More immigrants have come to the United States over the past decade than ever before in history, more even than during the decade prior to World War I. In fact, more immigrants came to the United States over the past ten years than to the rest of the countries of the imperialist world combined. And this is not because there has been little emigration to other countries; in fact, there has been a massive growth of immigrant populations throughout Western Europe in recent decades. Some two million immigrants are estimated to have come to North America or Europe in the last two years alone. Even the "white Australia" immigration policies have been broken through over the past quarter century, with hundreds of thousands of people emigrating from Asia and the Pacific in particular. The one exception, Japan, has a small immigrant worker population, but even there it is growing and the substantial Korean community is having a bigger impact on politics and the class struggle.¹

Like the employment of women, this immigration is being forced by economic necessity, by the laws of motion of capital itself. It is being forced by the dispossession of rural toilers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. It is being accelerated by the worsening economic and social conditions of the majority of peasants and workers in these countries, by the "successes" of the "market miracle" in the semicolonial world.

The Patrick Buchanans can talk all they want about building trenches and walls along the border with Mexico. They can talk all they want about massive roundups and deportations, and even about firing on unarmed workers trying to cross into the United States. Other Republican and Democratic politicians can make their slightly more genteel-sounding proposals. But nothing will stop the swelling immigration into the United States and other imperialist countries. In fact, the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the mouths of these politicians is not even primarily intended to stop the immigration. The central aim is to keep the level of fear and intimidation high enough so that the level of wages and working conditions can be kept low.  
 
'No such thing as an American job'
How do class-struggle-minded workers answer the trade union bureaucrats' demagogic cry that NAFTA will result in losing "American jobs" to Mexico? There is only one answer: There is no such thing as an "American job" or a "Mexican job," only workers' jobs.

Workers in the United States have to get together with workers in Mexico and with workers in other countries and organize ourselves to defend our interests as a class, as part of the vast toiling majority of humanity. We must not support policies that strengthen our common class enemy. If workers give any other answer, the bureaucrats and the liberals and the reactionaries will win the argument. If workers give any national answer, our exploiters will only strengthen their power over all those who work for a living.

Class-conscious workers oppose NAFTA, as we oppose all economic and military pacts entered into by the imperialist government at home with other capitalist regimes. But we do so from an internationalist standpoint, rejecting any notion of common interests with the employing class in bolstering their competitiveness against their rivals or helping them reinforce the pariah status and superexploitation of immigrant workers. The only "we" we recognize is that of working people and our allies in the United States, Canada, and Mexico--and the rest of the Americas and the world. Not "we" Americans, "we" English-speakers, "we" the white race, or anything else that chains us to the class that grows wealthy off the exploitation of our labor and that of our toiling brothers and sisters the world over.

The capitalist rulers in Europe cannot turn back the tide of immigration either. The German government can put people in boxcars and send them back to Romania. (The Militant should print the photos of those trains!) But that is not going to reverse the growing numbers of immigrants in Germany--the workers from Turkey, from Yugoslavia, from elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, and from other corners of the world. The German rulers have not even begun the battle to defeat the working class, west and east, and the immigrants are a growing part of that class who bring new experiences and give new power to struggles by workers throughout Germany.

The objective possibilities today to bring the weight of an international class to bear on unfolding fights are greater than at any other time in history, and nothing will reverse this trend.  
 
 
1. In 1993 some 900,000 permanent residents of Japan were estimated to be of non-Japanese origin. Of these, 80 percent are Korean, with the majority of the rest from the Philippines, Thailand, China, or other Asian countries.

In face of mounting opposition to its racist, anti-immigrant practices, Tokyo in 1993 ended its long-standing policy of requiring that Koreans living in Japan be fingerprinted; they must still carry an "Alien Registration Card" at all times.  
 
 
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