Vol. 76/No. 31      August 20, 2012

The Greek government recently rounded up 6,000 immigrants. The Public Order minister says that by the end of the year up to 10,000 will be detained, and most deported.

Under the current U.S. Democratic administration, firings, arrests, detentions and deportations of undocumented workers have increased.

The capitalist rulers need immigrant workers. They use them as a source of cheap labor and superprofits. In so-called normal times, this helps them to drive down the wages, working conditions and rights of all workers.

In periods of economic crisis, the boss class needs them less for work and more as scapegoats to obscure the real source of joblessness and other burdens foisted on workers and to divide us, in order to weaken our ability to mount united struggles against their relentless assaults on our rights, living conditions, unions and dignity. The government assaults are meant to decrease the net flow of immigration and deepen the pariah status of those who remain.

Everywhere but revolutionary Cuba, the bosses use patriotic and nationalist arguments to convince working people that we have common interest with them against our working-class brothers and sisters in other countries, and to back them in trade conflicts and the shooting wars they lead to.

Meanwhile, capitalists invest their capital where they find the cheapest sources of labor within and outside national borders.

Today, like never before, the capitalists’ reach encompasses all humanity, as does the crisis of their system, as does the resistance to it by the toiling majority. We can either let our common enemy pit us against each other in a global race to the bottom, or recognize and act on the basis of our common interests.

Working-class politics start with the world. For the workers’ movement, defense of workers without “proper papers,” and internationalist and working-class solidarity are life and death questions.

That’s why the working class, labor, socialist campaign of James Harris and Maura DeLuca is building solidarity across the country and abroad—from workers engaged in strikes and lockout battles to struggles by immigrant workers to live, work and fight wherever the conditions created by capitalism bring them.