The Socialist Workers Party says, “Stop the deportation of the ‘dreamers.’” We stand for this as part of the fight to win amnesty for all 11 million workers who don’t have papers recognized by the courts and the cops in the U.S.
The bosses need a layer of workers without “proper” documents. They want workers they can pay less, work harder, intimidate and use as scapegoats to boost profits and divide the working class. The capitalists depend on this pool of superexploited labor. They cannot compete worldwide and accumulate capital without it.
The U.S. rulers have never sought to deport all undocumented workers in the country. What they want is tighter control, so they can speed up or slow down the flow of cheap labor to match the ups and downs of their capitalist system.
There is less anti-immigrant sentiment in the working class today than ever before. U.S.- and foreign-born workers toil side by side in the same factories; our children go to the same schools; we live in the same neighborhoods. Workers don’t want to see friends, neighbors and co-workers torn from their homes and thrown out of the country.
At the same time, anti-immigrant rhetoric from sections of the ruling class still gets a hearing. When capitalist production and trade fall, competition for jobs grows in the working class. Workers need a perspective of how to fight these conditions.
The SWP campaigns for the labor movement to fight for a government-funded public works program to provide millions of jobs at union scale to build infrastructure, schools, health clinics, child care and other things working people need.
Workers in the United States — wherever we were born, whatever language we speak, whatever our skin color — face the same class enemy. Today less than 7 percent of workers in private companies belong to a union. It is only by rejecting the bosses’ dog-eat-dog divide-and-rule moves that we can organize the working class as a whole, rebuild a fighting union movement, take steps toward independent political action and transform our unions into instruments of class struggle.
When there is an economic downturn the fight for the political soul of the working class intensifies. The stakes are high.
Class-conscious workers fight to win the labor movement and the working class to demand: Stop the deportations! Amnesty now! Organize the unorganized!