The longer-term battle for amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S. is deeply tied to today’s fight to defend and extend constitutional protections and to advance the unity and fighting capacity of the working class.
This has become more evident as the ruling capitalist families and their government, led by Democrats and Republicans alike, have sought to impose ever-tighter restrictions on legal and political rights of immigrants. They simultaneously make adjustments to guarantee a proper flow of cheap labor to exploit as their employment needs vary.
“The number of illegal aliens into the United States was zero,” President Donald Trump said July 1, boasting about the sharp drop in arrests by the border patrol this year. “Even I find that hard to believe,” he said. “Somebody must have gotten in.”
The rulers’ crackdown on immigration, however, is not aimed at permanently cutting off the flow of cheap labor, but to create an atmosphere of intimidation that heightens insecurity and fear among immigrants who make it into the U.S.
For decades, squeezing or relaxing immigration requirements have changed according to the employers’ needs for production, as well as facilitating their goal of fostering divisions within the working class.
The current policy of mandatory detention of virtually all those facing deportation; retroactively deporting permanent legal residents for past criminal offenses, a violation of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the government from prosecuting or punishing an individual twice for the same offense; and the practice of denying family and friends information about anyone detained — all of these have been used at one time or another for decades.
These inroads on workers’ rights go together with broader attacks aimed at convincing U.S.-born workers that immigrants are not entitled to the same rights and opportunities. A recent example is the attempt by Washington to eliminate in-state college tuition and financial aid to undocumented students. Many attempts have been made at the local, state and federal level over the years to deny immigrant workers driving licenses, public education and health care, including emergency hospital services.
Language discrimination has long been used to divide and stir up hostility toward immigrants and others who don’t speak English. Last April, President Trump signed a new executive order mandating commercial truck drivers demonstrate proficiency in English, supposedly to “protect the safety of American truckers, drivers, passengers, and others.” The labor movement must reject this anti-labor measure.
Politicians say that throwing undocumented immigrants out of the country will open jobs for native-born Americans. This isn’t true. Bosses are using the immigration crackdown to trim their workforce while keeping production at the same level to boost profits.
The bosses need to maintain a reserve army of labor — the unemployed — to pit workers against each other and hold down wages and ignore safety. This is built into the capitalist system. Whatever steps the rulers take to tighten immigration control, their intention isn’t to stop bosses from hiring immigrant workers. It’s to create a layer of the working class with less rights and protections, more susceptible to exploitation.
Fight for amnesty and unity
In 1986 the Ronald Reagan administration garnered bipartisan support to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Close to 3 million undocumented immigrants who had lived in the U.S. before 1982 were granted permanent resident status.
At least another 3 million remained illegal, fair game for the bosses to deepen their exploitation. It included penalties for knowingly hiring undocumented workers. But for every boss who was selectively fined, thousands of others were placed in a stronger position to cut wages and pocket profits from these workers.
And they said they were “taking a bigger risk,” so they demanded more.
State officials were required to verify the immigration status of applicants for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment benefits and housing assistance, deepening their pariah status.
To supply enough farm labor the law opened the door for wider use of “temporary guest worker” visas. Agricultural workers were now legally forced to submit to low pay and miserable working conditions as the price of protection from the immigration cops. And if they couldn’t take the conditions and went to look for another job, they faced deportation.
Tens of millions of working people from the oppressed countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as from poorer regions of Southern and Eastern Europe, have migrated to the imperialist centers. They’re driven by the economic realities of imperialist exploitation of their homelands, military conflicts, political turmoil, gang violence and social crises.
Capitalist rulers everywhere have sought to take advantage of this migration. They have become utterly dependent on this massive pool of exploited and superexploited labor.
At the same time, millions are incorporated into the working class wherever they end up, going through experiences in battles as the bosses seek ways to get out of the deepening crisis of their capitalist system.
The labor movement has a life-and-death interest in fighting the rulers’ attempt to establish a caste of workers without legal rights. The unions have a major role to play in leading the fight for a total amnesty, with full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Otherwise, labor’s efforts to organize and mobilize its power will always be crippled.