Our campaign calls on the labor movement to oppose both the McCain-Kennedy “Secure America and Orderly Immigration” bill, and the Bush administration’s “temporary worker” proposal. Both are designed to reinforce divisions in the working class and maintain a permanent category of workers stripped of rights in order to guarantee a reservoir of superexploited labor for U.S. bosses. These measures are a threat to the entire labor movement, which should campaign vigorously for their defeat.

Both proposals would create a pool of “guest workers” dependent on employers to keep their work permits. The purpose is to regularize the legal status of a layer of immigrant workers in order to guarantee bosses a more stable workforce, and to give the government a ready-made list of immigrants they could keep track of and victimize.

These measures are designed to allow the government to tighten its control over immigrant workers, making them subject to deportation once their visas expire and scapegoating them for unemployment in times of economic slowdown. This is underscored by the provision that employers could sponsor an immigrant only by “proving” that no “American worker” wanted the job.

The McCain-Kennedy bill is also part of the reactionary “homeland defense” campaign that, in the name of “securing the borders against terrorists,” is being used to lay the groundwork for increased militarization of civilian life and other steps to crack down on working-class resistance in coming years.

The Socialist Workers campaign also calls for the repeal of federal and state laws mandating employer checks of immigration documents. We oppose the Real ID Act and other measures aimed at turning a driver’s license into a national ID card, which will be used to go after not only immigrants but working people as a whole.

The unprecedented integration of immigrants into U.S. society today—not only in a few large cities, but throughout the country—is due to the fact that capitalists are dependent on immigrant labor, from the packinghouses to hotels to agriculture. The exploitation of immigrant labor is a source of superprofits that gives U.S. capitalists an edge in the cutthroat competition with their imperialist rivals worldwide. The wealthy families who rule this country are not trying to push foreign-born workers out of this country, but to push them down.

At the same time, through this accelerated immigration, driven by grinding economic conditions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the working class in the United States and other industrialized countries is becoming more and more internationalized. These changes in social composition not only break down national divisions, provincialism, and prejudices that sap the power of the labor movement, but enrich the political and union experiences of the working class and broaden its historical and cultural horizons. Immigrant workers not only share their experiences with fellow workers. As they confront racist discrimination, many also shed their own backward, anti-Black prejudices in the course of common battles, learning from the example set by workers who are African-American.

The McCain-Kennedy bill and the Bush proposal would be used to undermine this process and set back the working class as a whole.

To confront the government and employer assaults on immigrant workers, what is needed above all is to organize workers into trade unions, and to use and extend union power to resist the bosses’ assaults on wages, benefits, and working conditions. The Co-Op coal miners in Utah, meat packers in the Midwest and other regions of the country, garment workers at Point Blank Body Armor in Florida, and hotel workers in New York—many of whom are foreign-born—have all been waging organizing struggles or fighting to strengthen and use their unions to the benefit of all labor. They are showing an example to working people everywhere.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Guest worker’ bill aims to regularize superexploitation of immigrant labor  
 
 
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