Last November I was asked by Mosaik to write on the migrant caravan making its way from Honduras to the US border. Mosaik, an Austrian socialist Blog (yes, Austrian socialists exist!) translated and published my article available here:
For non-German readers, here is an earlier version of the article in English:
The US midterm elections have come and gone, and the refugee caravan made up of thousands of asylum-seekers from the northern triangle of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador continues to make its way towards the US-Mexico border. Asylum seekers are mainly young workers, mothers and babies, LGBT youth, and multi-generational families fleeing for their lives. They are running from drug cartels, political repression, sexualized violence, and poverty. Honduras is one of the most violent countries in Latin America, its murder rate skyrocketing after the US-supported coup in 2009. The US-friendly government has overseen massive privatization and environmental degradation, where taxes are low and femicides are high.
The caravan’s intent is simple: to reach the United States by walking. They do so with whatever clothes they have on their back and whatever shoes – often flip flops or foam clogs – they have on their feet. Luis Hernandez, who spent a week with the caravan between Chiapas and Oaxaca observed, “Hope is what is moving them.”
This act of defiance, buoyed by the sheer will to survive, disobeys national borders and points to two possible futures.
On one side is Trump’s vision of violent, exclusive borders that delineate non-citizens from citizens. By characterizing the caravan as “thugs,” “very bad people,” “gang members,” and an “invasion” he can justify a military response. This includes deploying up to 15,000 US troops at US-Mexico border and suggesting that US soldiers would shoot migrants if they threw stones, invoking Israel’s practice of shooting Palestinian youth armed with slingshots. Post-election, he has escalated the war on ‘foreigners,’ threatening to revoke the right to claim asylum and to reverse birthright citizenship. Concurrently, heavily armed far-right militias publicized their plans to go to the border to ‘assist’ border control. The scene has been primed for violence.
Using the caravan as a rallying point Trump has gone after Democrats, wildly claiming that they are for open borders and the abolition of Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE), the policing force which enacts detention and deportations. While a few left wing Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for the abolition of ICE, party leaders have rejected this position and reaffirmed their support for border security. As Chuck Schumer reminded us in June:
Open borders, @realDonaldTrump? The bipartisan immigration bill I authored had $40 billion for border security and would have been far more effective than the wall.
Unfortunately, the Democrats have never been for open borders and have contributed significantly to border militarization, continuing deportations, and the criminalization of refugees and undocumented immigrants, which maintains a class of vulnerable and highly exploited workers. Over eleven million people are undocumented in the US, concentrated in agriculture, restaurants, meatpacking, construction, and housekeeping. The Democrats authored laws that support this caste system, such as Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act which established new grounds for deportation, penalties for illegal entry and re-entry, and mandates for detention of deportable noncitizens. In 2013, Barack Obama fast-tracked deportations by rejecting asylum requests and increased deportations for people charged with nonviolent crimes. When 70,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America made their way to the US-Mexico border in 2014, Obama approved deterrence measures, such as the first iteration child and family detention centers.
The right to claim asylum in the United States has also been whittled away over the years, through physical deterrence to slashed refugee quotas. This recent history goes back to Bill Clinton, who deployed the US Coast Guard to stop Haitian refugees from reaching US waters, a move that has been adopted by the EU. In 2014, Barack Obama pressured Mexico to shut off the southern border in order to deter refugees from making it to the United States in a move analogous to the EU outsourcing border control to Turkey and Libya. This has not stopped people from making the journey, but has made the journey more deadly.
On the other side of this nightmare is the solidarity of regular people. Wherever the caravan has passed, regular people have organized generous responses. Much like scenes of solidarity at German and Austrian train stations where hundreds of people came to welcome refugees in 2015, villages in Chiapas and Oaxaca have turned out to welcome the caravan. Chiapas and Oaxaca are the poorest of Mexico and the most indigenous. They also have a long tradition of social struggle from the rebel Zapatistas in Chiapas to the striking teachers in Oaxaca. In Juchitán, Oaxaca, which was badly damaged by an earthquake last year, the town turned out to provide food, water, and even a movie showing for the caravan. Along the route unions and villages have donated meals, buses and medical care, and organized basic shelter in town squares. As Radio Zapatista proclaimed, “it is not whether we, as Mexicans at the bottom have a little or a lot to share, but rather that those in the caravan have a greater need than us. That’s what solidarity is about.”
Every day, hundreds of people are forced to leave their homes and make the journey towards safety. Their journey is largely small, privatized, and silent. The current exodus of thousands exclaims publicly, “We are here. We are to be seen. We are human.” It is also a practical consideration, as moving as a group can protect refugees who are often victim to human smugglers, cartel extortion, and corrupt police. This is particularly the case for women and LGBT refugees, who face a higher risk of sexualized violence.
Even as politicians have little to offer the caravan, activist groups in the United States are organizing a Sanctuary Caravan to meet refugees at the US-Mexico border. Former soldiers Rory Fanning and Spenser Rapone have called on soldiers to refuse Trump’s deployment: “By every moral or ethical standard, it is your duty to refuse orders to “defend” the U.S. from these migrants. History will look kindly upon you if you do.” Dozens of demonstrations are being organized. These acts can counter the promised violence of the Trump administration.
Internationally, the working class is on the move, due to growing inequality, governmental violence, and increasing climate change. How the left responds to the question is the test of our generation. Will we choose borders- sites of exclusion and violence- or will we choose internationalism? In siding with the caravan, the simple act of walking becomes radical, opening towards a shared future.
Initially presented at Historical Materialism in London, November 2018.
Last August, neo-nazis stormed the streets of Chemnitz, in former East Germany, chanting, “for every dead German, a dead foreigner” and “Foreigners out!” They chased brown-skinned people through the streets, beating those who they could catch, threw a journalist down a set of stairs, and smashed the windows of a Jewish-owned restaurant.
This was no spontaneous mob, but an organized manifestation. Using the death of Daniel H., a German-Cuban man killed in an altercation with a Syrian and Iraqi man at the town carnival, the far-right to neo-nazi spectrum mobilized en-masse, drawing over 6,000 people into the streets. On any other day, the tragic death of someone in a late-night fight would be a newspaper story, not a pogrom. But as we have seen over the past three years, fascists have seized on crimes committed by non-Germans in order to indict whole nationalities and whip-up anti-refugee and anti-immigrant violence.
“We’re diverse until the blood splatters.” Neo-Nazis gather in Chemnitz, August 26, 2018
Soon, a rumor began to circulate that Daniel H. had been defending three German women against unwanted advances by Syrian and Iraqi men. Picked up by the conservative tabloid Das Bild, the fictitious insult of white German women at the hands of Arab men is a familiar and repeated trope. Leyla Bilge, far-right Alternativ für Deutschland member, demonstrated with a banner that stated: “we are not prey!” Nazis held a banner aloft that pictured women’s faces, beaten and bruised. It stated, “we are diverse until the blood splatters.” The AfD concurred, tweeting about protecting women from “knife migration.”
Women at the neo-Nazi gathering in Chemnitz. “Enough! Women march: we are not prey! Women’s freedom is not negotiable!” August, 2018
By seizing on or inventing [native] women as victims of foreigners’ attacks, Nazis develop a narrative that [white] German women need to be safeguarded from Muslim men, who pose a “pollution threat” to the pure German Volkskörper. This bloodline fantasy is an echo of Germany’s eugenicist and genocidal past, made present by the law of citizenship, which was defined by blood until 2000 The fantasy of protecting women becomes the fantasy of avenging all Germans, and every sexual assault by non-Germans becomes the next right-wing mobilization, as we have seen Kandel, Kölln, and Chemnitz.
Women have a particular role to play in these demonstrations, their presence at a softening the fascist intent. At the same time, by adopting the language of female self-empowerment and moral righteousness, they twist the demands of feminism –to be free from sexualized violence and harassment- towards xenophobic aims. This tactic has drawn on the historic women’s mobilizations we have seen around the world – from women’s strike to women’s marches to #metoo, and perverts the fight against sexism into a fight against foreigners.
This is why Alternativ für Deutschland organized two “Frauenmarschen” in Berlin demanding an end to “Sharia Law.” The first Frauenmarsch was surrounded and blocked by antifascists, delivering a defeat to the AfD. In reality, of course, the fascist street movement has few women supporters- most participants in the Women’s March were men. Nor do women support the AfD at the ballot box-twice as many men support the AfD than women. Outside of a few prominent leaders (Alice Weidel, Beatrix von Storch), the AfD has the lowest number of elected women of any party.
I use this example of racialized sexism as entry into one of the tenets of femonationalism, or what Sara Farris (2017) defines the deployment of “women’s rights” by the state, liberal feminist organizations, far-right and even fascist groups towards anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Muslim means. The power of the far-right instrumentalization feminist demands is that it creates a bridge to bourgeois racism, which has long conceptualized non-Western, non-EU men as uncivilized, sexist, misogynists, in need of enlightening – or deportation.
Left-wing women’s organizations have rejected this instrumentalization, noting that sexualized violence and sexual harassment have nothing to do with nationality. Anyone who has ever been to Oktoberfest knows that sexism does not have to be imported – it is long here.
The instrumentalization of ‘in the name of women’s rights’ occurs at almost every level, from government policy, state discourse, among liberal feminists, and in court rulings. Islam is a particular target and is consistently discussed in negative terms, defined as backward, hostile, threatening, or irrational. Hakan Tosuner describes the “integration debates” as “an act of domestication for a problematic population.” Domestication connotes taming wild animals. This is echoed by Thilo Sarrazin, a well known SPD member, on tour for his latest book: “Hostile Takeover: How Islam hinders progress and threatens society”. Describing Islam as “an ideology of violence disguised as religion,” Sarrazin argues that if Europe doesn’t take swift action to halt Muslim migration into the EU, European society will ultimately be enveloped and destroyed by Islam. A particular irony is the claim that Muslim refugees are ‘importing’ anti-Semitism into Germany even as the neo-Nazis gather.
Islamophobic liberals. Thilo Sarrazin presents his new book, “Hostile Takeover: How Islam hinders progress and threatens society”
While Muslim men are conceptualized as violent and sexualized extremists by the far-right, the German state sees Muslim women are seen as passive victims in need of saving. Part of this saving includes forced unveiling, a common trope throughout Europe which has become a powerful image in Germany. This unveiling on colonial traditions wherein Europe is conceptualized as a civilizing and egalitarian force to the non-EU/non-western arrival.
Most politicians – from Angela Merkel to the SPD- have supported a ban on headscarves wherever possible. Local court cases have upheld the so-called religious “neutrality” law, which bans state employees from wearing religious symbols at work, from yarmulkes to crosses to hijabs. This is Islamophobia masquerading as secularism which means a de facto work ban for millions of women who choose to wear the hijab. Most recently, so-called feminists like Alice Schwarzer and the organization Terres de Femmes defended the hijab ban, calling for it to be extended to school age children. A notable exception has been the left party- Christine Buchholz and Cornelia Möhring- who have defended a woman’s right to choose their clothing.
In short, we can see implicit or unintended alliances between “liberal” German forces and the far-right as they make common cause against the so-called “Islamization of Germany.” This should begin to point us towards an appropriate response: our movement must demand self-determination and bodily autonomy against a hostile and colonial state.
AfD claims demographic crisis to stimulate forced reproduction
AfD party program spells out a regressive, reactionary agenda for women, which includes a ban on headscarves, an end to gender quotas in the workplace, an end to transgender protection. At the same time, marriage and childbearing are incentivized and abortion restricted, pulling on policies straight out of the Third Reich in order to increase the German [read, white] population. The far-right and neo-fascist forces see non-white immigrant woman’s womb as a threat to Germany. Section 6.2 of AfD’s political program, titled “Larger Families instead of Mass Immigration” warns that immigrant families with higher birthrates than German families will “hasten the ethnic-cultural changes in society.” AfD’s answer to this “problem” is straight out of the fascist playbook: “Germany’s negative demographic trend has to be counteracted… The only mid- and long-term solution is to attain a higher birth rate by the native population by stimulating family policies.”
To do this, the AfD opposes abortion and seeks to maintain the two constitutional paragraphs which restrict and limit abortion: Paragraph 218 and 219. Although abortion is a common procedure in Germany, it remains technically illegal under Paragraph 218, where it is listed next to murder and manslaughter. Only through a subsequent amendment is abortion permitted, granted specific requirements are met.
Paragraph 219a, passed in 1933, criminalizes advertising abortion services. The offense is punishable with up to two years in prison for anyone who publicly “offers, announces or recommends services for pregnancy termination.” What the law means in practice is that doctors are forbidden from listing abortion services or factual information online. Dr. Kristina Hänel, a target of the anti-abortionists, was charged with breaking 219a and fined 6,000 euros for offering information on abortion online. In essence, information on ending a pregnancy – the basis for self-determination, remains taboo.
Lest you think Germany is a sexually repressed or victorian country- you can find advertisements on the street for anything from dildos to erotic massage to vasectomies – sometimes all three – but not abortions.
Advertising to terminate a pregnancy is banned under Paragraph 219a. Advertising for vasectomies, however, is not. Photo credit: Author
The AfDs defense of the 219a is particularly chilling, given its eugenicist origins, part of the Nazis’ “racial hygiene” program that sought to forcibly increase the “Aryan” population and decrease that of the “destroyers of the culture,” such as Jews, foreigners, and “individuals unworthy of life.” Shortly after its introduction in 1933, the Berlin Council of Physicians argued that practice of abortion “shall be exterminated with a strong hand … proceedings will be taken against every evil-doer who dares to injure our sacred healthy race.” Meanwhile, Hitler awarded women with four or more children the Cross of Honor of the German Mother. Nazi propaganda determined that “to be a wife and mother is the German woman’s highest essence and purpose of life.”
This invocation of “racial hygiene” is visible in Alternative for Germany’s election poster, which features a white pregnant woman’s midsection and the caption, “New Germans? We’ll make our own.” At the same time, Andre Wendt of the AfD in Saxony made an inquiry into the cost of sterilizing “unaccompanied refugee minors.”
AfD campaign 2017 campaign poster: “New Germans? We’ll make our own / Be proud of yourself, Germany!”
These struggle to remove Paragraph 219a from the German constitution represents the first renewal for the abortion rights since reunification. Hundreds of thousands signed petitions to defend Dr. Hänel, and dozens of demos helped to pressure the Social Democrats, who have not pursued removal while in coalition with the CDU. As the centrist coalition breaks apart, and polarization continues, we can expect this struggle to sharpen.
The fight to remove paragraph 219a is a demand for bodily autonomy and self-determination that puts women in direct confrontation with the state to control our own bodies. The same logic of bodily autonomy and self-determination is present in every fight for the right to wear the hijab, to flee unsafe conditions, to demand higher pay, and an end to sexualized violence.
While we have seen the meteoric rise of the far-right over the past three years and an increase in fascist violence, we have also seen- along with the rest of the world- a rise in women’s organizing and struggle. Women*-led struggles have the potential to challenge both far-right and liberal forms of femonationalism and become sites of native-born and immigrant solidarity. To do so, the growing movement must consciously build anti-racist and anti-imperialist feminism. This means building a left that imagines the working class, not as a white man in a hard hat but the non-white, immigrant woman cleaning hotel rooms or the Muslim teacher barred from the classroom. This is the lesson for Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of Die LINKE, who has fixated on winning back AfD voters by dropping language anti-racism or anti-sexism, instead putting forward economistic demands and immigration caps. This is strategy will fail.
While Germany calls itself “Kein Einwanderungsland” (a non-immigrant country), it relies on immigrant labor. Over 10 million people, or 13% of the population, are immigrants. One out of every five Germans has an immigrant background. And because Germany faces a major labor shortage in areas such as construction, administration, transportation, technology, and care work- a labor shortage that is projected to grow over the next ten years, we can only expect this percentage to grow. A large section of this workforce is immigrant women, shuttled into low-paid care work which has suffered the brunt of neoliberalism. This is where we have seen recent strikes for higher hospital staffing in 2015 and 2017; daycare workers striking for higher pay in 2018, and recent dispute of cleaning staff fighting for a winter bonus.
The new feminist movement is also intertwined with growing consciousness about racism and discrimination. We see glimpses of this in the recent #MeToo movement, which moved from sexual harassment to racism. Using the hashtag #MeTwo (Two in reference to two cultures) Germans of immigrant descent cataloged their experiences of everyday racism in a country that defined citizenship based on blood until 2000. German-ness remains linked with whiteness and Christianity. Brown-skin or non-white features signify foreignness, even for third-generation Turkish, Vietnamese, or Angolans, while segregated schools, higher education, and jobs maintain this distinction. An example of this duality is German-Turkish football star Mesut Özil, who quit the German National team this summer out of disgust with racism, declaring: “When we win, I am German. When we lose, I am an immigrant.”
From #MeToo to #MeTwo
This is our task: to build an anti-capitalist, antiracist and anti-colonial feminist movement that organizes Germany’s growing immigrant class. This weekend, over 300 women* are meeting in Göttingen to plan the German version of the International Women’s Strike for March 8, 2019. Although political questions and fights remain, the strike form- which is inherently anti-capitalist- demonstrates the potential for feminism to break with liberal forms of femonationalism by making visible the classed experience of women – women who are not passive, and not in need of saving, but who are saving themselves.
Demonstrators oppose Trump’s family separation policy.
The question of immigration is the question of our times. Over 65 million people fled their homes in 2017, due to war, gang violence, political repression, environmental catastrophe, or economic difficulty, and that number will rise. Many of these reasons are caused or exacerbated by the powerful countries of the world, towards which millions are fleeing. Capital and powerful militaries respect no borders. Whether it is the United States support of the coup in Honduras, which brought the military to power and destabilized the country; the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; Germany and US arms sales to Saudi Arabia, used to push Yemen to the brink of starvation, or Russia and Iran’s support dictator Bashar Al-Assad in Syria: the human consequences are horrific. Regardless of drone surveillance, border walls, sensors, dogs, oceans, deserts, arrests, and deportations: people will always emigrate.
The question, then, is simple: do we stand in support of people fleeing their homes, or not?
The consequences of not standing with immigrants are visible in the drowned bodies fished out of the Mediterranean Sea, the perished in the Sonoran Desert, those trapped on Manus Island, the wails of children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
And while anti-immigrant discourse takes different shapes in Europe and in the US, the arguments end up the same: immigrants and refugees take jobs, take social resources, do not integrate, are criminals.
These arguments have all been debunked over and over by experts: immigration is the sign of a healthy economy, and immigrants are more likely to set up small businesses that contribute to the economy. In Germany, immigration is necessary as the native population’s birth rate falls below replacement level; in the US undocumented immigrants pay taxes but cannot receive benefits. Yes, refugees require social services to begin with, including help with language, housing, and the job search, but this is offset by those who stay and contribute longer-term. It’s the same reason Germany has offered the free university to national students and international students: a study found that 50% of international students stay in Germany, working and paying taxes. Finally, immigrants and refugees are less likely to commit crimes than native-born populations.
But the logic of the anti-immigrant arguments is what is most disturbing: that we would draw a circle around a certain group of people and say “these people are not deserving.” At base, it is an anti-human argument, one that sees “the Other” as non-human.
“Those are not our children on the border” is used to justify acts of cruelty. But this cruelty does not come out of nowhere: twenty years of scapegoating of immigrants and militarizing the border has created the infrastructure for today’s family separation and detention. Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement- today’s Gestapo- was only formed in 2002 with bipartisan support. George W. Bush passed the “Secure Fence Act” which built 700 miles of the border wall, which Senators Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton voted for. Bush’s administration implemented mass deportation trials in “Operation Streamline.” Later, Obama would win the distinction of most deportations under a sitting president, and whose policy of family detention led to his administration being sued for imprisoning families. These family detention centers are now expanded by Trump, who has also expanded ICE raids to terrorize immigrant communities.
There are kernels of the ‘undeserving’ argument in neoliberal austerity, whose cuts in all sectors, education, health, housing, childcare, transportation, have had a disastrous effect on our lives. In the United States, people are dying younger, infant and maternal mortality rates are rising. Suicide rates are up. Childcare eats away at 20-30% of income, the average student debt is $25,000. For too long, neoliberal logic has drilled into our heads that the working class is undeserving of social benefits, offering us only the gospel of positive thinking. On the other side of the coin, centrists and the right-wing scapegoat “the Other” to justify government cuts, working to appease Capital.
Where does the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ end? If immigrants are not ‘deserving,’ what about disabled individuals? Single mothers? Those addicted to drugs? Thos who cannot work? Those without homes? Those in prison? Students laden with debt? Our right to life should not be based on our ability to labor.
Jeff Session’s argument that domestic violence cannot be used to claim asylum in US tells us that immigrant women are not deserving of a life free from violence. It is easy for the same logic to justify cuts in social spending for domestic violence shelters in the United States. The logic of austerity and racism work together.
Decades of this have done their job: Reagan’s ‘welfare queens,’ Clinton’s ‘super-predators,’ Trump’s ‘Mexicans are all rapists and drug-dealers,’ Beatrix von Storch’s “immigrants are criminals” have been used to justify cuts in welfare, increase criminalization, and militarize the border. The white population is soothed by thoughts of superiority while Capital pockets the difference.
German fascism saw this to its logical conclusion, encoding the socially-fit ‘Aryan’ population as deserving and worthy, while Jews, the disabled, Communists, Roma, gays, and the ‘socially unfit’ were deemed undeserving of citizenship, property, the right to vote, and later, the right to life.
Socialism’s answer is that all people, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion, skin color, or ability, are deserving of life. As part of the fight against neoliberalism, we must insist that we are deserving, and so are our neighbors- regardless of their nationality. We must break down the borders between countries, and we must break down the borders between ourselves and “the Other.” Our humanity urgently depends on it.
La Luchona 