The Socialist Workers Campaign salutes the October 12 march on the United Nations for immigrant rights. Our candidates in this election are demanding the U.S. government stop deportations and are calling for equal rights for all immigrants - with or without papers.

We welcome all immigrant workers to this country as part of the working class, who along with working farmers produce all the social wealth in the society. Immigrant workers strengthen the working class here with class-struggle experiences that they bring from other countries. The Socialist Workers campaign calls on the labor movement to join the fight for immigrant rights and recruit immigrant workers to strengthen the unions.

The Republicans and Democrats are carrying out a bipartisan offensive against immigrant rights. Summary deportations are accelerating. The recent changes in the U.S. immigration laws will require up to 1.5 million workers to return to their country of origin and wait for their residency papers, and deny legal status to hundreds of thousands who would previously be entitled. These measures aim to deepen the bosses' ability to victimize this layer of the working class.

The ruling rich in the United States go all over the world exploiting labor and expropriating the wealth produced by workers and farmers in the semicolonial countries. Their actions ensure that the vast majority of the world remains "underdeveloped." Workers should have a right to travel and live wherever they can find a livelihood. We stand for a world without borders.

Discrimination against immigrants hurts all workers and working farmers. Keeping a section of the working class in second-class status puts downward pressure on the wages of all. As the capitalist crisis deepens, immigrants are scapegoated as the cause of unemployment and cuts in social services.

The purpose of this propaganda is to further divisions among workers and keep our eyes off the real source of our problems - the system of capitalism, where the profits of a tiny minority are put before the human needs of the vast majority.

In this campaign, the Socialist Workers candidates put forward an action program for overcoming the divisions that the capitalist class fosters among toilers so the working class can use its potential power to reorganize society in the interest of the vast majority of humanity.

Both the Teamster strike against UPS and the transit workers strike against Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco landed blows against divisions the bosses have foisted on workers through keeping some at part-time jobs or at permanently lower wages through the two-tier system. These strikes are part of a growing resistance to the bosses' offensive. The same kind of unity should be extended to fight the attempt to scapegoat immigrants.

The outpouring of popular rage against the police torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima is another example of this working-class resistance. The protests by thousands showed the way forward in fighting for our dignity, and against the widespread police brutality, racism, and scapegoating of immigrants that are a hallmark of the profit system.

The action program that we are presenting aims to unify workers and oppressed peoples to fight for our democratic rights, our living conditions, and for a new society.

* Rescind the reactionary legislation against all immigrants. Stop all deportations now! Open the borders!

* Jobs for all: for 30 hours work for 40 hours pay to spread the available work. There is plenty of work to be done from the point of view of human needs. For a massive public works program to build housing, child-care centers, schools, mass transit, clinics, and so on.

* For defense of affirmative action - a gain that was won in the struggle to overcome historic discrimination against Blacks, Chicanos, and women.

* The Third World debt sucks hundreds of billions of dollars every year from semicolonial countries and pours their social wealth into the imperialist banks and other lending institutions. The Socialist Workers Campaign calls on the labor movement take on the fight to cancel the Third World debt.

Our campaign fights for a society where those who collectively create the wealth will also make the decisions on how it is used. We call for a workers and farmers government, the only government that has the will and the interest in carrying out such a program.  
 
 
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