Stop Deportation of Laibar Singh!

VANCOUVER—Since December, the threatened deportation of Laibar Singh, a paralyzed Sikh man from India, has roused protests across the country as thousands have shown their anger at the racist treatment of immigrants and refugees. On December 10, more than 1,000 protesters, overwhelmingly South Asian and including women, children and the elderly, descended on the Vancouver International Airport to stop his planned deportation. A second successful mobilization, hundreds strong, was held a few weeks later to prevent Singh’s removal, scheduled for 4:30 a.m., from the Sikh temple where he had taken refuge.

Laibar Singh entered Canada in 2003 seeking refugee status, which was rejected by the government. He later became paralyzed due to a spinal infection that has left him a quadriplegic. Last July, Canadian authorities issued a deportation order after rejecting his appeal to remain on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Given Singh’s compromised physical condition, deportation back to India would mean certain death. Stop the deportation! Give Laibar Singh status in Canada! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

The bourgeois media has stoked racist reaction against Singh and his supporters, invoking the “danger” that Canada’s borders will be flooded with “illegal” immigrants. Singh’s supporters have received hate email and phone calls, while South Asian students have seen an increase in racist slurs at schools. This comes in the context of stepped-up racism against Third World immigrants under the so-called “war on terror,” a political tool by which the imperialist rulers have increased their repressive powers.

Racist hysteria against immigrants from India, particularly Sikhs, has a long history in Canada. From 1903 to 1907, 5,000 Sikhs were brought in to replace Chinese and Japanese immigrants as a source of cheap labour. Most settled in B.C., where they became victims of state-orchestrated racist terror. In 1907, when a recession hit the West Coast, Sikhs were stripped of all voting rights (which they did not regain until 1947), barred from buying public land and thrown out by landlords. Those who left to visit relatives in India were not allowed to return.

In 1914, 376 courageous Sikhs, determined to break Canada’s racist colour bar against Asian immigration, sailed into Vancouver harbour aboard the Komagata Maru. The government refused to let them land and for two long, hot summer months the passengers were left to perish on board. Denied fresh food or drinking water, they stood down continual harassment by immigration officials and racist mobs on shore. Only after 100 police attempted to board the ship and the government threatened to blow the Komagata Maru out of the water did the Sikhs finally concede and sail back to India.

Outrageously, the immigration cops who have been trying to deport Singh are part of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the main union of federal government employees. The president of their “Customs and Excise Union” complained to the Globe and Mail (21 January) that they are “very frustrated about how this case is being handled” by the government, adding, “not removing Mr. Singh makes us look quite impotent and we need to show the public that we do uphold the immigration laws and that we should not bow down to public protests.”

This shows with crystal clarity how the cops, including immigration cops, are not workers but agents of the capitalist state, an instrument for organized repression against working people and the oppressed on behalf of the racist ruling class. Cops, border guards and security guards out of the unions now!

Due to its centrality in social production, the organized working class, which includes hundreds of thousands of immigrant and ethnic minority workers, has the social power to lead all the oppressed in a struggle to defend immigrant rights. But the workers are disarmed by a union leadership that pushes support to Canadian capitalism and even “organizes” cops and prison screws. As for the labour bureaucrats’ political arm, the social-democratic NDP, it too binds the working class to the capitalist state. When in power, as in B.C. in the 1990s, the New Democrats are the enforcers of the racist capitalist order against immigrants, minorities, Native people and organized labour. In 1999, the B.C. NDP government whipped up a racist furor over Chinese migrants, painting them as “criminals” and calling on the federal government to detain them on arrival.

We fight to build a multiethnic revolutionary workers party through breaking workers from the politics of the pro-capitalist NDP. Such a party would fight all strains of oppression and exploitation, mobilizing the social power of the working class on behalf of immigrants, refugees and ethnic minorities as part of the struggle to sweep away racist capitalism through a socialist revolution.