The following statement was released Oct. 24 by Róger Calero, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New York.
The capitalist economic crisis is taking a heavy toll on workers around the world. And the imperialist plunder of the semicolonial world makes the situation for workers and farmers there even worse.
That is what is happening in Honduras and the rest of Central America. In Honduras a nearly $9 billion foreign debt is owed to bankers and speculators in the north. The capitalist crisis and the further carnage hitting workers and peasants as the Honduran capitalist rulers move to make workers sacrifice more to pay for the debt, is what propels tens of thousands of immigrants to head for the U.S.
Workers in Honduras face the same challenge that workers face in the United States. How to build a fighting union movement, forge an alliance of the working class and working famers, and build our own party, a working-class party, based on the unions that can fight to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist class.
We both have an example to look to in the Cuban Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959 and began to build a workers and farmers government.
The parties of the capitalist rulers in Honduras — including those involved in organizing the caravan currently traveling toward the U.S.— also bear responsibility for the economic and social disaster working people face there.
The Socialist Workers Party demands cancel Honduras’ foreign debt. The fight for this can put working people in a better position to win higher wages and better working and living conditions.
The representatives of the capitalist rulers in the U.S. — the Democrats and Republicans — favor controls over immigration to divide the working class. Calls by some in the Democratic Party to “abolish ICE” have no intention of eliminating the rulers’ immigration police and their efforts to control the pace of immigration.
The demand for an “open border” is utopian under capitalism and an obstacle to forging international solidarity in struggle among working people.
The Socialist Workers Party candidates fight for the labor movement to demand amnesty for the 11 million immigrant workers living and working in the United States without “proper papers.” “Not having papers” is a weapon the bosses use when immigrant and native-born workers move to organize in common struggle, as we are seeing in the fight to unionize port drivers in Los Angeles.
This is why the SWP candidates join with these workers and their union in demanding the government restore and make permanent the Temporary Protected Status that thousands of workers from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan held, allowing them to live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation.
We say, “Join the union. Let’s fight together against the bosses.”
That is the road to boosting the self-confidence, fighting spirit and class consciousness of working people toward rebuilding the labor movement.
There is less racism and less anti-immigrant prejudice among working people today than ever before. That puts us in a better position to organize against the grinding assaults on wages, the brutal work schedules and hazardous conditions we face. And to fight to unify the working class.
Workers need our own party, a labor party, that can lead the working class and our allies to fight to take power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters.
We say amnesty for the 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.! Cancel the foreign debt of Honduras! Extend a hand of solidarity to workers and farmers in Central America in their battle against both the ravages of U.S. imperialism and their own national exploiting class as well!