The Socialist Workers Party campaign urges working people to take part in September 30 demonstrations for immigrants’ rights in cities across the United States. In the Northeast we encourage participation in the march and rally in Danbury, Connecticut, to protest the arrests of 11 day laborers there in a sting operation by federal immigration cops who worked hand-in-glove with the local police—a spreading practice.

We join with the millions who have mobilized to demand federal legislation granting permanent residency—immediately and without conditions—to all undocumented immigrants. This is a precondition for combating employer-fostered divisions the bosses use to drive down the wages and job conditions of all workers. Resistance to the capitalists’ unrelenting antilabor assaults can be effective only if the labor movement embraces every unionization effort by workers and acts to organize all workers, U.S.- and foreign-born.

The arrests in Danbury are part of the broader attacks by the employers and their government. This includes federal police raids and deportations; firings of workers based on Social Security “no-match” letters; the expansion of the fence along the Mexican border; the further militarization of the frontiers, including the deployment of National Guard troops at the Rio Grande; and local measures designed to criminalize undocumented workers. Examples of the latter range from closing down a hiring site for day laborers in Mamaroneck, New York, to an anti-worker ordinance in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, that bans hiring and renting to those without papers.

These attacks by Democratic and Republican officeholders have emboldened rightists like the Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control. That outfit—led by backers of fascist-minded politician Patrick Buchanan, whose anti-worker tract State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America is selling briskly—has called an anti-immigrant rally October 7.

Such efforts are demagogically couched as targeting "illegals" and "lawbreakers." But their real aim is to intimidate and push back not only immigrant labor but the entire working class.

Immigrants are drawn to each metropolis of finance capital by the wealthy rulers, who line their pockets not only by exploiting native-born workers but by exporting capital to capture markets and natural resources, forcing millions to flee the countryside and cities of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean impoverished by imperialist plunder.

But these workers are not willing to turn the other cheek and be permanent second-class citizens. Millions declared in mass rallies and strikes this year, "We are workers, not criminals!" These actions, involving up to 2 million in the streets nationwide, have shown that the unprecedented immigration of the last decades and the integration of these workers into the hereditary proletariat of the United States have strengthened the working class palpably and irreversibly.

Capitalist politicians rationalize their attacks by blaming immigrants for unemployment, housing crises, the "Medicaid drain," drug trafficking, and other social ills. They are simply scapegoating workers for the profit system's world disorder.

The purpose of the police raids, deportations, and restrictions on the rights of immigrants is not to expel most undocumented workers. That would be impossible given the historic wave of immigration under way. And the U.S. employers depend on superexploited immigrant labor, especially in face of international competition among capitalists.

All the current “immigration reform” bills, both House and Senate versions, contain provisions designed to do just that: maintain a layer of workers more vulnerable to exploitation.

It’s true that bosses use immigrant labor to push down the wages of all. There is only one way to prevent them from doing that: Organize all workers into unions! Embrace immigrants as fellow fighters and join hands to resist the bosses’ attacks. Offer solidarity in action to our brothers and sisters around the world, from teachers in Mexico to coal miners in Kazakhstan, who are in the same trenches fighting a common enemy: the capitalist exploiters and their dog-eat-dog economic system at its highest and final stage—imperialism.

We should champion the demand voiced loudly by millions of workers: Unconditional legalization of all immigrants now!
 
 
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Rally in Connecticut to protest arrests of day laborers
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