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	Workers Vanguard No. 869	28 April 2006

Democrats, Republicans Wage War on Immigrants

For a Class-Struggle Fight to Defend Immigrant Rights!

Beginning in March, massive demonstrations totaling millions of mostly Latino participants have put front and center the fight for immigrant rights in the U.S. On April 9 and 10, some two million turned out to protest HR 4437, a bill sponsored by Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner and passed by the House of Representatives in December that would build a 700-mile wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and turn all “illegal” immigrants, as well as those who provide them assistance, into felons. Demonstrating the growing weight of immigrant workers in the economy, a number of meatpacking plants shut down production as workers flooded into the protests. Some 600 members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2 walked off the production line at the Excel meatpacking plant in Dodge City, Kansas, refusing to work if the company carried through with threats to discipline workers who attended the local rally. The company backed down.

Nationally, hundreds of immigrants have been fired from their jobs for missing work to attend demonstrations, while high school students have been met with police-state repression for walking out in support of immigrant rights (see accompanying article). With further protests scheduled for May 1, including plans to boycott jobs and schools, the government has stepped up deportations in a clear attempt at intimidation. On April 19, nearly 1,200 undocumented immigrants employed by the IFCO pallet supply company were rounded up in 26 states by the Department of Homeland Security, which has already deported 275 of the workers to Mexico. Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff is threatening further crackdowns. The Bush administration had earlier sent agents disguised as OSHA safety inspectors to work sites searching for undocumented immigrants. It is crucially important that the labor movement use its social power in defense of immigrant workers and demand: No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

In a marked change from the past, the outpouring of millions of immigrant protesters, despite their vulnerability to government victimization and in the face of a virulent racist backlash, shows that they are not afraid to stand up for their rights. But the protest leaders—mainly liberal immigrant rights groups, Democratic Party politicians and the Catholic church, along with some trade-union bureaucrats—have channeled anger at HR 4437 into support for alternative legislation that would also augment anti-immigrant repression. The liberals are mainly pushing a version of a bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 27 that is based on bipartisan legislation proposed by Ted Kennedy and John McCain.

The bill would double the number of border patrol agents, add 5,000 immigration cops to hunt “illegals” in interior states, create a high-tech “virtual fence” along the Mexican border with new checkpoints and barriers, and authorize police forces to act as immigration agents. It would require Homeland Security to build 20 detention centers capable of holding 10,000 detainees—i.e., concentration camps—and expand its authority to deport alleged terrorists while adding new criminal penalties for evading immigration cops and criminalizing any aid to undocumented immigrants that the government deems is not “purely humanitarian.” A cornerstone of the bill is a “guest worker” program under which hundreds of thousands of immigrants would be assigned to particular employers. This attempt at indentured servitude harks back to the notorious bracero program of 1942-64 under which “temporary” Mexican workers, denied elementary rights, were brought in to slave for agribusiness.

Kennedy stresses that the Senate bill “does not provide undocumented immigrants with amnesty.” Indeed, its much-vaunted “path to citizenship” would be open only to those who pay a $2,000 penalty as well as back taxes, pass a medical exam and learn English. Ineligible would be anyone ever convicted of offenses as minor as shoplifting or “public nuisance” or deemed to have acted adversely to U.S. foreign policy. In the latest version proposed on April 6, only those who could prove they have lived in the U.S. for five years would be eligible. Those here two to five years would have to leave the country, go to a border station and apply to be readmitted. Those with no proof that they have lived here that long, which includes at least a million people, would be subject to deportation outright.

The Spartacist League/U.S. has intervened into the protests with the call for full citizenship rights for all who have made it into the country. We oppose racist anti-immigrant repression and call on the labor movement to fight deportations through class-struggle means and to organize immigrant workers into the unions with full rights and protections. This requires combating the politics of the labor misleaders, who are opposed to a program of class struggle and look to the capitalist state to defend the rights of working people and immigrants.

Bipartisan War on Immigrants

The precarious situation of immigrants has dramatically worsened as a result of the bipartisan “war on terror.” Stopping “terrorists” from entering the U.S. is one of the pretexts for further militarizing the border. While the U.S. occupiers of Iraq and Afghanistan terrorize those societies, at home immigrants of Arab or Islamic background are portrayed as “internal enemies.” Imperialist war abroad is often accompanied by attacks on immigrants and naturalized citizens originally from the “enemy” countries, as evidenced by the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II by the Democratic Roosevelt administration. We call for the unconditional withdrawal of the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan now and for class struggle at home against the capitalist rulers carrying out these imperialist depredations. The working class must fight tooth and nail against anti-immigrant chauvinism and in defense of civil liberties, which are being shredded under the pretext of the “war on terror.”

One of the main slogans of the April 10 demonstrations was: “Today we march, tomorrow we vote”—a clear attempt to steer anger at Republican-led efforts to further criminalize immigrants toward the Democratic Party. But it was Bill Clinton’s 1996 immigration “reform” that allowed the deportation of even longtime permanent residents for trivial offenses, and his “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” enacted the same year, in addition to vastly expanding the use of the racist death penalty, set up immigrants for prosecution in special courts on charges and “evidence” kept secret even from their lawyers. The militarization of San Diego and other border areas was vastly expanded under Clinton’s “Operation Gatekeeper,” resulting each year in the deaths of hundreds of immigrants trying to cross over in remote desert areas. And the NAFTA agreement that went into effect in 1994, which we called the U.S. “free trade” rape of Mexico, further impoverished millions of Mexican peasants and drove them off their land, spurring on the last decade’s huge increase in immigration.

The current wrangling over immigration “reform” is entirely in the framework of capitalist interests. Representatives of the ruling class are divided on this question. On the one hand are right-wing antiimmigrant ideologues, including those Republicans who hope to ride anti-immigrant chauvinism into the November Congressional elections. On the other hand, there is a wide swath, ranging from the Bush White House and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to most of the Democratic Party, that speaks for those capitalists who depend on the labor of immigrant workers and is pushing various versions of “guest worker” programs.

In today’s economic conditions, to deport the estimated eleven million “illegals” would wreak havoc. But when the economic and/or political needs and interests of the U.S. ruling class change in this regard, the spigot of immigration can be slowed to a trickle and substantially reversed. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, federal, state and local governments (especially in California) effected the repatriation of almost half a million Mexican immigrants, some of whom were U.S. citizens.

State legislatures have recently been stripping immigrants of the ability to obtain basic benefits, while many state and local police agencies are being trained to pursue “illegals,” as captured in a New York Times (14 April) article headlined, “Path to Deportation Can Start With a Traffic Stop.” A new federal law requires a passport, birth certificate or other proof of citizenship in order to receive Medicaid benefits—a requirement that will be a barrier to health care not only for immigrants but also many of the elderly, black people, Native American Indians and the homeless.

By denying immigrants the most basic rights, the capitalists seek to keep them in fear and prevent them from challenging their brutal exploitation, the better to drive down the wages and working conditions of the entire working class. The working class, including its diminished unionized sections, has been under the gun for decades, with the capitalists taking the ax to industrial jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits. A class-struggle fight for immigrant rights would not only defend vulnerable immigrant workers but help to revitalize the entire labor movement by bringing in thousands of workers with experience of militant struggle in their countries of origin.

But the labor bureaucracy accepts and defends the capitalist profit system, and therefore offers to “defend” U.S. workers through protectionism and other forms of “America First” chauvinism. Anna Burger, chair of the Change to Win union federation that split from the AFL-CIO last year, grotesquely lauds the proposed Senate Judiciary Committee’s “reform” as a “historic step” that “will improve our national security by strengthening our borders with more personnel and more advanced technology to prevent illegal immigration.” The Teamsters bureaucracy, another component of Change to Win, is notorious for its chauvinist campaign against Mexican truckers using U.S. highways.

While the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney opposes “expanding” guest worker programs beyond those that currently exist for agricultural workers, it refuses to demand citizenship rights for immigrants or to condemn plans to further militarize the border. Its call for permanent residency is limited to those undocumented workers “who have paid taxes and made positive contributions to their communities.”

As the SL/U.S. and the Grupo Espartaquista de México declared in a joint statement printed in WV No. 867 (31 March) and distributed as a special supplement at demonstrations across the country:

“Instead of mobilizing union power in defense of immigrants, the union tops embrace one or another of the capitalists’ anti-immigrant ‘reforms,’ particularly favoring their so-called ‘friends’ in the capitalist Democratic Party. This policy of class collaboration, sacrificing labor’s interests on the altar of capitalist profitability, flows from the labor bureaucracy’s support for the capitalist system and its identification with the ‘national interests’ of U.S. imperialism. This program has led to defeat after defeat, leaving the U.S. labor movement weaker today than at any time since the early 1900s.”

The fight to defend immigrants and to defend the interests of the labor movement as a whole runs straight into the capitalist profit system. To undercut the bosses’ attempt to pit native-born against foreign-born workers, there should be a fight to create jobs for all through cutting the workweek at no loss in pay. Against “English-only” chauvinism and restrictions on access to schools and health care, we call for free, quality, integrated education and free medical care for all. What is urgently needed is the forging of a workers party to lead all the exploited and oppressed in the struggle for a workers government that will seize the productive wealth of this society from the profit-gorged capitalists and create a planned, socialized economy. The fight for international socialist revolution is the only road to the elimination of exploitation, racial oppression, impoverishment and the wars and occupations through which the imperialists seek to secure their domination of economically backward countries.

Break with the Democrats!

The reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), Workers World Party and Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have signed up as cheerleaders for what is being dubbed a “new civil rights movement.” The reformists disappear the central role played by capitalist politicians and the Catholic church in these protests. All these outfits editorialize against “guest worker” programs but refuse to raise the straightforward call for full citizenship rights. The ISO’s maximum demand is for “Amnesty Now,” while the SWP calls for “permanent residency now.” Both of these demands would keep immigrants in second-class status.

The April 10 demonstrations, which were heavily built by the AFL-CIO, featured a panoply of Democratic politicians. In New York City these included state Attorney General and candidate for governor Eliot Spitzer, who prosecuted the New York City transit unions for going on strike in December (see article, page 3). Under fire from chauvinist yahoos over the waving of Mexican and Central American flags at earlier protests, the April 10 organizers made sure that there would be incessant waving of the U.S. flag—the emblem of the bloodiest government on the planet. Immigrants should have no illusions that waving the American flag will offer them any protection against chauvinist reaction. The Minuteman vigilantes who have staged racist, anti-immigrant provocations along the Mexican border and throughout the U.S. have rallied their fascistic forces behind the same flag, along with the Confederate flag of slavery.

Prominent in the protests in Los Angeles—where on March 25 up to one million turned out in one of the largest demonstrations in the city’s history—have been Democratic mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, various Catholic priests and Maria Elena Durazo of the L.A. UNITE HERE garment and hotel/restaurant workers union, who is interim head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Durazo was the national director of the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, which served as an electoral vehicle for the Democrats in the 2004 elections.

Durazo’s mentor, and that of her late husband Miguel Contreras, who was also head of the county labor federation, was Cesar Chavez, the leader of the hard-fought battle to build the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chavez is to this day widely revered as a leader of Mexican migrant workers. In fact, Chavez was key in orchestrating the political alliance between the tops of predominately Latino/immigrant unions, the Catholic church and the Democratic Party. In 1974, as agribusiness was using contract labor and undocumented immigrants against the UFW, Chavez fingered the “illegal” farm workers to federal authorities.

Last May, the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops initiated a three-year “Justice for Immigrants” campaign. Anyone who believes in the benign role of the church—a force for all-sided social reaction—should look at its history of “organizing” workers. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), endorsed using Catholic labor groups as a means of undercutting the socialist Second International. One writer described this as the Vatican’s answer to The Communist Manifesto and Karl Marx’s Capital. It set the stage for decades of reactionary machinations in the working class.

In the U.S., where the Catholic church was historically a key nexus in the lives of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland and elsewhere, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) was formed in the late 1930s to undercut the growing influence of the Communist Party (CP) and other leftist tendencies in the labor movement. Following World War II, the ACTU played a key role in the purge of Communist unionists and other leftist militants, for example by helping to orchestrate the split of the International Union of Electrical Workers from the CP-influenced United Electrical Workers. In Australia, Europe and elsewhere, Catholic organizations fomented similar anti-Communist splits.

L.A.’s Cardinal Mahony has his own history as a union-buster, including against attempts to organize by immigrant church cemetery workers in the 1980s. Mahony served as the first chairman of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, a government agency that operates on behalf of agribusiness, and has often served the capitalist rulers of L.A. by helping to scuttle strikes. In 2000 he played a key role in discouraging an L.A. county workers strike, which could have gone a long way toward beating back attempts to close down all or parts of King/Drew Medical Center, which poor blacks and Latinos in the Watts area rely upon.

For United Class Struggle!

The poisonous divisions between native-born and immigrant workers that are fostered by the capitalist rulers are echoed by some black organizations and spokesmen who see in immigrants a threat to the precarious gains made by the specially oppressed black population. A black contractors association in South-Central L.A. recently advocated cracking down on immigrants as a way to provide more jobs for blacks. Najee Ali, a prominent L.A. black activist, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times (10 April) as saying in regard to the mammoth March 25 demonstration, “Once I saw the half million, I felt fear, in a sense, that (blacks) might be marginalized in the future when it comes to jobs and political empowerment.”

Black-Latino hostilities in L.A. have exploded recently into nasty fights between high school students and race riots in the prison hellholes, stoked by police authorities. These tensions, which are further inflamed by black and Latino nationalists, have particular usefulness to the rulers of Los Angeles, where key unions that have engaged in class struggle in recent years, such as transit and grocery workers, are predominately Latino and black. In 1994, the passage of California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187 was the precursor to the passage two years later of Proposition 209, which was designed to outlaw the token affirmative action programs that gave blacks and other minorities limited access to higher education, government jobs and contracts.

It is particularly important to combat anti-immigrant chauvinism in the working class and especially among black workers, while the immigrant-derived proletariat must understand that anti-black racism remains the touchstone of social reaction in this country. While newly arrived plebeian immigrants in their vast majority begin at the bottom of U.S. capitalist society, light-skinned immigrants have historically been able to advance up the economic ladder. The special oppression of black people is of a fundamentally different character, rooted in centuries of chattel slavery and subsequent segregation in this capitalist society.

Whipping up racial and ethnic hatred has long served the U.S. ruling class in furthering the exploitation of all workers. It is through united class struggle that the divisions between white and black workers, and between the native-born and immigrants, can be overcome. A model effort in this regard was the November 1982 labor/black mobilization in Washington, D.C., initiated by the Spartacist League, which stopped the race-terrorist KKK from staging an anti-immigrant march. As we note in the SL/U.S. Programmatic Statement:

“There will be no effective resistance to the immiseration of American working people without the unity in struggle between the trade unions and the black and Hispanic poor. Despite the destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, who have a significantly higher rate of trade-union membership than do white workers, continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the industrial proletariat, which alone has the power to shatter this racist, capitalist system.”

The key to unleashing that power is the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party, a U.S. section of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.