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IG contingent in February 19 march to defend immigrant workers fighting for their rights in Brooklyn. (Internationalist photo)

On May 1, 2006 vast numbers of immigrants marched in the streets of cities and towns across the United States protesting immigration bills that would label them criminals, militarize the U.S.-Mexico border and set the stage for mass deportations. In many cities, including Los Angeles, they were the biggest demonstrations in history. U.S. rulers were shaken as they saw millions of people who toiled for years in the shadows show the courage and determination to fight for their rights.

Last year’s immigrant-bashing bill, H.R. 4437, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, died in Congress. But now its key components are back, in immigration “reform” proposals by Republican president George Bush and the Democratic Party majority in Congress. Meanwhile, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cops of the Homeland Security Department have unleashed nationwide raids, going after immigrant workers in particular, as “Minuteman” fascist vigilantes hunt immigrants on the border and stage anti-immigrant provocations across the U.S.

On this May Day 2007, we call on the workers movement to come out in defense of immigrants, not just in words, but in militant labor action. Today, union bureaucrats and liberal Democrats will make pro-immigrant noises from the platforms, but their vague calls for “legalization” won’t obtain legal rights and union conditions for more than 13 million undocumented workers. They say “stop the raids and deportations.” But how? By lobbying Congress? Forget it. The only way to stop the wave of anti-immigrant repression is to mobilize labor’s power against the ICE Gestapo.   

The Internationalist Group says: Labor must demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants, documented or undocumented . When the migra tries to stage its raids in a union town like New York, thousands of workers should pour into the streets to block the immigrant catchers. For labor action to put a stop to Minuteman provocations! ¡La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras – Workers’ struggle has no borders!

The fight for immigrants’ rights is a political battle and it must be waged politically, but with working-class politics. Take the issue of the war. We have repeated in headlines and signs, “War on Iraq, Immigrants Under Attack.” The migra raids are the home front of this imperialist war. Immigrants have been labeled the “enemy within” and treated as “potential terrorists.” Many immigrants rights coalitions respond by calling on demonstrators to wave the American flag and emphasizing the more than more than 40,000 non-citizens who have volunteered for the army in the hopes of gaining citizenship – if they don’t end up dead, like José Antonio Gutiérrez, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemalan who was one of the first U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq.

Flag-waving will get immigrants nowhere. For the masters of the Pentagon, the soldiers are just “cannon fodder” to feed their war machine. We say it is necessary not only to oppose but to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war on immigrants and working people at home, and to defend those under attack, from Iraq to the U.S. But you won’t hear that from the speakers platforms today, because as in all the “antiwar” marches, the organizers are looking to the Democrats – who are just as much a war party as the Republicans.

The Democrats are also enemies of immigrants and workers. Both the Bush initiative and the STRIVE Act (H.R. 1645) co-sponsored by  liberal Democratic representative Luis Gutiérrez and conservative Republican Jeff Flake call for a “guest worker” program that amounts to virtual slavery, chaining immigrant workers to an employer and subjecting them to deportation if they dare to leave. This is indentured servitude just like back in colonial days. Such “guest” workers will have no effective legal rights, and they will be used to drive down wages for all workers. 

While right-wing Republicans and open racists fulminate against “amnesty,” the Democrats talk about a “path to citizenship.” But their “path” leads to a dead end. The STRIVE Act calls for immigrants to pay a $2,000 fine as well as back taxes, to leave the country within 90 days and apply for a non-immigrant visa. After a six-year waiting period they could apply for citizenship, which at the current rate would take another five to eight years. Who wants that?

The Democrats as well as Republicans are pushing for militarization of the border. The STRIVE Act would increase the Border Patrol to 24,000 agents, six times the size it was when Democrat Bill Clinton took office in 1993. It would open 20 new “detention facilities” with space to hold 20,000 more immigrants. Meanwhile, crossing the border without papers would be made a crime subject to up to five years in prison. The Gutiérrez-Flake STRIVE Act, H.R. 1645, like Bush’s proposals, is an immigration law in the interest of the giant corporations and cockroach capitalists who want to rake superprofits off low-wage workers without rights.

Last year, the various immigrant rights and Latino political groups supported the so-called Kennedy-McCain bill, even though that, too, provided for beefing up military controls, “guest workers,” and the rest. This year there are differences over how to deal with the Democrats and their latest immigration “reform” bill. This has reached the point that in Los Angeles there are two different marches today, with the reputedly more “militant” March 25 Coalition marching in the morning and the “moderate” Multi-ethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network in the afternoon.

The differences are at most tactical. While the March 25 Coalition and its national counterpart, the “National May 1st Movement for Worker and Immigrant Rights,” oppose the Gutiérrez-Flake bill and call for a “boycott,” the “moderate” labor, community and church groups consider H.R. 1645 “promising” and oppose a walkout. But they will all have their Democrats on the platform. The more militant talkers will have former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney in Los Angeles, the “moderates” will have party chairman Howard Dean in Miami.

Similar differences have arisen in the labor movement, where John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO opposes the “guest worker” provisions of the bi-partisan immigration bill, while the “Change to Win” split-off led by Andrew Stern of the SEIU (service employees) along with UNITE-HERE (garment, hotel and restaurant workers) and the UFW (farm workers) want to work with their Democratic Party pals to support “guest workers,” presumably to get some kind of rake-off. The bourgeois immigrant rights groups and pro-capitalist union tops are all in the Democrats’ orbit.

So, too, are the self-proclaimed socialists who specialize in “coalition-building” with these misleaders. Whether they are petrified Stalinists, like the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA), which openly calls to vote for Democrats, or the Mao-Stalinists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and its liberal campaigns (World Can’t Wait); Stalinoids like the Workers World Party (WWP), Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and their various antiwar groups; or social democrats like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the No Human Being Is Illegal coalition, they all play the same game. Appealing to Democratic Party liberals, these reformists tailor their programs to what their bourgeois would-be “partners” will go for.

Last year they were all talking “amnesty.” The Internationalist Group, which has campaigned for years to demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants, objected that undocumented workers have committed no crime for which they need to beg forgiveness. As the immigrant marches dried up during the mid-term election campaign, and many activists switched to electing Democrats, the reformist pseudo-socialists allowed themselves a little “left” cover by talking of “full legalization,” whatever that means. But now that they are all trying to pressure the newly Democratic Congress, their empty rhetoric is back to “amnesty,” “equality,” “human rights,” etc. All these calls are purposefully vague so that they won’t embarrass liberal “allies.”

We have emphasized that the struggle for immigrants’ rights, while formally a democratic right, is at bottom a class question. Genuine defenders of the overwhelmingly working-class immigrant population have fundamentally counterposed interests to those of the capitalists and their parties. Ruling class politicians – Democrat and Republican alike – seek an immigration “reform” that “legalizes” the inferior status and lack of rights of millions of proletarians, the better to exploit them and keep their wage slaves divided. We demand full citizenship for everyone who works and lives in this country to lay the basis for a common struggle against the bourgeoisie.

Several hundred workers from Smithfield Packing Co., including many Latinos, walked out on January 15 to join Martin Luther King Day march. Immigrants must take up struggle for black rights in U.S.
(Photo: Marc Hall/Fayetteville Observer)

In order to unite the exploited and oppressed, it is vital that immigrant workers understand the centrality of black oppression in the United States, which was founded on chattel slavery. Black working people, in turn, must see the need to fight for full democratic and labor rights for immigrants, and to reject the boss propaganda about “stealing American jobs.” It was particularly important that on January 15, hundreds of Latino immigrants joined with black workers at the Smithfield Packing Co. plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina to march on Martin Luther King Day. Last fall when dozens of immigrant workers were fired over their immigration status, 1,000 workers walked out together and shut the plant down (see article).

The fight for immigrants’ rights faces a fundamental choice between the path of class collaboration and that of class struggle. Without the labor of undocumented immigrants, whole industries would grind to a halt, including construction, meatpacking, garment and service workers.

Working people as a whole, and particularly the oppressed black, immigrant and poor people must break with the partner parties of American capitalism. We need to build a workers party on a revolutionary, internationalist program against the twin parties of American capitalism. The cause of immigrant workers, because they confront the limits of the national state, has an enormous revolutionary potential. May Day, the international workers day, was born in the United States but for decades it was not celebrated here, due to the joint efforts of the capitalist bosses and their labor lieutenants to banish the specter of workers revolution. In 2006, the huge immigrant marches brought back May Day. Now we must restore its revolutionary content.

While capitalist immigration laws are inherently racist and exclusionary, the French Revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune of 1871,  and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, granted all foreign-born workers immediate citizenship rights. This is the revolutionary heritage that class-conscious working people must take up today.   n