For months, tens of thousands of mostly Venezuelan migrants have poured into Chicago, and the Democratic city rulers are tearing their hair out over what to do about it. Initially, they dumped the migrants on sidewalks or threw them into police stations, “welcoming” them with curfews and police abuse. Then, as costs piled up, Mayor Brandon Johnson changed tack and proposed to house the migrants in the decrepit buildings of the ghettos and barrios. That provoked an anti-migrant backlash led by city aldermen, who denounced the mayor for taking resources away from black people and Latinos.

This reactionary cycle keeps repeating itself, as every one of Johnson’s “solutions” to the crisis has fueled divisions between working people and migrants while doing nothing to address the problem. When he tried to set up tent cities, the first one, slated for the Latino/Asian Brighton Park neighborhood, was met by a reactionary mobilization, and Governor J.B. Pritzker pulled the plug when the construction site was found to be toxic. Johnson has stashed migrants in dangerous warehouses and in hotels, again sparking anti-migrant protest. He’s fining bus companies for bringing in migrants and time-limiting shelter stays. To get the city off the hook and the story off the front page, he initially sought to expedite work permits only for recent arrivals, breeding resentment among the large immigrant population without papers that has lived in the city for decades.

Righteous anger with Johnson—who has screwed working people and betrayed all of his campaign promises—is being channeled by his opponents on the city council into an anti-migrant campaign that solves nothing. It’s easy for them to present migrants as competitors for limited jobs, housing and education given the forcible segregation of black people at the bottom of society and the Latino population’s precarious position in the economy. The black aldermen opposing Johnson recently “discovered” the black homeless and falsely counterpose housing them to housing the migrants.

But these charlatans won’t do anything about black homelessness. Like Johnson, they approach every question from the standpoint that the property and power of the ruling class are to be preserved above all else. Racial segregation is a crucial prop for the bosses and drives black homelessness. Affordable, quality, integrated housing will only ever be achieved through a direct clash with fundamental capitalist interests—the very interests that Johnson and the aldermen each uphold in their own way.

Both Johnson’s liberal schemes and the aldermen’s demagogic attacks against migrants pit black people against migrants in the same way the bosses and their politicians pit white workers, Latinos and migrants against black people. These racial divisions undermine united struggle against the common enemy and drag down living standards and wages for all. The disagreements between Johnson and his city council opponents amount to tactical differences over how to best manage the crisis for the ruling class and dupe their constituencies. These politicians all represent the LaSalle Street bankers and bosses, who want working people and migrants at one another’s throats to keep profits rolling in while the city goes to hell.

To advance their interests, workers must reject the reactionary polarization pushed by both sides in the bosses’ Democratic Party and wage a class-independent campaign to defend the migrants, combat racial segregation and fight for jobs and housing for all! Only then will it be possible to break the isolation of the migrants and raise the living standards of the entire working class. The unions must fight now to let the migrants stay and house them and the homeless in the vacant office buildings and apartments in the Loop and the Gold Coast! This would undercut the hostility toward the migrants in black and Latino neighborhoods and actually do something about homelessness.

The liberals will use every excuse to not house migrants and the homeless in commercial and luxury properties. They’ll say that it’s too expensive to convert offices into housing. So what? Get the building trades to convert the space! There aren’t enough skilled tradesmen? Hire more and spread the work around—there’s plenty of unemployed and migrants who need jobs! They’ll say there’s no room for more migrants. House them in Pritzker’s mansion! The unions should organize the migrants, fight to seize these properties and move the migrants and the homeless in. A fight for what’s so obviously needed would also quickly expose Johnson and other liberals, who defend the migrants only insofar as they can be exploited as pawns against labor.

The current polarization serves no one but the bosses. On the one side, economic anxiety is manipulated to whip up anti-migrant hysteria. On the other, the liberals reinforce reaction by pushing “solutions” that are limited to what is acceptable to the bosses, while blaming the victims of their bankrupt half measures. Both sides present the crisis as flowing from whether or not the population cares too much or too little about the migrants, and each is lined up behind a wing of the ruling class that is actually to blame for everyone’s misery.

In reality, the migrant crisis is caused by U.S. imperialism’s domination and dispossession of the neocolonial world. It is only by fighting the common enemy of the migrants, working people and the neocolonial masses—the U.S. imperialist ruling class—that any progress can be made toward ending the special oppression of migrants, black people and Latinos and improving the living standards of the working class as a whole. And that requires struggling independently of, and against, liberal politicians like Johnson as well as his opponents on the city council.

The Migrant Crisis: Made in the USA

Some 35,000 migrants have come to Chicago since August 2022, most from Venezuela. For the “crime” of nationalizing their oil, the U.S. imperialists have targeted successive Venezuelan governments for destruction and are strangling the country with sanctions. But Venezuelans aren’t the only victims of U.S. imperialism in Chicago. The city is a third Latino—mostly Mexican-Americans whose families fled U.S. imperialist devastation of Mexico.

Over the past year or so, 30,000 Ukrainians fleeing the U.S.-provoked war with Russia have settled in the city. These asylum seekers have been received very differently than those from Latin America; they were largely granted legal status and work permits from the outset. As the U.S. ruling class, in defense of its strategic interests in East Europe, pushes Ukraine to fight to the last drop of Ukrainian blood, it figures that this minimal gesture will help further its designs. For their part, the trade-union bureaucrats cheer on campaigns against Venezuela, pledge support to the reactionary war in Ukraine and call for a vote to the Democratic politicians enabling genocide in Palestine. This activity reinforces divisions among U.S. working people here and between U.S. workers and the neocolonial masses, aiding the bosses in dividing and conquering both.

An anti-imperialist strategy is the only way to unite U.S. workers, migrants and the neocolonial masses and advance their shared interests against the common enemy. At every turn, the aim must be to weaken the U.S. imperialist ruling class that oppresses all of them. Inside the U.S., it is possible and necessary to strike concrete blows against the imperialist masters—whether through working-class action against U.S. military operations and economic sanctions or class battles to win more of what workers need and to push back against the oppression of migrants and black people. But to pursue this course will require a fundamental break from the existing liberal union leadership and the Democratic politicians.

Break with Brandon!

Instead, so-called socialists line up behind Johnson. The six DSA aldermen on the city council form the backbone of Johnson’s “progressive” coalition. Plenty in the DSA are no doubt appalled by Johnson’s response to the migrant crisis, but their whole activity is defined by maintaining unity with these “socialist” aldermen. That includes the likes of the 20th ward’s Jeanette Taylor, who openly opposes letting more migrants in. In September, she declared: “We need to say we can’t take no more, why won’t nobody say that out of their mouth, out of this administration? We can’t keep taking buses.”

Chicago DSA is doing real damage to the name of socialism—and hindering the migrant movement—by aligning itself with these aldermen and the mayor. This was graphically illustrated with the defeat last month of the Johnson coalition’s Bring Chicago Home (BCH) referendum to raise real-estate taxes on high-end property sales to fund homeless services. The opponents of this supportable demand were able to get BCH evicted at the ballot box by playing up the connection to the hated Johnson.

While BCH would have made only the slightest dent in redressing homelessness and making housing affordable, it still provoked a strong backlash from the real-estate barons, with Democrats like Paul Vallas spearheading the opposition. This underscores that homelessness and the migrant crisis can be tackled only through confrontation with entrenched capitalist interests and that doing so in alliance with Democrats, who uphold those interests, is futile. Revolutionaries in DSA must fight to effect an immediate break with the Democratic Party in order to defend the homeless and the migrants!

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) are outside the Democratic Party, but nevertheless tie workers to liberal Democrats like Johnson. The Stalinist FRSO helped put Johnson in office and leads coalitions like the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression, whose statements hail his election as “unprecedented for our movement.” While they recognize that “we must unite all who can be united against the monopoly capitalists of the U.S. and turn our movements into a tide that will sweep them away,” their actions are utterly antithetical to waging such a fight. That requires working-class struggle in the U.S. against the imperialists and their front men like Johnson! You can’t strike a blow against imperialism while pushing pro-imperialist politicians!

PSL sometimes sounds more radical by comparison, declaring: “This system is attempting to pit poor and working people in the Black and Latino community against each other, unnecessarily fighting over the crumbs of capitalism.” In response, they propose “a united working-class movement” on the national level to “challenge the power of the capitalists’ utter lack of compassion and humanity and win a just resolution for all of us.” Presenting the problem as an “utter lack of compassion” is entirely consistent with the liberals, who in the name of caring for one oppressed sector of the population blame another. But black people, the longstanding Latino population and workers are getting screwed, too. Simply appealing for solidarity with migrants without concretely addressing the concerns of others on the bottom can only further inflame racial and ethnic divisions. Rather than conciliate liberalism, it must be combated to cohere the united working-class mass movement that is so desperately needed to resolve the migrant crisis in a progressive manner. Socialists must aim to mobilize the working class not to make Johnson fight, but to fight against Johnson.

Other declared socialists align themselves with Johnson by backing his main boosters in the trade-union bureaucracy, such as the Chicago Teachers Union’s Stacy Davis Gates. But it’s not just the “progressives” who march behind Johnson. Plenty of the construction union bureaucrats who supported his opponent last year salivated over the prospect of getting to erect tent cities for Johnson. What unites the “progressives” and the “business unionists” is their loyalty to U.S. imperialist domination and their utter refusal to challenge the capitalists’ divide-and-rule. They’re not organizing migrants into the unions or fighting for housing for all because they do not want to cross their supposed “allies” in the ruling class. The pro-imperialist bureaucrats of all stripes stand in the way of uniting the workers movement and waging the necessary battles against the bosses and must be shown the door.

For Black Liberation and Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Cutting through the false polarization between Johnson and his opponents requires fighting for black liberation because the degradation of black people in this society is used by the ruling class to degrade the entire working class, migrants included. Johnson talked a big game about defending black people on the campaign trail, but his election is one more example of how you can’t begin to address any of the conditions of black oppression by supporting politicians who base themselves on the source of that oppression, capitalist rule. The working class, to advance its material interests and emancipate itself from wage slavery, must fight to fully integrate black people into American society, while black people, to achieve their freedom, must join forces with the proletariat.

Let’s start the fight now! In addition to mobilizing to demand the immediate housing of the homeless and migrants in the Loop and the Gold Coast, union militants should fight for a union-run, massive public works program to build low-cost, quality, integrated housing and state-of-the-art, integrated public schools. Combined with a fight for a shorter workweek with no pay cut and union-run job training, this would create high-paying union jobs and undercut the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes by striking at the heart of black oppression.

In yet another case of dog-eat-dog, some Latino aldermen have demanded that Mexican migrants be given work permits instead of Venezuelans or Ukrainians. In the face of this competition and all the other anti-migrant attacks, what is posed is a fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and for union control of hiring to make sure nobody is forced to work under the table. By fighting for these demands, it will become completely clear whose side both Johnson and his city council opponents are actually on.