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	Workers Vanguard No. 920	12 September 2008

Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

595 Immigrant Workers Rounded Up in Mississippi

Drop All Charges! No Deportations!

Unions: Organize and Defend Immigrant Workers!

SEPTEMBER 8—On August 25, Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents raided a Howard Industries transformer plant in Laurel, Mississippi, detaining 595 workers, most of them from Mexico, for immigration violations. This was the biggest immigration raid on a single plant in U.S. history, surpassing the raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, in May, when nearly 400 workers were rounded up. Nearly 500 children, most of them under five years of age, had one or both parents arrested in Laurel. The head of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) declared: “People in the Latino community are afraid to go out of their homes. In many cases they are afraid to go to work” (Reuters, 26 August).

This latest mass arrest of immigrant workers, many of whom are reportedly union members, came as Local 1317 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) was engaged in contract negotiations with Howard Industries. As in Postville, where the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) had been trying to organize the Agriprocessors plant for at least two years, these raids show the union-busting that goes hand in hand with the government’s anti-immigrant onslaught.

As in the Postville raid, those rounded up at Howard face not only deportation but lengthy prison sentences. So far, eight have been charged with “identity theft.” In the Agriprocessors raid, hundreds of immigrants were sentenced to five-month prison sentences before deportation. Many of those arrested at Howard could also be charged under Mississippi’s draconian SB 2988 law, which makes working with false papers a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. This sinister escalation of anti-immigrant repression is a threat to the entire labor movement. An injury to one is an injury to all! Drop all charges! No deportations! Free the detainees now!

Most of those arrested in the Howard Industries raid were whisked out of the state and locked up in an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana. Jena is the city where tens of thousands marched last year against Jim Crow justice after six black youths faced a series of felony charges for defending themselves after months of intense racist harassment and threats of violence. The hellish conditions in such detention centers have been exposed in several New York Times articles that have noted the scores of immigrants who have died in the past few years while in custody. The most recent piece (13 August) concerned Hiu Lui Ng, a Chinese computer engineer and New York City resident who was arrested while applying for his green card. After months of being denied medical treatment for excruciating back pain, Ng died—five days after finally being diagnosed with terminal cancer and a broken spine.

The I.C.E. raid at Howard Industries comes amidst a growing wave of arrests and deportations. Over the past five years, the number of deportations has increased by 60 percent; last year more than 250,000 people were deported, many after being picked up for things as trivial as a routine traffic stop.

It is in the vital interest of the U.S. labor movement to mobilize in defense of immigrants, who form a key and vibrant component of the U.S. working class and a living bridge to the struggles of working people in Mexico and elsewhere. As in the so-called free-trade maquiladora factory zones in northern Mexico, Mexican and other foreign workers often work for—and struggle against—the same employer as U.S. workers. It is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to oppose such imperialist trade deals as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which we have always denounced as a “free trade” rape of Mexico. Our position has nothing in common with the U.S. labor bureaucracy’s poisonous, chauvinist tirades against such pacts, through which they paint foreign workers as the enemy of American workers.

The social power of the union movement must be mobilized to fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, no matter how they got here. We call on the unions to organize immigrant workers with full rights and protections. This is integral to revitalizing the labor movement and organizing the unorganized.

For a Class-Struggle Fight for Immigrant Rights!

Anti-immigrant hysteria has become particularly intense in the South and the Southwest, where a number of states have passed laws targeting undocumented immigrants in the workplace. During the 2007 Mississippi state elections, 500 Klansmen rallied in Tupelo, carrying placards demanding “Stop the Latino Invasion.” Four months later, Mississippi’s anti-immigrant SB 2988 law was passed with overwhelming support by both Republican and Democratic state legislators—including by three-quarters of the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus.

Following the mass arrests at Howard Industries, an I.C.E. spokeswoman tried to play on anti-immigrant sentiment by claiming that the raid was carried out in response to a complaint made by a union member...three years ago! By all accounts, there are sharp tensions in the Laurel plant—where immigrant workers make up about half the workforce—among some white, black and Latino workers. At the same time, as a spokesman for MIRA told Workers Vanguard, many union workers opposed the I.C.E. raid.

In fact, there have also been clear signs of solidarity. When a group of women workers who had been released from detention in order to care for their children went to the plant to demand their pay, the company initially refused and threatened to have them arrested. The company relented and issued the paychecks after the women’s fellow workers protested.

According to journalist David Bacon, who has written a number of reports from Laurel, IBEW Local 1317 has made efforts to organize Latino workers, though it initially “did not offer much support to its immigrant members” (alternet.org, 2 September). The union brought in Spanish-speaking organizers and began to distribute leaflets in Spanish. Yet to date, the Local 1317 leadership has not even issued a statement protesting the I.C.E. raid or defending their own members.

In fact, the national IBEW bureaucracy essentially calls for intensifying the wave of anti-immigrant workplace raids by demanding “authorization and funding for additional work-site” I.C.E. agents (“Talking Points,” www.ibewunity.org). And the head of the Mississippi state AFL-CIO helped whip up anti-immigrant hysteria two days after the I.C.E. raid by complaining that southern Mississippi had become “a little Mexico,” denouncing companies that hired undocumented immigrants and questioning whether such workers can even be allowed to join the union (AP, 27 August).

Meanwhile, the right of undocumented workers to unionize is under attack at the Agriprocessors warehouse in Brooklyn, where workers voted in 2005 to join the UFCW. When workers struck against the company’s refusal to negotiate with the union, Agriprocessors claimed that many of its employees were using someone else’s social security number. In an ominous attack on immigrants and the labor movement, Agriprocessors has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to reverse its 1984 ruling that granted undocumented workers the right to unionize, arguing that attitudes on the question have “undergone a sea change” (New York Times, 1 September).

Agriprocessors is notoriously anti-union and its factories are well known for their deplorable conditions. Before the Postville raid, the Iowa Division of Labor fined the plant $182,000 for violating safety rules (this was reduced to $42,750 after the raid). Since the raid, the Iowa state government has brought 57 child labor cases against Agriprocessors, involving “egregious violations of virtually every aspect of Iowa’s child labor laws,” according to the Iowa Labor Commissioner.

The workplace raids by I.C.E. agents have been denounced by the Change to Win trade-union federation, which includes heavily immigrant unions such as the UFCW, the SEIU service workers union and the UNITE HERE hotel, restaurant and garment workers union. But the Change to Win bureaucrats call to beef up the border to prevent “illegal” immigration. They push immigration “reform” bills with provisions to expand “guest worker” programs—the modern equivalent of indentured servitude—that tie immigrants’ visas to their employers. Meanwhile, the Change to Win tops’ rivals in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, while opposing the expansion of “guest worker” programs, complain that “lax enforcement of labor laws created an incentive for corporations to recruit and hire workers who came to the United States from Mexico without authorization to work.”

The role of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucrats is to tie the proletariat to the class enemy, especially through support to the capitalist Democratic Party, of which they are a component. Both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win are throwing all they have into getting the Democrats elected in November.

The reformist left tails the bureaucracy’s pro-Democratic Party “lesser evilism.” Workers World Party (WWP) wrote of the I.C.E. raids in Postville and Laurel: “Thousands of labor officials attended the Democratic National Convention…. Was there an effort during the convention to at least pass a resolution condemning these anti-worker, racist raids?” (Workers World, 5 September). Such inane, groveling appeals partake of the union misleaders’ entire strategy, which rests on a program of class collaboration. This is directly counterposed to mobilizing the power of the multiracial proletariat independent of the capitalist class enemy. To unchain the power of labor requires, above all, a break with the Democrats, the other party of American capitalism, racism and war. This can only be achieved through sharp political struggle within the unions against the labor lieutenants of capital, who tie the workers to the class enemy.

Workers of the World, Unite!

A major factor behind the gutting of the union movement in this country since the late 1970s has been the massive transfer of industry from the North and Midwest to the open shop, low-wage South and Southwest. This has been accompanied by an important demographic shift, of which Mississippi is an example. As in most Southern states, starting well before World War II and peaking in the 1960s, there was a steady decrease in Mississippi’s black population, which was attracted to industrial jobs in the North—and repelled by Jim Crow. Over the past several decades, that trend reversed, such that today black people constitute over 37 percent of the population of Mississippi. Meanwhile, it is estimated that immigrants are now almost 5 percent of the total state population.

Today, a massive organizing drive in the South, where conditions are ripe for unionization, is vitally necessary if the U.S. labor movement is to regain its strength. Yet efforts to organize labor are still met with police-state measures abetted by fascist terror.

One key labor battle is the years-long effort by the UFCW to organize the Smithfield pork processing plant—the largest such plant in the world—in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Smithfield management has repeatedly collaborated with I.C.E. to target militant immigrant workers, who along with black workers make up the bulk of the workforce (see “Smithfield Plant: Smash Anti-Union RICO Suit!” WV No. 909, 29 February).

Above all, the crucial battle to organize the South must go hand in hand with the fight against racist discrimination. As the Spartacist League/U.S. and the Grupo Espartaquista de México, sections of the International Communist League, wrote in a joint declaration, reprinted in WV No. 867 (31 March 2006):

“Opposition to anti-immigrant racism in the U.S. is directly intertwined with the struggle against black oppression. It is particularly important to combat anti-immigrant chauvinism among U.S.-born black and white workers, while immigrant workers must grasp that anti-black racism remains the touchstone of social reaction in the U.S. Black oppression is the cornerstone of American capitalism.”

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 capitalists and create a planned, socialized economy. For socialist revolution from the Yukon to the Yucatán!