ON MONDAY night, US President Donald Trump announced via a tweet that he would stop all applications from foreign nationals seeking permanent residence in the US.
On Tuesday, Trump followed up his promise to ban applications for a ‘green card’ stating that this would ‘protect American jobs’, saying that with over 20 million Americans thrown out of work because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government had a ‘solemn duty’ to ensure they regain their jobs.
Trump said: ‘It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labour flown in from abroad.’
In fact, most visa services have already been suspended because of coronavirus. Trump is increasingly desperate to put the blame for the mass unemployment, and the huge death toll, on anyone but the US ruling class.
So far, Trump has blamed China for causing the pandemic, the World Health Organisation for being a tool of the Chinese government and now migrants are portrayed as the enemy of American workers, not only depriving them of jobs but of using up scarce medical resources.
While Trump was placing the blame on migrant workers, the US shale oil industry collapsed.
For the first time in history, the price of a barrel of US oil fell as low as minus $40.32 a barrel on Monday – oil companies were paying buyers to take oil as their capacity to store it ran out.
It made a brief recovery after Trump vowed to take action to stop the US shale drilling industry from going bankrupt only to fall again to minus $6.70.
This followed the realisation that it is not just the US oil industry that is in meltdown but the world oil market is being dragged down with it.
The price of the benchmark Brent crude dropped by 30% to less than $20 a barrel.
Oil is one of the main indicators of the depth of the crisis that is tearing capitalism apart. The international trade in oil closely follows the way in which the financial markets operate with massive speculation on ‘futures’ with trillions of dollars being bet on the increasing price of oil.
All this money spent in speculation is accumulated through debt. In fact the entire US shale drilling industry, which Trump boasted would make America self sufficient and ‘great’, was based on massive debt. Now that oil demand has slumped, all this accumulated debt will bankrupt the giant oil companies and entire countries.
What is clear is that capitalism cannot escape from its crisis by printing worthless paper money and running up eye watering amounts of debt.
In fact this attempt by capitalism to print its way out of the crisis that erupted with the banking crash of 2008, has only inflated the debt bubble that the coronavirus pandemic has brutally punctured.
With no way out of the crisis, the ruling class has no alternative but to fight it out to the bitter end against both its rivals and against its own working class.
Trump, in seeking to place the blame on migrant workers, is not just trying to divert attention away from the criminal responsibility of capitalism in undermining and destroying public health systems leaving them totally unprepared for a pandemic.
Trump and the ruling class are also seeking to lay the ground for using racism to split the working class in preparation for a civil war against the working class.
Capitalism internationally is in its death agony but it will not leave the scene of history peacefully. It will wage war to try and make the working class pay for its crisis.
The enemy of workers in the US and throughout the world is not migrant workers or the Chinese government but a bankrupt and collapsing capitalist system that deserves to be put out of its misery through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Marx concluded that the working class is the grave digger of capitalism. It began the job in October 1917. Its conclusion is fast approaching!
