As the capitalist crisis deepens today, workers increasingly confront how can we come together to use the full strength of the working class and our unions to stand up to the employers’ assaults on our wages and working conditions and advance our class interests on all political questions.
The capitalist rulers have a sharply opposed class standpoint. They’re driven by the lash of the market to intensify competition among workers, to turn us against one another, to convince us to subordinate our own class interests to theirs. One part of this is fostering divisions between workers with and without papers.
As on all key class questions, there is no serious difference between the policies of the two main capitalist parties — the Democrats and Republicans. They’re for looser immigration when bosses need workers and for clamping down when they don’t.
The Democratic Party administration of former President Joseph Biden deported an average of 57,000 immigrants every month last year. Today President Donald Trump blames workers without papers for the competition of workers over jobs, housing and services, for violent crimes and other serious social problems. But the fact is his administration has been deporting less immigrant workers than his predecessor. He’s ratcheting up the anti-immigrant rhetoric and moved to expand facilities to incarcerate them in the future, in the U.S., Guantánamo and El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. This is aimed at intimidating the millions of workers in the U.S. who have no papers, reinforce their second-class status and create conditions to intensify their exploitation.
The bosses and their government look to profit from dividing the working class. In the construction industry in New York City, for instance, the bosses have increased the hiring of immigrant workers — who today make up over half of the workers — and driven down the number in unions to 20% or less.
The rulers try to convince workers the answer to this is to deport workers without papers. But that’s dead wrong. They used the same argument to try and convince Caucasian workers it was in their interest to keep Black workers out of industry, which was exploded by the mighty Black-led movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation.
The only way our class makes any gains is when we join together and fight, regardless of color, nationality, sex or legal status. What’s needed today is an amnesty for workers without papers in the U.S., ending their second-class status, so fewer workers live in fear. This can tear down the barrier to our class fighting side by side against the bosses and their government.
Taking on and politically answering the scapegoating of immigrants is a life-or-death political question for the labor movement. It has to explain that workers — whatever their status — are the working class in the U.S. The union must organize all workers.
There is an action today that sets an example. Join the March 31 action to defend immigrants, called by the United Farm Workers and the California Federation of Labor Unions in Delano. Look for similar actions in your area. Bring your family, friends and co-workers.
This is the road to bring workers together. It helps prepare workers for the political struggles that lie ahead — the fight to break from the bosses’ parties and to chart a course to take political power into our own hands, the only way to end the power of capitalist exploitation and oppression once and for all.
