Vol. 74/No. 20      May 24, 2010

This knowledge is part of what gives millions of undocumented workers the confidence to keep marching and demanding legalization and to resist anti-immigrant laws, like the one recently passed in Arizona.

The U.S. capitalist class depends on immigrant labor—especially from those without papers who are paid lower wages and benefits. They use immigrants to increase competition among workers for jobs, drive down wages, and boost their profits.

When the economy is expanding, the bosses encourage larger numbers of immigrants to move to the United States. This is true in all major capitalist countries. During economic crises, the bosses scapegoat immigrants for unemployment and attempt to convince native-born workers to blame the foreign-born instead of the dog-eat-dog system of capitalism.

In the 1930s Great Depression the U.S. government deported large numbers of Mexican-born workers with and without papers. However, as Washington geared up for World War II it faced a labor shortage, leading the capitalists to once again encourage large numbers of immigrants to come work in the United States.

One way was through the 1942 to 1964 bracero program. At its peak the U.S. government brought in more than 400,000 temporary Mexican workers a year, mostly to work in the fields, with few rights.  
 
‘Operation Wetback’
In 1954, when the U.S. economy was in a recession coming out of the Korean War, President Dwight Eisenhower named retired army general Joseph Swing to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Swing turned the U.S. Border Patrol into a semimilitary organization, and in the summer of 1954 launched Operation Wetback, mostly in the Southwest.

They deported 1,000 people a day; U.S.-born children were frequently deported along with their parents. By the time the program ended later in the year more than 1 million workers had been deported.

In the midst of this massive operation, Washington continued to bring in braceros to meet the capitalist class’s labor needs. And just a decade later, in 1965, Washington reformed immigration laws to make it easier for workers from Latin America and Asia to emigrate to the United States.

In 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed. Some 3 million undocumented workers were granted amnesty and given green cards. That same year U.S. immigration agents deported 1.6 million workers, more than at any time since Operation Wetback.

In 1996 President William Clinton won passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which expanded the powers of the immigration police. For decades prior to the Clinton law, about 95 percent of undocumented workers who were deported left without a court order. They simply signed documents “voluntarily” agreeing to their deportation.

After 1996 the immigration police more and more obtained “orders of removal” against undocumented workers they arrested. Unlike “voluntary” deportation, removal orders add possible felony charges for reentering the United States. This grew from almost 70,000 deported under removal orders in 1996 to more than 200,000 in 2003. Under the administration of Barack Obama this reached its highest level ever; 387,790 of those deported were issued removal orders, even as the number of workers crossing the border without papers declined.  
 
Arizona echoes federal laws
The new Arizona law echoes what already exists in federal law. Faced with the possibility of mounting protests, Arizona legislators quickly modified provisions that instructed cops to detain those they “suspect of being illegal.”

The amended law instructs cops to check the immigration documents of those they stop but supposedly bans doing so based on “race.” This is not much different than the federal government’s “Secure Communities” program whose goal is to check the fingerprints of every prisoner in federal, state, county, and municipal jails against a Department of Homeland Security database to see if they are in the country legally.

The bosses have a dilemma: they can’t live without immigrant labor, and they can’t live with immigrant workers’ growing self-confidence and willingness to fight back.

Even if the U.S. rulers eventually grant amnesty to millions of undocumented workers, raids and deportations will continue. And more states and cities will pass anti-immigrant laws as the capitalist class tries to increase divisions within the working class and heighten competition for jobs.

The working class must combat the condition of competition with struggles that expand the union of workers. Workers, native-born and foreign born, with papers and without, need to join together, to form unions to fight to raise wages and benefits, to oppose speedup on the job, and to demand job safety.

Unions should take the lead in opposing deportations and raids and fighting for legalization for all undocumented workers. As long as capitalism exists, it will foster competition among workers. The only way to put an end to this once and for all is for workers to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist class and use that power along with state property to organize society to meet human needs.
 
 
Related articles:
Australian gov’t suspends asylum requests
California: Farm workers rally against racism  
 
 
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