Vol. 72/No. 36      September 15, 2008

Drop the Charges, Free All Those Detained! Stop the Raids! Legalization for All Immigrants Now!

All charges of identity theft and of using false Social Security cards against the 595 immigrant workers at Howard Industries Inc. in Laurel, Mississippi, should be dropped immediately.

As Mayra Santiago Peña, an arrested worker, stated, “We’re here to work, we’ve done nothing wrong.”

The bosses at Howard Industries Inc. work hard to divide workers in the plant. They tell immigrant workers that Blacks are lazy, they tell Black and white workers that immigrants are stealing their jobs. Several of those arrested said that some of their coworkers applauded as they were forcibly taken out by the immigration cops.

Any divisions and discriminatory treatment that the bosses are successful in creating among workers weakens our class and our ability to fight effectively together against speedup, unsafe working conditions, and low wages. The bosses want to keep us from uniting together to fight to better our conditions on and off the job. As the economic crisis worsens and more native-born workers lose their homes, the message is “well, at least you’re lucky—you’re not an immigrant.”

For the U.S. rulers the purpose of the raids are to intimidate workers from fighting, not to deport all immigrant labor, which they desperately need to maintain their competitive edge against their imperialist rivals. The raids, criminal charges of identity theft, police harassment, and deportations of immigrants are an attack on the entire working class. These attacks go hand in hand with new measures to give the FBI, the U.S. armed forces, and local cop agencies more freedom in spying on and disrupting unions, Black rights organizations, working-class political parties, and all those who refuse to go along with the injustices, indignities, and dehumanizing effects of capitalism.

They will expand the use of illegal entry and eavesdropping that were used in framing Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, René González, and Antonio Guerrero, five Cuban revolutionaries who have been unjustly held in U.S. jails for 10 years. These methods will be used against a broader layer of workers as we organize to defend our standard of living and hard fought for social gains like Social Security and Medicare.

The working-class has been strengthened and has won more fighting space by the massive May Day mobilizations of millions for legalization of immigrant workers over the past two years. These workers are part of a small but important vanguard that is developing in experience and fighting capacity in the battles for unionization and better working conditions in plants across the country. We must reject the bosses divide and rule strategy by refusing to let them divide us. We must reject their attempts to convince us that there are “American” jobs.

Workers need to stand together to fight for higher wages and better working conditions no matter what side of the border we happen to have been born on. This is the road to building a fighting trade union movement.

Join my campaign in demanding:

Drop all charges and free all those detained!

Stop the raids, legalization for all immigrants now!
 
 
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