Amnesty key for working-class unity

The Socialist Workers Party urges working people to join, build and organize public meetings and protests calling for “Amnesty now! Stop the raids and deportations!” Raise these questions in your union, with your co-workers, at school or at church.

Guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security Feb. 20 give the immigration cops more leeway for raids, arrests, detentions and deportations. Coming actions will build on the impressive Feb. 16 mobilization of hundreds of thousands of workers and young people, closing restaurants, stores, factories and construction sites and taking to the streets across the country.

As Washington seeks to bar travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, the Socialist Workers Party says “No to immigration tests based on religion, nationality or political views!”

The objective of the Trump administration, like those before it, is not to stop immigration or get rid of immigrants.

In the recently released Pathfinder book Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? A Necessary Debate Among Working People, SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters explains that the working class in the United States, including the 11 million who are undocumented, is “the source of the capitalists’ surplus value, which in turn is the source of their profits, wealth, social status, and state power. They utterly depend on this massive pool of exploited and superexploited labor.”

This is the basis for the immigration policy of Washington and all capitalist governments worldwide.

Waters says, “The battle to win the labor movement and the big majority of working people to defend the rights of immigrants is inseparable from the battle to organize the working class as a whole and rebuild the trade unions.”

“It is an issue that is determining the future of the labor movement and will continue to do so — much like the fight against Jim Crow segregation did in the 1950s and 1960s, and as the ongoing fight against all forms of racism and discrimination still does.”

The capitalist rulers advance the division between undocumented and native-born workers to prevent us from unifying and fighting for our common working-class interests. One of the central slogans of the Feb. 16 actions was “We are workers, not criminals.” The fight for amnesty — decriminalization — is crucial for the working class.

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