One thousand immigrant workers and others marched in Minneapolis Feb. 1, one of many actions in defense of the rights of immigrants across the country. “We need to be here, there is no work in our country to help the family,” one worker originally from Ecuador told the Militant. “That is why we are here at the demonstration.”
In Tallahassee, Florida, over 100 marched Feb. 3, and some small businesses shut down for the day. Jose Guillen, a U.S. citizen originally from El Salvador, came with his wife and two children. His sign read, “We are not criminals. We build your houses. We cut your grass. We cook your food. We make America Great!”
“Nobody likes the deportations they’re doing,” he told the Tallahassee Democrat. “I know they’re trying to find criminals, but there are more good people.”
These actions came in response to stepped-up moves in Washington to crack down on immigration. In all attempts to divide native- and foreign-born workers, working-class solidarity is key. That requires a fight by the labor movement for an amnesty for all workers in the U.S. without papers.
The current round of high-profile arrests by President Donald Trump’s administration is the latest step in the bipartisan course of the Democratic and Republican parties over decades toward the 11 million-plus undocumented workers in the U.S. today.
The country’s capitalist rulers try to regulate immigration as the economy expands and contracts to maximize their profits. They seek a layer of workers with second-class status living in fear of deportation, who they hope will be more easily exploitable. And they aim to sharpen divisions among working people, to prevent them from uniting to beat back the rulers’ attacks against the unions and against wages and working conditions.
To advance the rulers’ aims, former President Joseph Biden’s administration left office with deportation orders against nearly 1.4 million people. Trump ran for office claiming he’d one-up Biden and launch the “largest deportation program in American history.” In reality, neither Biden nor Trump aim to expel millions of workers without papers, but to frighten them and create conditions to intensify their exploitation.
The Trump administration is focused on apprehending and deporting immigrants who either have criminal records, are members of criminal gangs, or have overstayed their visas. He’s also trying to close the border. He ordered every regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to arrest a minimum of 75 immigrants per day beginning Jan. 25. In nine days through the end of January, immigration cops arrested more than 7,400 people at their homes, workplaces and elsewhere.
‘We come to work’
Often there is collateral damage, arrests of other immigrants in the wrong place at the wrong time. David Salinas, an undocumented warehouse worker from Ecuador, was arrested along with two co-workers following an ICE visit to his workplace, Ocean Seafood Depot in Newark, New Jersey, Jan. 23. Four days later, Salinas’ co-workers, friends and relatives won his release after raising a $10,000 bond.
“We are not bad people. We come to work,” Salinas told the Washington Post. Robinson Sanchez, another of the detained workers, was also released, while the third worker, who had overstayed his visa, faces deportation proceedings.
The unsettling impact of the arrests on workers is exacerbated by Trump’s habit of exaggeration. His “border czar,” Tom Homan, said the administration would launch “shock and awe” operations.
The impact is also worsened by liberals’ hyperbolic response and rumor-mongering. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed Feb. 2 that Trump’s policies would mean there would be no farmworkers left in the country.
A central factor in the administration’s threat to impose hefty tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico was part of an effort to get the governments there to each put 10,000 troops at the U.S. border to reduce unauthorized entry into the U.S. and stop fentanyl and other drugs from being smuggled into the country.
The Department of Homeland Security has tightened other immigration controls.
Trump signed a separate bill Jan. 29 authorizing the deportation of workers without papers who have been arrested or charged with shoplifting, burglary or other crimes, but have not had a trial. The legislation, known as the Laken Riley Act, is a blow to equal protection under the law and reinforces the pariah status of undocumented workers.
Amnesty for workers without papers
The administration’s anti-working-class moves are provoking a much-needed debate.
Craig Honts, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for lieutenant governor in New Jersey, told the Militant about discussions in the locker room at the factory where he works.
“One worker said, ‘There’s a lot of jobs in restaurants and construction that are low paying. If immigrants are deported, these companies will be forced to pay more. That’s good for us.’
“Another said, ‘Who are these people who just show up in the U.S. expecting an easy life?’
“‘They’re workers,’ a third worker replied, ‘many have been here for 10 or 20 years. They’re part of us. But now I can see people in my neighborhood living in fear.’”
“Workers’ strength is in our numbers and our unity,” Honts told his co-workers. “That’s why I’m for an amnesty for undocumented workers who are in the U.S., to advance working-class solidarity and to strengthen the unions.”
Horrendous conditions, produced by the workings of capitalism, are driving millions in Latin America and worldwide to seek a better life in the U.S.
Bosses use immigration to heighten competition among workers for jobs. But as newly arrived immigrants join the labor force they become part of the working class and its struggles. Immigrants have not only joined, but led strike battles. Fighting side by side, native-born and foreign-born workers develop confidence in themselves and in each other.
Many workers today are too young to have any memory of the millions who took to the streets on May Day in 2006 and 2007 in cities and small towns across the U.S. Immigrant workers and their supporters rose up to protest a federal bill that would have made it a felony to be in the U.S. without a visa. Their actions set a powerful example, advanced the self-confidence and unity of the working class, and strengthened the labor movement. The bill was defeated.
During workplace raids at that time, fellow workers, including those born in the U.S., helped hide immigrants or took in their children if their parents were seized. By 2008 the U.S. rulers concluded the political cost of the raids was too high and shifted to other methods to try to regulate the bosses’ need for cheap labor.
Whatever the current Trump administration does in the coming days and weeks, the capitalist rulers will continue to target immigrant workers. The fight to defend them and to unify the working class will continue as well, requiring a union-led fight for an amnesty.
There have already been two far-reaching amnesties in recent U.S. history, one of over 3 million under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, and a second of some 1.5 million by George Bush in 1990. Another victory can be won.