How the Fake Left Amnesties the Democrats

For a Class-Struggle Fight for Immigrant Rights!

The huge protests this spring against the anti-immigrant “Sensenbrenner bill” (HR 4437) were, on the one hand, an important demonstration of the potential for class struggle for immigrant rights against the onslaught of the capitalist rulers. On the other hand, the workers who turned out for these demonstrations were not organized as workers. Rather, they were dissolved into the classless “people” against Bush & Co. by the demonstrations’ leadership, made up of, among others, the Democratic Party and Catholic church. Nor did the pro-Democratic Party trade-union bureaucracy seek to mobilize workers power independently and where it counts—in class-struggle action in defense of immigrant rights and against deportations. Thus it was no accident that the mobilizations petered out as Democrats joined “moderate” Republicans in brokering a compromise bill (S.2611) that passed the Senate on May 25.

The Senate bill would add thousands more border patrol agents and immigration cops to hunt “illegals,” build concentration camps for detainees, and further militarize the border, where National Guard troops are already on duty. It promises a years-long “path to citizenship” for some immigrants, which would be unattainable for vast numbers in practice; it calls for payment of back taxes, significant fines and fees; it declares English to be the sole official language. Moreover, it proposes a “guest worker” program, under which hundreds of thousands of immigrants would be at the mercy of particular employers.

This nasty racist bill was supported as the “lesser of two evils” by the bourgeois liberal organizers of the spring demonstrations. They have organized virtually no protest in the run-up to the November 2006 elections, as both houses of Congress take the legislation to a House-Senate conference committee.

The Spartacist League opposes all anti-immigrant laws and demands full citizenship rights for all immigrants. We stand for full equality of all languages and defend bilingual education against English-only bigots. As we explained in the “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program” of the International Communist League (of which the SL is the U.S. section):

“Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in
the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction. Thus capitalism in ongoing fashion creates different strata among the workers, while simultaneously amalgamating the workers of many different lands. Everywhere, the capitalists, abetted by aristocracy-of-labor opportunists, try to poison class consciousness and solidarity among the workers by fomenting religious, national and ethnic divisions. The struggle for the unity and integrity of the working class against chauvinism and racism is thus a vital task for the proletarian vanguard.”

—Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 54, Spring 1998

In the U.S., the fight for immigrant rights intersects the struggle for black freedom. The oppression of black people as a race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society is integral to American capitalism. Without winning the multiracial workers movement to the fight for black liberation, there will be no socialist revolution in this country.

Contrary to this internationalist, proletarian and revolutionary perspective is that of our reformist opponents on the left, ever eager to push “Anybody but Bush” lesser-evilism. Thus, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) wrote of the recent massive demonstrations: “Potentially, the movement can break the logjam of U.S. politics, in which the Republicans launch attack after attack with little or no response from the Democrats” (Socialist Worker, 31 March). Later, the ISO wrote: “A specter is haunting Congress—the specter of amnesty…. The movement is putting pressure on Congress to come up with a ‘plan B’ to the Sensenbrenner Bill” (Socialist Worker, 7 April).

It was in this context that the reformists laid claim to the call for “amnesty,” which right-wing Republicans have wrongly attributed to the (overwhelmingly) Democratic Party-sponsored legislation. Should anything like genuine amnesty for undocumented immigrants be proposed, we Marxists would be in favor of it, as an elementary democratic gain for immigrant workers and the proletariat as a whole, while explaining that it falls short of our demand for full citizenship rights. However, nothing resembling amnesty has been proposed from any bourgeois quarter.

Both the ISO and Workers World Party (WWP) acknowledge the limitations of the Democrats’ current legislation, but conclude that Democratic Party-led protests are “sending chills down the spine of Corporate America” (Socialist Worker, 7 April) and have “shaken the very foundations of the imperialist order,” asserting that the protests were “taking a path independent of both Republicans and Democrats” (Workers World, 27 April). These reformists are disappearing the role of the Democrats and Catholic church in organizing and leading the protests. Behind this is their reformist, class-collaborationist program, which ties the working class and oppressed to the capitalist rulers.

Thus the ISO is running Todd Chretien for U.S. Senator from California on the ticket of the capitalist Green Party (see “ISO Goes All the Way with Capitalist Greens,” WV No. 866, 17 March). In point of fact, the Green Party’s 2004 platform called for “controls on immigration, if only for the sake of national security.” Ralph Nader, who ran on the Green Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election and was supported by the ISO then and in 2004, told reactionary bigot Pat Buchanan in a June 2004 interview: “We have to control our immigration. We have to limit the number of people who come into this country illegally” (The American Conservative, 21 June 2004).

As opposed to the program of the reformists, what is urgently needed is a struggle to break the working class from its allegiance to all capitalist parties, a struggle to forge a politically independent revolutionary workers party dedicated to fight for all the oppressed and to the overthrow of the capitalist system. The parliamentary cretinist ISO can prattle about the “third side” in the immigration debate, that of “the U.S. working class, led by millions of immigrant workers” (Socialist Worker, 7 April). But it stands indicted by the Green company it keeps and promotes. Ditto the WWP, which appeals to “progressives in general” to support the struggle for immigrant rights, while promoting, on the ground, the enemies of the working class.

These reformist outfits’ agenda is to prettify the ugly face of U.S. imperialist capitalism. Our aim in intervening on behalf of immigrants, both at the massive demonstrations and within the working class, is to win workers to the understanding that they must oppose the whole capitalist system. We do not seek to tinker with the system, looking for an alternative immigration policy. We will support such reforms as are offered. But, our bottom line is that we will worry about the ebbs and flows of the world economy when the proletariat under revolutionary leadership runs it. We are not responsible for, nor do we seek to advise, the bourgeoisie on its immigration or other policies. We seek to organize the social power of the proletariat to smash this system and establish proletarian rule.