October 14, 1977
OAKLAND--Some 135 people at a September 23 forum here heard farm labor leader Philip Vera Cruz denounce deportations of immigrants without visas as an attack on all working people.

Vera Cruz, a seventy-two-year-old Filipino, retired as a second vice president of the United Farm Workers at its convention last August.

The forum was organized by the Raza Contra la Migra Committee, a local group organizing support for the national Chicano/Latino Conference to be held in San Antonio October 28–30.

Vera Cruz spoke of his own suffering as a noncitizen worker in the United States. Enthusiastic applause from the mostly Latino audience greeted Vera Cruz when he spoke of the Mexican-American War of 1848.

"The United States was stronger, so it changed the border," Vera Cruz said. "Today the undocumented workers, when they cross the current border, are just coming home to their own country, to their own land."

After his talk, Vera Cruz told the Militant he opposes Carter’s proposed crackdown on immigrants. "Carter’s plan will cause more problems for Mexican workers than they have now," he said. He added that the San Antonio conference was a "good way to oppose deportations."

Although no longer an official of the UFW, Vera Cruz’s stance reflects the position of the union. At the UFW’s convention last August, delegates adopted a resolution denouncing the Carter plan and demanding "total amnesty to undocumented aliens."  
 

October 13, 1952
The wiseacres who claim that Lenin’s theory of imperialism has been "refuted" by American development should read the story on foreign investment in the Sept. 27 issue of Business Week. It starts:

"The U.S., greatest creditor nation in history, has to export huge hunks of private risk capital if there’s to be a stable, expanding free world economy. So say most experts on international economic policy. Lately they’ve been bewailing the fact that less than $1 billion annually in direct new investments (last year: $963 million) is going abroad--and all investment alone accounts for half of that. A yearly outflow of about $4 billion, they say, may be more in keeping with U.S. aims and needs."

American imperialism, like every other before it, it is impelled by a profound need to export capital: that is, to obtain ownership of new portions of the world. This need is drastically frustrated by the rising colonial revolution which makes foreign investment ever more risky, and by the growth of the Soviet bloc, in which investment is impossible. Foreign investment possibilities have been made the responsibility of the so-called Point Four officials.

Actually, Point Four is nothing more than capitalist imperialism. Point Four means investment, and investment is not a gift, but the acquisition of ownership over means of production, and such acquisitions abroad are the precise central focus of capitalist imperialism. The fact that Washington tries to cover up with "philanthropic" talk is not at all impressive: all previous British, French, Dutch, Belgian, German, or Japanese imperialism was also rationalized by talk of "white man’s burden."  
 
 
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