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.

Seven Catholic plowshares activists entered Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia on April 4th, 2018. They went to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat swords into plowshares.” The seven chose to act on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who devoted his life to addressing what he called the “triple evils of militarism, racism, and materialism.” Carrying hammers and baby bottles of their own blood, the seven attempted to convert weapons of mass destruction. They hoped to call attention to the ways in which nuclear weapons kill every day, by their mere existence and maintenance. One of those seven, Mark Colville (pictured back right), talks with Colleen Shaddox about his resistance to the weapons economy and his life at Amistad Catholic Worker House in New Haven, Connecticut. Mark talks about how he and his comrades argued that their Catholic faith compelled them to act against Trident - a defense that the jury was never allowed to hear. Now he looks forward to serving his sentence for the action. As he says, much of the Bible was written inside a prison - what better place to read it?

Dear Father Leahy,

We are writing to ask that you make a public statement condemning the Israeli military assault on Gaza. This is not a conflict between two equal belligerent parties. Israel maintains one of the world’s most sophisticated and powerful militaries, while two million Palestinians have been under siege, locked in an open-air prison in the Gaza Strip for over a dozen years, and denied access to many basic necessities. Over the last 12 days, the Israeli military killed 231 people, including 65 children. About 91,000 Palestinians have been displaced.

On Sunday, Pope Francis made an appeal for peace in the region and specifically described the death of children as terrible and unacceptable. He called for an end to the violence:

In the name of God who has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters, I appeal for calm and, to those that with the responsibility, [I appeal] to stop the sound of the arms and to walk on the path of peace with the help of the international community.

We believe that in times of great injustice, it is important for leaders everywhere to speak out in the name of peace and justice. We ask that you use your platform as President of one of the foremost Jesuit Catholic universities in the United States to speak out on behalf of the oppressed. Although we are relieved that a ceasefire has been reached, we believe that now is not the time to become complacent. Rather, we encourage you to use this moment to demonstrate your commitment to peace and human rights worldwide. 

Last summer, the Pope called on Catholic institutions to divest not only from fossil fuels but also from the armaments industry. It is a subject he has spoken about throughout his pontificate. In 2017, he stated, 

It is an absurd contradiction to speak of peace, to negotiate peace, and at the same time promote or permit the global arms trade. Is this war or that war really a war to solve problems? Or is it a commercial war for selling weapons in illegal trade and so that the merchants of death can get rich?

In a speech to the US Congress in 2015, he asked,

Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.

In the spirit of these declarations, we ask that BC sever its ties to the military industrial complex to ensure it is not complicit in any way in supporting atrocities in Gaza or anywhere else. The CEO of Raytheon, Thomas Kennedy, sits on the Board of Governors of the BC Chief Executives Club. Raytheon is a major supplier of arms to Israel. In 2014, Israel used F-16s armed with the company’s missiles during its assault on Gaza, killing 1,462 civilians, including 550 children. Defense for Children International found that 225 of those children were killed from missiles fired from fighter planes. Raytheon munitions were also used to shell a UN school inside of the Jabalia refugee camp in 2009, killing between 30 and 40 people. In 2019, the Young Democratic Socialists of BC documented how Raytheon’s weapons have been used in war crimes against civilians in places like Yemen. In 2015, the US-backed Saudi coalition used Raytheon munitions to bomb a funeral at a community hall in Sana’a, killing 140 people and wounding 525. In the spring of 2019, Kennedy hosted an event for the BC Chief Executives Club with the CEO of General Dynamics, another arms manufacturer whose weapons have been used to kill civilians in Yemen and Syria. That same year, Kennedy told investors that increased tensions with Iran were good for the company’s business prospects. Boston College should not associate itself with people and corporations that profit off of war.

No institution that associates with these arms manufacturers can claim to adhere to any set of moral principles. There is no ambiguity in this, just as there is no ambiguity in the Pope’s denunciation of the profit motive behind the death and destruction these corporations enable. 

BC must cut ties with people like Kennedy.

We hope you will add your voice to the chorus of those speaking out in the face of oppression and injustice and not remain silent during this crisis.

With only three weeks left in the New York State legislative session and city primaries following up close behind, socialist are in the streets! Tonight we’ll hear from comrades in Astoria who are fighting to pass Public Power as well as comrades in Sunset Park, who are working to elect DSA-endorsed candidate for city council Alexa Avilés. And we’ll also talk with Alexa herself about how her mother’s  struggle for Puerto Rican liberation and being a mother fighting for her own kids’ education has shaped her politics and about her community’s vision for District 38.

 

To get involved with Alexa's campaign: www.alexaforcouncil.com/

 

To get involved with the campaign for Public Power: https://ecosocialists.nyc/events/

“The Coulee DSA books club will begin reading Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds” beginning Tuesday, May 25th at 7 PM. Parenti’s 1997 text is considered a classic among many on the left. Among many themes, the book explores how corporate power has embraced fascism throughout history, how historical revolutions freed populations from the forces of exploitation, the enduring power of Marxism, and the importance of class analysis in understanding and comprehending the political realities of our time. 

The Coulee DSA Book Club meets every Tuesday night at 7 PM, It doesn’t require regular attendance, so feel free to stop by or drop in and out as you have time. Reading is strongly encouraged but not required. The discussion often goes off on tangents and covers a broad array of topics, and we would love you to add your voice to the discussion! Reply to this email if you are interested in joining and we will connect you to the group. “

The post DSA book club is starting ‘Blackshirts and Reds’ first appeared on Coulee DSA.

In the past week, the state of Israel has escalated its violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel is expelling Palestinian families in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan neighborhoods to make way for more Jewish settlers. When Palestinians protested these expulsions, Israeli police responded with violent repression, including attacks on Arab worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque during prayers nearing the end of the month of Ramadan. In Gaza, an Israeli bombing campaign has so far killed 103 Palestinians, including 27 children, and injured over 500 more. Israeli street mobs chant “death to Arabs.”^[1]

This violence is not new to the Palestinian people. May 15, 2021, marks the 73rd anniversary of Nakba Day, commemorating the Zionist expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. The Nakba began in 1948 when Zionist paramilitary groups launched an ethnic cleansing operation, killing 107 Palestinian Arabs in the Deir Yassin Massacre, including women and children. Zionist forces carried out other atrocities, displaced 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, emptied 400 villages and cities, and left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead.

This is how the Jewish state of Israel was created.

To Palestinians, the Nakba never ended. For decades, Israel has violated international law by creating hundreds of illegal settler colonies in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel has restricted Palestinians’ freedom of movement in the West Bank, and with the Gaza blockade, trapped 2 million people in an open air prison. Israel has created a system of apartheid: systematic discrimination and separation on the basis of ethnicity.

We, the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, condemn these continuing acts of ethnic cleansing and violence, and we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We reject the media narrative of calling these atrocities “clashes” and “conflicts”, creating a false equivalence between a U.S.-backed settler colonial state and those they have dispossessed and violently oppressed for decades. We support the right of Palestinians under occupation to defend themselves from Israeli violence. We support the anti-racist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005 to end Israeli apartheid, and call for an end to U.S. aid to Israel.

As socialists, we must fight racism and all forms of injustice, both at home and abroad. Removing Palestinians and denying their right of return is an act of deep injustice even in times without violent conflict. We understand the fight for Palestinian rights as part of the human struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and all forms of oppression. Palestinian liberation is our liberation too; until all of us are free, none of us is free.

Silicon Valley DSA invites community members to show support for the Palestinian people:

• Saturday, May 15 at 11am. 20th Annual Palestinian Cultural Day. 70 W Hedding, St. San Jose.
• Saturday, May 15 at 2pm. Rally for Palestinian Liberation – Palestine Action Network. Valencia and 16th in the Mission, San Francisco.
• Sunday, May 16 at 6 pm. Join us to Protest for Palestine at San Jose City Hall.

---

See also:

• National DSA Statement

Endnotes:

1. Chanting “Death to Arabs,” Israeli Mobs Attack Arab-Owned Businesses and Assault Driver

The post Silicon Valley DSA Stands in Solidarity with Palestinians appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

How would your life change if you no longer had to worry about healthcare? Maybe you would quit that job you hate and start a business, or work part-time so you could spend more time with your kids. Maybe you could finally get that dental work you have been putting off, or use the money you save on insurance premiums to pay off debt.

We say “healthcare is a human right” because it is a moral and practical imperative to ensuring people can live lives of value, and because providing it would eliminate unnecessary suffering in all our communities. Ensuring universally accessible healthcare would literally SAVE LIVES.

Just as importantly, it would break the shackles that our current for-profit healthcare system places on average Americans. In the “freest nation in the world”, many of us are beholden to jobs we hate, working long hours to pay up to a third of our income for insurance (if we are lucky enough to have it), never able to reach the financial or life goals we set for ourselves. A universal, single-payer healthcare system will open up opportunities for the average American. It will give everyone more flexibility in employment, prevent crippling medical debt, and ensure care to marginalized populations.

Right now in Wisconsin we have an opportunity to take a step closer to this goal, by accepting federal Medicaid expansion funding and using it to expand the WI BadgerCare program to cover those making between 0-138% of the poverty line. This would provide affordable healthcare to an additional 91,000 Wisconsinites, while saving our state approximately $630 million in taxes. While Governor Evers has proposed this expansion in his biennial budget, our legislature does not currently support accepting these federal funds.

Coulee DSA is fighting in coalition with other groups across the state to demand the WI legislature include BadgerCare expansion in their next budget. You can help by reaching out to your local legislator to let them know you support this legislation or by helping CDSA spread the word at our upcoming canvassing events in Viroqua.

Coulee DSA’s Health Care Justice working group meets every other Wednesday at 7 PM. Contact us at couleedsa@gmail.com if you are interested in learning more or joining up.

The post Demand BadgerCare Expansion Now! first appeared on Coulee DSA.

Do we live in a secular age? Is capitalism a religion? In this episode, Stephen Crouch asks author and professor Eugene McCarraher about the "misenchanted" qualities of capitalist society. Dr. McCarraher is the author of the 800-page tome entitled, Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (2019). During the episode, Dr. McCarraher discusses the shortcomings of Marxism and the Protestant work ethic, and suggests a better path forward through the anti-capitalist Romantic tradition with its "enchanted" view of the world. Dr. Eugene McCarraher is a Professor of Humanities and History at Villanova University and the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought. He has written for Dissent and The Nation and contributes regularly to Commonweal, The Hedgehog Review, and Raritan. His recent work, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Resources listed include magazines, publishers, podcasts and other project that should to educate you in organizing, theory, and history. Outlets Democratic Left : A Publication of Democratic Socialists of America […]

This weekend, OCRA coalition partners and comrades, namely OKC DSA, For The People OK (FTP), Autonomous Brown Berets of Oklahoma (ABB), Student Socialist League OK (SSL), and Scissortail Defense Network […]