‘Amnesty for immigrants! Stop the deportations!’

The following statement was issued Feb. 1 by Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders preparing to deport thousands of workers without papers and barring refugees from entering the U.S. are a threat to the working class as a whole. The Socialist Workers Party demands amnesty for all undocumented immigrants in the United States today.

The capitalist rulers depend on competition and division among workers to maintain their rule and keep filling their pockets from the wealth produced through our labor. From unemployment and racist discrimination to maintaining pariah conditions for immigrant workers and refugees, their system of exploitation depends on keeping workers pitted against each other.

To advance the fight to overcome these divisions, the Socialist Workers Party calls for stopping all deportations and ending the criminalization and denial of civic rights to immigrants, those fleeing the effects of imperialist wars abroad and those seeking a better life here alike. Build solidarity and unity among working people. Fight for government-funded public-works programs to provide jobs at union wages for all — building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and other things working people need.

The bosses use their government to open or close the influx of immigrants as their capitalist economy expands or contracts. The one thing that never changes is their effort to force this section of the working class into a less-than-legal status — enforcing superexploitation and driving down the conditions of all working people.

For decades the nationalist-minded trade union officialdom has refused to take on this challenge. They say it’s impossible to organize workers without papers. We say: organize the unorganized, regardless of what papers a worker has. The U.S. labor movement was built by joining all workers in struggle — native-born, former slaves and wave after wave of immigrants.

Both Trump and his liberal bourgeois opponents say they speak for “we Americans.” But there is no such thing. To see clearly what workers face and chart a road forward, we need to start with the fundamental class division between the capitalist rulers and the working class.

The propertied rulers’ capitalist system is in deep crisis today, facing declining profit rates, contraction in production and trade, and growing conflicts over resources and markets. The deepening competition between capitalist rulers worldwide has produced growing carnage, devastating economic crises and dispossession of millions of human beings around the world. Washington and other imperialist powers have engaged in nonstop wars since the turn of the millennium in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.

Workers need our own party to organize independent of the bosses and their political parties, to defend our interests on the road toward taking power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers. The Socialist Workers Party is your party.

Let’s fight together: Unionize all workers! No deportations! Speak out against attacks on Muslims and mosques! All U.S. troops out of the Middle East!

Related articles:
Gov’t orders target refugees, immigrants, workers’ unity
Workers debate how to defend immigrants, jobs

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