The defense of the millions of workers without papers is a front-line battle for all workers, which must be taken up and led by the unions. Because of the bosses’ insatiable need for labor, immigration has grown, and native-born and foreign-born workers have worked together side by side for decades. They live in the same neighborhoods, their children go to the same schools, they attend the same churches. And, as the crisis of capitalism deepens today, they increasingly face the same struggles to provide housing, food and other necessities for their families.
Immigrants and native-born workers have stood together on picket lines, as we turn to the unions to resist the employers’ moves to drive our wages down, cut benefits we depend on, and impose speedup and conditions that threaten life and limb.
We’re all part of the same class, the working class, for whom solidarity and unity is decisive.
On behalf of the U.S. capitalist rulers, the Democrats and Republicans are preparing for new and more horrific wars to come. To try and whip up enthusiasm among workers, they are stepping up U.S. chauvinism, which goes hand and hand with vilification of foreign-born workers.
Some workers initially supported Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and then his administration when it claimed it only intended to deport “the worst of the worst criminals.” But these same workers are outraged when they see the reality — wide-ranging immigration raids and brutality that target their neighbors, friends and co-workers.
In cities and small towns working people have rallied to defend fellow workers picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. They’ve stood shoulder to shoulder and won broad support. In some cases these struggles have led to the release of those arrested, like the fight to free SMART union member Kilmar Ábrego García in Maryland and restaurant owner Anou Vongbandith in Philadelphia.
What’s needed is an effective, disciplined movement of working people that fights for an amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S. A movement that draws in the unions and reaches out to rally all the exploited and oppressed to its side, one that immigrant workers can join and help lead. The banner they carried in their millions in protests in 2006 and 2007 said, “We are workers, not criminals!”
Fighting to check the competition for jobs workers always face under capitalism has been at the center of the unions’ course since they first emerged with the rise of modern industry. Karl Marx, a founder of the revolutionary workers movement, explained in 1866 that unions must “learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interests of its complete emancipation.”
They must “enlist the nonsociety [unorganized] men into their ranks,” Marx wrote. “They must look carefully after the interests of the worst-paid trades, such as agricultural laborers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.”
Advancing this perspective requires rallying around the call for amnesty for workers without papers, essential to unify and strengthen the labor movement for the deeper class struggles that lie ahead, and to open the door for the working class to take political power into our own hands.