTQ rights movements that followed in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Lives Matter protests of recent years have inspired the world. But bourgeois consciousness is traveling in the retrograde, backwards direction!
How should workers in the United States respond to the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the border?
It is in the class interests for workers in the United States and internationally, who themselves have been pushed to the wall, to defend immigrant rights and the democratic rights of all of our class sisters and brothers. We will either rise together or fall separately….and right now we are all falling pretty fast. The time to fight is now!
No deportations! For mass labor-centered mobilizations to defend Haitian migrants and all migrants against Border Patrol, ICE and National Guard terror!
For the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the border! U.N. out of Haiti!
No one is illegal! Tear down the fences and disband the Border Patrol! Abolish ICE! Asylum for all refugees! For free movement of all workers across the border! No fines or fees!
Full citizenship and employment rights for all workers! Reunite the kids with the parents and drop all charges!
Down with racism and racial profiling! No scapegoating of oppressed peoples! Down with English-only bigotry! For mass Labor/Community militant actions to stop ICE raids and deportations!
For labor political strikes to defend immigrant workers! For labor defense guards to defend immigrants at the border and to drive ICE from the workplaces and the communities!
Free all detained undocumented workers! Down with E-Verify!
Let workers choose where to work by demanding that all workers who do the same work get the same contract, same wages, and same working conditions, regardless of border! Demand the “prevailing rate” in the western imperialist center to become the international standard wage.
An injury to one is an injury to all! For international working class struggle!
Fight for full employment at full union rates and benefits for all! For 30 hours of work for 40 hours pay to spread the available work and do the neglected, socially necessary environmental remediation!
Nationalize major industries and the financial sector without compensation under workers control to provide adequate access to credit and to get the wheels of industry rolling again!
American workers: The main enemy is right here at home and it is the U.S. capitalist ruling class! U.S. military out of the Middle East! Defeat U.S. imperialism in Latin America, in the Middle East, and everywhere! For the independence of Puerto Rico!
Break with the Democrats and Republicans! Their policy is threats and wars abroad and racist and sexist wage suppression at home!
Build an internationalist fighting workers’/labor party to struggle for a workers’ government to abolish capitalism and its system of national borders!
For a new revolutionary Workers International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
Workers to power in Haiti! For socialist revolution throughout Latin & North America and the Caribbean! For a Socialist Federation of the Americas and the Caribbean!
Workers of the world unite!
