U.S. residents who are males over the age of 16 and who hail from 20 countries--including Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, and north Korea--have been given deadlines to be photographed, fingerprinted, and interrogated by immigration cops. U.S. officials say, however, that they intend to widen the registration requirement to "track" all 35 million people living here with temporary resident status from all countries. But why would they stop there? Setting up this kind of national tracking system coincides with moves to establish a national identity card for all U.S. residents. Probes toward such an ID card have begun with requirements by some states that driver’s licenses include a person’s Social Security number.

Such moves go hand in hand with other attempts to curb the rights of working people--from indefinitely jailing U.S. citizens without charges by labeling them "enemy combatants," to deporting U.S. permanent residents for having a minor conviction on their record from decades ago.

These attacks are part of the broader war by the capitalist rulers against working people at home. As their profit rates fall and their economy sinks into depression, the ruling billionaire families try to take it out on our backs--demanding pay cuts, longer work hours, and speedup, as well as attacks on social entitlements. On a political level the bosses’ government seeks to hamper workers’ ability to organize to resist--and they know working-class resistance will grow in response to the economic catastrophe.

Many of those denouncing the registration and recent mass arrests in Los Angeles correctly draw a parallel to the more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, mostly U.S. citizens, who were hauled off to concentration camps after Washington declared war on Japan in 1941. That brutality went hand-in-hand with the Roosevelt adminis-tration’s drive for "no-strike" pledges in the unions, efforts to hamstring the emerging Black rights movement, and the jailing of union militants and socialists who opposed the imperialist war.

The U.S. concentration camps for Japanese-Americans were the policy not of a fascist regime but of a "democratic" imperialist government. Likewise, the probes against workers’ rights today are not those of a rightist government, much less a police state, but rather a bipartisan offensive that has been unfolding for years and that will escalate as the capitalist order declines.

The protests that have already taken place against the INS’s actions, from Los Angeles to New York, are an indication that working people will not be willing to subordinate their interests to the employers’ calls for sacrifice of rights and living standards for the "war effort." By joining the ongoing protests against the INS roundups and deportations, both defenders of the rights of immigrants and other working-class militants will strengthen the cause of all working people.
 
 
Related article:
New York protesters: ‘No to INS registration and arrests’
Immigration cops question, track U.S. residents from 20 nations  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home