Left Caucus and Las Vegas DSA unreservedly condemn the subversion of our democratic process by elected officials and supporters of the losing slate.
On June 8th, the Washoe County Dems announced that they would coordinate the state’s Democratic election campaigns, receiving statements of support from Governor Sisolak, Sen. Cortez Masto, State Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson, and State Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro.
This decision to run these campaigns outside of the state party is, in reality, an attempt to run these campaigns outside the oversight of Nevada Democrats. It is a move that purposefully circumvents the mandate of the State Central Committee and disregards the results of our free and fair officer elections. We decry this shameless bid to ignore the voices and values of the Nevadans these representatives claim to serve.
We recognize that this is only the latest development in a continued assault on the right of Nevada Democrats to govern their own party. Ever since the election of Chair Whitmer and the Progressive Slate, the political elite has made it clear that it has no intention of respecting the choices of rank-and-file members.
It is time for us to send a message: free, fair, and open democracy is not a slogan – it is a foundational principle that we, as a party, must embody.
It is for this very reason that we organized around Chair Whitmer. It is for this reason that we voted for the Progressive Slate. It is for this reason that we are proud to continue to support their bold agenda of transformative change – bringing genuine inclusivity, transparency, and bottom-up democracy to our party. We remain united in our vision for a better world and a party that gives us all a say in building it. Directing our movement is not a privilege granted to us by our representatives, it is our right.
Nevada’s working people deserve to be treated as partners in the democratic process, not as subjects to be dictated to by a wealthy and privileged elite. In the coming primary season, Democrats will remember who among our representatives stood for the choice of the people and who stood only for themselves.
Left Caucus and Las Vegas DSA remain committed to their mission of lifting up the voices of Nevada’s working class and marginalized communities, transcending our differences and uniting us in our shared struggle for justice, equality, and democracy. When we fight together, we win together.
New Steering Committee
June 1st marked the start of a newly elected SC, contact buffalodsa@gmail.com to get involved and subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay up to date >>>>>
It's Always Hot in Palestine: BDS and the Anti-Imperialist Struggle
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The “Both Sides” Perspective on Palestine and What It Tells Us About the Ceasefire
In what was recently precipitated by a court order expulsion of Palestinians from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, during the week of Eid, Israeli forces have tear-gassed Al-Aqsa mosque, leveled press and residential buildings with rockets, fired white phosphorus into the streets, ransacked Palestinian businesses, and killed over 232 Palestinians so far, 62 of whom are children, most of whom are certainly civilians. By the time you read this certainly even more unconscionable acts will have occured.
In response to these events, the UK’s Boris Johnson called “for both sides to show restraint.” Representatives of the European Union called on “all sides to engage in de-escalatory efforts.” US Secretary of State Tony Blinken stated “we urge de-escalation on all sides, we also recognize Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself and to defend its people and its territory. It is critical for all sides to ensure calm and de-escalate tensions and avoid violent confrontations.”
One can see why some people may find this rhetoric appealing. Finding fault in “both sides” is an effective way to communicate a sophisticated and plausibly sympathetic perspective without having to define any real positions for what that perspective might be. And to call for de-escalating violence is a particularly deft move — “violence” and “escalation” are concepts that don’t exactly poll with your typical disinterested Westerner, and you don’t even need to assert where or how much there is violence, necessarily, just that wherever it might happen to be you think it’s not a good idea that it’s there. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the violence could simply stop? And why couldn’t it?
But an appropriate analysis of these events should identify such statements as an obscene false equivalence, as can be similarly identified by the left in the slogan “All Lives Matter.” “All Lives Matter,” as a slogan, while in the broad sense seems obviously true, nevertheless in context plays a role of its opposite, championing death. “All Lives Matter” as a slogan serves only as a reaction to the struggle against the police killings and incarcerations of Black lives sloganized by “Black Lives Matter” to dismiss a neo-colonial injustice as unnecessary or unimportant — reactionary in the most literal sense. To characterize what happened to Palestinians over the past few weeks as “violence on both sides” is to similarly play a role in enabling the violence that has been taking place unilaterally and over decades.
From any proper account of the struggle, the false equivalence with Israel/Palestine is plain: not only are the deaths from the struggle disproportionately Palestinian (at rate of 87% since 2000), but the military and political conditions are wholly incommensurate. From 1948, roughly a million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, while Israelis face no such displacement. Israel controls essentially the entirety of the territory, 98.4% claimed as its own and the remaining 1.6% of Gaza strip under tight control. The 1.8 million Palestinians living in Israeli live under a second-class citizenship: almost all land in Israel is prohibited for Palestinians to own and any residency in Jerusalem by Palestinians is revocable at any time. The 2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza live under Israeli imposed blockade, prevented from reliable access to food, clean water, fuel, electricity, medical supplies, or education.
And placed with the statement “we also recognize Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself” as the United States Secretary of State did, the United States not only willfully mischaracterizes the struggle but also plays into a well-worn Zionist rationalization. From the Zionist perspective, there can be no limit to the destruction and violence incurred so long as there is some detectable resistance on the other side which will allow it to be justified as self-defense. Any ounce of Palestinian backlash, no matter of the Israeli atrocity which provoked it, can be asserted to be some fresh aggression for Israel to have been responding to. So rather than Israel as a merciless bomber of a civilian population it will be argued in the West that Israel has shown incredible restraint but is simply the much superior fighter, as for example this Lockheed Martin backed Australian think tank argues. The same justification has been used by Israel historically before, such as with the “preemptive strike” justification for the Six-Day War in 1967 wherein Israel completely wiped Palestine from the map.
But the empty condemnations responding to this latest escalation are more than just words, they are indications of a broader worldview which is wholly unequipped to address the root problem. Liberal leaders in the West have called for a ceasefire and it is currently being enacted. And so from “both sides” rhetoric we have a “both sides” policy: we are told that the problem is not the disproportionate violence, or the 90,000 recently displaced persons, or the whole colonial project, but the fighting itself, specifically, certain types of violence associated with the military or terrorism seen as disruptive to the current status quo. It is a solution that is not a solution, a peace that is not a peace, an answer made only to satisfy the artificial created demands of liberal decorum and international law but none of the material injustices. And in doing so it has satisfied everything it needs in order to ensure the continuation of the 7th largest importer of United States military weaponry and a major justification for United States military funding domestically.
What is missing from this liberal conception of Israel/Palestine is a historical, material, and international class analysis. Israeli and Palestine are not two objects floating in space, disconnected from political, social, or economic forces, happening to bump into each other at random, like two strangers arriving at the same corner from different directions. (A ceasefire would be suitable for such things, if they existed.) Israel is a colonizer of Palestine, the United States is an imperial power against the Middle East, Jerusalem real estate is resettling Sheikh Jarrah, and violent IDF soldiers are carrying out ethnic cleansing against an Palestinian population, all of which are struggles of oppressors against oppressed in an international system of exploitation known as capitalism. It is these relations that govern these world events and the behaviors of those within it, not the vacuous “both sides” geopolitics of liberal imagination.
Similarly insufficient is the impulse to insert a different explanation for the Israel/Palestine struggle in substitution of class analysis, such as religion, as has been argued in the United States, even amongst those associated with the left. Does Israeli require Judaism to colonize, or Palestine require Islam to resist? Little more than we should believe that the Indian Removal Act was a Christian evangelical expression or that the Seminoles resisted displacement only out of regard for Little Giver or for Breathmaker. What religious distinction denoted redlining in the 20th century? Assertions like these appear designed to confine the stakes of the Israel/Palestine struggle to a difference of the subjective or of the spiritual only, a characterization which has never resembled the colonization of Palestine.
The liberal conception of Israel/Palestine not only contains no understanding of space but also no understanding of time, like a judge with no memory who is therefore easily fooled or a bribed guard whose recollection of events becomes increasingly hazy. From a snapshot of just these past few weeks (well, perhaps a blurry one) Israel may look like a parked vehicle, but it has been driving straight over Palestine for the past century. The journey of modern Israel has been fueled by imperialism and colonialism from the outset — in WW1 as a spoil of war for defeating the Ottoman empire, the British empire was granted the war-torn territory of Palestine in what was called the British Mandate for Palestine — after it had promised the indigenous Palestinian Arabs of the region autonomy in each exchange for their support in the war (a promise it clearly broke). Britain had in fact made conflicting commitments during WW1; the British had also promised Palestine to the French and had also outlined a vision for a Jewish homeland in Palestine known as the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration was no matter of conscience but an imperialist stratagem with a veneer of Zionist propaganda: the gesture was deliberately to win favor with Jews in United States in hopes to bring the United States into the war and to settle Palestine with a pro-British population which would allow them access to the Suez canal in support of their colony in India. So it’s in the context of these origins that understand the modern state of Israel: a Western Imperial power ceasing land through conquest, sending settlers from the West to occupy indigenous lands, and maintaining control for its continued hegemony.
And it is this Israel/Palestine colonizer relation which so much dominates the nature of this struggle that news of a ceasefire remains an unconvincing counterfactual. Could international agreements like a ceasefire qualify as steps towards improving the relationship between Israel/Palestine? Could Biden’s ceasefire in fact be decolonial? Once again history humiliates this idea. Israel has violated ceasefire agreements in 1949, 1956, 1967, 1973, at least three times in the 1980s, at least five times in the 2000s, and at least four times in the 2010s, in the form of “preemptive strikes,” targeted raids, and political or military assassinations. That Israel has done anything other than defended against imminent attacks, policed local instabilities, and killed suspected terrorists when it has repeated its cycle of promise, provocation, invasion is something that Israel has never reckoned with. The present ceasefire has already been introduced by raiding Al-Aqsa with tear gas. Plans for Israel to break the ceasefire in what it will term as a preemptive strike have already been advanced by a Senior Netanyahu aide. While a good faith commitment to ending violence and provocation and the transition to peaceful coexistence in the form of a ceasefire would be uncontroversially a good thing, in the medium and long term that’s never what it has been or can presently ever allowed to be because verbal international agreements are not what dictates world events but the ever evolving international class struggle.
So on this point let there be no confusion. We should be against colonization. We should be against violence. We should want peace and the end of the struggle. to want the day to pass when for the last time all the firing will truly and finally cease. We should want it so badly, in fact, so as to hope to no longer be able to afford to think or to feel in ways that enable that violence, that willfully or incidentally turn a blind eye, or that play directly into its hands. And it’s from the place that we will see the violence behind the calls to end the violence, the ways that the firings will continue because of the terms under which they will be ceased. We must resolve not to deny the reality of this struggle or where in it we must stand.
References
- “There’s Nothing Complicated About What’s Happening in Palestine,” Jacobin
- “Eid al-Fitr,” Wikipedia
- “Celebrations in Gaza as ceasefire takes hold,” Al Jazeera
- Tweet by @mohamendshnewa
- Tweet by @SulomeAnderson
- Tweet by @MechaWonders
- Tweet by @AMofatteh
- Tweet by @Africa4Pal
- Tweet by @vrmyj20
- Tweet by @PalestineUpdat
- Tweet by @shahidjourno19
- Tweet by @BorisJohnson
- “Israel/Palestine: Statement by the Spokesperson on the latest escalation,” EEAS
- “US condemns rocket strikes by Palestine on Israel, calls on both sides to de-escalate tensions,” ANI
- “This chart shows every person killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict since 2000,” Vox
- “Gaza Strip vs Israel,” Index Mundi
- “Palestinian refugees and the right of return,” AFSC
- “Forced Displacement in Palestine and Israel,”AFSC
- “Israel-Gaza live: More than 52,000 Palestinians ‘displaced by airstrikes’ as Biden shows support for ceasefire,” Independent
- “Gaza Strip: A beginner’s guide to an enclave under blockage,” Al Jazeera
- “Israel, Hamas, and the right to self defence,” ASPI
- “The six-day war and Israeli self-defence: Questioning the legal basis for preventative war,” J. Quigley
- “U.S. arms exports, by country,” Statistia
- “Indian Removal Act,” Wikipedia
- “Native languages of the Americas: Seminole Legends, Myths, and Stories”
- “Palestine: World War I and after,” Encyclopedia Britannica
- “Balfour Declaration,” Encyclopedia Britannica
- “Self-defense or provocation: Israel’s history of breaking ceasefires,” IMEU
- “Infographic: Who violates ceasefires more, Israelis or Palestinians?” The Electronic Intifada
- “Violence at Al-Aqsa mosque just hours after Israel and Hamas announce ceasefire,” Independent
- “Senior Netanyahu aide: Israel to carry out preemptive strikes on Hamas,” Middle East Monitor
Las Vegas DSA is unequivocally opposed to recent anti-transgender legislation in Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, and 30 other states
Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America is unequivocally opposed to recent anti-transgender legislation in Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, and 30 other states. While the exact content of these bills varies by state, the goal of each is to criminalize the existence of transgender people and/or penalize anyone who supports transgender people.
Transgender people already face harassment and discrimination on a daily basis. These additional laws install additional methods of persecution against trans people for the “crime” of existing in public.
While we believe these laws are blatantly unconstitutional and will eventually be struck down, we also acknowledge transgender people already fight harder than most to simply exist. Transgender people face much higher rates of violence than cisgender people. In 2015, nearly half of all transgender people were subject to verbal harassment within the past year and 9% of all transgender people were physically attacked for their gender identity. More than half had been subjected to emotional or physical abuse by partners. Rates of attempted suicide are likewise much higher. Transgender people also experience high structural barriers to accessing healthcare. One in five transgender people are uninsured and nearly one in five reported being refused medical care because of their gender identity. Transgender people deserve the same rights and privileges afforded to cisgender people, as well as to live their lives free of harassment and discrimination.
We stand in solidarity with our transgender comrades around the world in condemning these actions and those politicians who promote them. Furthermore, Las Vegas DSA strongly encourages the Nevada Legislature to pass SB139, which would mandate coverage of medically necessary procedures for transgender people. We also encourage our Nevada Congressional delegation to pass the Equality Act, which would expand anti-discrimination laws to cover transgender people, before the midterm elections.
Defund NYPD, Refund NYC with Tiffany Cabán
Last night, hundreds of people occupied the amphitheatre area in front of the Brooklyn Museum to share stories and collectively mark the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. At least 15 NYPD vehicles lurked on Eastern Parkway 100 yards away. The police presence included the large vans used to transport people who have been arrested as well as two vans for NYPD’s notorious Strategic Response Group, a “riot control” division which has violently arrested, pepper sprayed, and intimidated anti-racist and anti-fascist protestors consistently over the last year. SRG was established in 2015 and has an estimated yearly budget of $68 million.
We know it doesn’t have to be this way. We can change our city for the better by redistributing the massive amount of resources NYPD uses to harass and intimidate New Yorkers and investing that money in healthcare, education, housing, parks, art, and other things that will actually improve our quality of life and keep our communities safe. Tonight on Revolutions per Minute, we hear from DSA-endorsed candidate for City Council District 22 Tiffany Cabán, a long time de-carceral activist, on why she was proud to sign on to DSA’s vision for real public safety and budget justice. We’ll also be taking your calls live with Kay Gabriel, an NYC-DSA member and Defund NYPD organizer.
Learn more about Tiffany Cabán and her campaign at www.cabanforqueens.com.
Has your City Council candidate signed on to the Real Public Safety pledge? Visit bit.ly/defundpressure2021 to find out and get involved.
Revolutions per Minute looks forward to seeing you at the Defund NYPD week of action May 31 - June 6! View a full schedule and sign up at https://www.defundnypd.com/woa.
The United States Needs More Than Just Higher Refugee Caps; It Needs To Overhaul Refugee Resettlement Itself
On April 16, 2021, Joe Biden reversed course from his original position and announced in remarks that he would keep the refugee cap at 15,000 – the same historically-low number set by Donald Trump. Rightfully, the President faced immense backlash for that decision, particularly from elected officials who are DSA members. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) called the announcement a “disgraceful decision,” and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted that “upholding the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump admin, incl the historically low + plummeted refugee cap, is flat out wrong.”
The White House pivoted quickly and announced the Administration would, in fact, increase the refugee cap. Further blowback resulted in the White House’s May 3 announcement that the cap would be raised further, to 62,500. The reversal is an important shift, one that will benefit thousands of people and families fleeing war and persecution, but the reversal is insufficient. The refugee cap must be expanded, particularly as major refugee communities like Dadaab are closed and regimes like Ethiopia’s conduct ethnic cleansing in Tigray. Raising the refugee cap does not address the fundamental contradiction embedded in the refugee resettlement program since its inception – that of humanitarian promise versus politicized implementation. To actually practice a humanitarian refugee policy, we must overhaul the system of refugee resettlement completely to cut off its Cold War and exploitative roots and embrace a truly equitable resettlement process. The task is necessary but not easy. Making the resettlement process actually humanitarian requires not only massively expanding the support infrastructure for refugees, but also abolition of the anti-Black caste system in America.
In the Refugee Act of 1980, the conditions of refugee resettlement were enshrined in American law. A number of obligations of the state to refugees were outlined. Not only must the state provide for refugees’ roads to economic self-sufficiency, but the state must take into account the need for resources that allow refugees to prosper. These needs include, but are not limited to, mental health counseling and access to education. Refugees are entitled to these positive rights contingent upon their acceptance to be resettled in the United States.
In exchange for that promise, the state has reaped the benefits of soft power ever since the Act was passed. That was particularly the case during the Cold War. Every refugee accepted was another bullet in the barrel of the gun of soft power pointed toward the Soviet Union. These refugees accepted under the protocol of the Refugee Act were nearly invariably those displaced by the imposition of regimes antithetical to U.S. interests. This was especially the case for refugees fleeing from ostensibly Communist governments, as in Cuba, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Meanwhile, the state denied the benefits of refugee status to huge swathes of people fleeing political repression or war in the Caribbean and Central America, where displacement was instigated by direct and indirect U.S. intervention and the propagation of the American imperial war machine. Haitians, Salvadorans, and Hondurans fleeing state violence were labeled economic migrants and denied resettlement or asylum. Instead of asylum, they were wrapped into the complex web of immigration law and subjected to its whims.
In other words, the declaration of refugee status has always been a political act. Refugees have been permitted entrance to the United States to serve the interests of the U.S. government, with little regard for refugees’ lives and motivations and identities and complexities. During the Cold War, that norm led to a bifurcation of displaced people. Often, refugees were those displaced by communism; economic migrants were those displaced by anything else. Since the Cold War ended, that has changed – even as the White House has shifted the basic nebulous definitions of refugee and migrant according to its own interests.
The President did not specifically articulate why the Trump-era refugee caps were maintained at first, but some insiders indicated the reason had to do with fear in the White House of appearing “too soft” in the face of migrants seeking asylum at the country’s southern border. Biden’s conflation of refugees with migrants to defend a political action plays into the same opportunism that has always been built into the state’s practice of refugee resettlement. There is no Cold War now, no way to see the conflation as simply one tool in the arsenal of anti-Soviet weapons. There is, from the perspective of the government bureaucracy, no similarity between refugees seeking to be resettled and migrants seeking to enter the United States (even if, in many cases, the “migrants” at the border meet the definition of refugee as laid out in the 1951 Refugee Convention, as is the case with Hondurans fleeing mass violence instigated by the 2009 coup aided and abetted by the U.S. Defense Department). Refugee resettlement and migrants at the country’s physical border are managed by entirely separate government bodies. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services manages refugees who apply for asylum from abroad, the subjects of the refugee cap, while the Department of Homeland Security formed to combat terrorism manages the border (implicitly conflating migrants crossing the border with terrorism). Entirely different departments, entirely different personnel, entirely different processes.
The President is quite aware of the fact that, in the government’s eyes, refugees and migrants are as separate as night and day. The President is aware that, bureaucratically speaking, the federal government has more than enough capacity to prioritize both refugee resettlement and the humanitarian treatment of people seeking to enter the United States through the southern border. Since there is no logistical connection, the President’s conflation to support the Administration’s narrow policy interest in limiting the number of nationals of other countries settling in the United States has another, more political motive. “Too soft” on migration is just another way to say “too welcoming.”
But a fear of political blowback from xenophobic voters is not an excuse to not be welcoming to both refugees and migrants. To be sure, many Americans view refugees and migrants as one and the same, but the United States should not take advantage of that fact to deny people fleeing violence from access to the wealthiest country on earth. Nativist voters are not an excuse for nativist policy. Instead of greenlighting this xenophobia by using refugees as pawns in a political game, the United States should actually welcome and provide for refugee justice. For refugees, that begins with the depoliticization of refugee resettlement. Instead of shifting the definitions of refugee and migrant to suit political needs or dodge political blowback, the United States should adjust refugee caps based on the number of refugees worldwide.
But even that important shift toward a depoliticized, humanitarian definition of “refugee” is not enough to make the refugee resettlement process humanitarian. The task requires a complete overhaul of refugee resettlement itself. As the Refugee Act of 1980 is written, in Section B.i., “employable refugees should be placed on jobs as soon as possible after their arrival in the United States.” B.ii. further notes that social services should be “focused on employment-related-services.” In other words, the goal of refugee resettlement as designed right now – even the provision of social services to refugees fleeing war – is to provide labor for the United States. Refugees are treated by the Refugee Act as potentially exploitable workers. Viewed through that lens, it is no coincidence that the labor supply that refugee resettlement creates from refugees is usually Black and brown and from the Global South. The refugee resettlement program does exactly what the Bracero Program did in the mid-century: recruit brown workers for physically taxing jobs.
And all too often, physical labor that many white Americans are unwilling to do is exactly the type of jobs that refugees toil in. Nama, a Syrian resettled in Houston, TX., labors for a dollar above minimum wage and still barely manages to scrape by in paying rent. Ahmed, a Congolese refugee I met in Clarkston, GA., was a doctor in Congo but has become a warehouse worker in the United States. Many Cambodian refugees during the 80s and 90s in New York City, as detailed by Eric Tang in his book Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto, did contracted garment labor at home so the company that employs them can avoid overhead costs (117). Refugees are promised better lives and a chance at their own American Dreams, then rudely awoken from those Dreams by bosses overseeing regimes of paltry wages and few benefits at warehouses and factories and their own homes.
Even as refugees toil in jobs to be economically “self-sufficient” and meet the requirements mandated by resettlement to produce labor, many are forced to downward assimilate into marginalization by that same process. For many refugees, downward assimilation is characterized by entrapment in deep impoverished conditions and constant physical movement within the United States. “The cycle of uprooting, displacement, and captivity that defines the refugee experience persists long after resettlement,” Eric Tang noted in his work, a description that holds true today (5). Refugees move from apartment to apartment, flat to flat, city to city, accompanied by nightmares and Food Stamps. Cambodian refugees were resettled into the Bronx, even as the Bronx’s social services were gutted and defunded as a consequence of the insurrections of the 1960s by the state, and became part of the entrenched ghetto that cages generation after generation. These cages were imposed after resettlement because the resettlement process, as written in law, does little to aid refugees after a few short months in the resettlement process. Refugees are fast-tracked to assimilation – as exploitable labor, commonly provided only enough ESL education to supply their labor, funneled into welfare systems that societal structures encourage them to rely on in perpetuity. That system is enforced by the need to pay back travel loans provided to arrive in the United States for resettlement within six months of arrival. All the while, perpetual poverty is conceptualized as temporary – even as it becomes permanent by virtue of the structures of oppression into which refugees assimilate in American communities.
There are two ways to break that cycle. The first is to greatly expand the funding available in the refugee resettlement process to allow for integration, including long-term provision of mental health services and healthcare, as well as affordable housing. That requires reform of the process to dispose of its intense focus on transforming traumatized people into exploitable workers. Reform would effectively aid people fleeing war and repression in actually finding refuge in U.S. society on their own terms, not on the terms mandated by the state.
The second method is to confront the fundamental issue that there is a “downward” to assimilate into, a task that requires decolonizing the hyperghetto by addressing the root anti-Black causes of violence, incarceration, and other manifestations of systemic racism that undergird the persistence of the hyperghetto in American cities. Social housing, reparations, massively more funded education through redistribution of funds currently allocated to city police, and forgiveness for crimes committed by the incarcerated are all necessary steps to decolonize the hyperghetto. Most of these are viewed as pies in the sky precisely because the ruling political class has been fighting a class war against Black people for a generation of one-way battles, from the War on Drugs to the War on Crime, to keep Black Americans as an exploitable and often enslaved caste. But a limited political imagination based on anti-Black norms is not enough to cope with the deep, structural racisms that produced the hyperghetto. Nothing less than an abolitionist framework can deconstruct the hyperghetto and tackle the root causes of structural inequality many refugees experience by virtue of their proximity to the subjects of the American caste system: Black Americans.
Both of these avenues to reform refugee resettlement should be pursued. The first is a medium-term goal; the second, a long-term one. Both are necessary steps to actually reform refugee resettlement to commit to its humanitarian promise. To be sure, many refugees successfully integrate on American terms and become small business owners, organizers, and politicians. But we cannot let individuals who “make it,” in the sense that they fit the criteria by which Americans tend to evaluate success, be tokenized to defend an indefensible system. Reform will benefit all refugees, including both past and future generations of people who find themselves in America after fleeing their own homes. Both expanding the refugee resettlement program and abolition are contingent on depoliticizing refugee resettlement from the ever-fluctuating narrow interests of whoever happens to sit in the Oval Office at any given time. When President Biden raises the refugee cap after pressure from progressives, it is a necessary but insufficient corrective. Reform should be grander and more ambitious – namely, a commitment to make refugee resettlement policy as moral as its promise.
