Activists plan immigrant rights campaign

Activists on both coasts met on June 17 to launch a summer of struggle for immigrant rights and worker unity. The March 25th Coalition in Los Angeles and the May 1 Coalition in New York convened planning conferences to address Washington’s reactionary policies, which are geared to incite racism and worker disunity in the U.S.

The two coalitions have been working in tandem since early spring to build a national movement. They helped organize millions to march on May Day for immigrant rights.

They are putting forward a slate of demands: full legalization of all undocumented persons; no border walls; no detention and deportation of immigrants; protection of civil rights for all; no “guest worker” slave labor program; opposition to the “criminalization” of immigrants; full worker rights for all; reunification measures for immigrant families; repeal of sanctions on employers of undocumented workers; and no to both the Sensenbrenner bill (HR-4437) and the Hegel-Martinez bill (S-2611).

The New York conference met at a school in Jackson Heights, Queens, a community of diverse nationalities from Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America. It broke down into committees that addres sed legal, economic and social issues.

One group discussed opposition to so-called free trade agreements, specifically the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Together with the World Trade Organization and “structural adjust ment” programs imposed by the Inter national Monetary Fund, these mechanisms have increased poverty and unemployment all over the world and have forced millions of people to migrate from their home lands to more developed countries while enriching the transnational corporations.

This committee also went on record opposing the 1947 Taft-Hartley Bill, which the CIO has dubbed a “slave labor act.”

Legalized slave labor is an intrinsic part of the immigration bills presently before Congress. It is the reason Washington wants a so-called “guest worker” program. Congressional collaborators with capital are looking to bring back the Bracero Program under which millions of Mexican farm workers provided low-wage labor in U.S. fields for more than two decades after World War II. This push to resurrect a system of legalized slavery is designed to provide cheap labor for everything from megastores to meatpacking, from farm labor to food preparation, from construction to landscaping.

“The immigrant rights issue is a workers’ issue,” said Brenda Stokely, a leader of the Million Worker March Movement who headed the New York workshop on building alliances with labor unions. Vicente “Panama” Alba of Local 108, Labor ers’ International Union of North America, spoke of strengthening unity with anti-war, environmental and other progressive groups. Many have been slow to take up the cause of immigrant rights.

The May 1 Coalition intends to produce literature exposing the reactionary and racist campaign against immigrants and showing how the Hagel-Martinez bill would declare war on the undocumented. The bill could lead to imprisonment and deportation for millions of workers and their families. It is engineered to divide the immigrants, deporting millions while promising legal residency to others who have lived here for over five years. But anyone who ever used false identification could be punished by deportation. As Beatriz, a Colombian from the Legali zation Workshop, said, “Just about everyone who came here without documents obtained fake papers to get a job.”

The conference ended with a plan to endorse national demonstrations for immigrant rights on July 15 and to support the National Grassroots Immigrant Stra tegy Conference, July 28-30, at American University in Washington, D.C.

The March 25th Coalition in Los Angeles devoted its planning conference to organizing a summer of protest. A teach-in on immigration will be held on July 15, followed by a rally in late July in support of day laborers. The coalition is also planning a rally in solidarity with the Black community at UCLA. The state has cut back affirmative action programs so drastically that Black enrollment at the university is at record lows.

The March 25th Coalition will join unions and unorganized workers in the Labor Day march in Los Angeles in what they hope will be part of a national day of protest and support for immigrant and worker unity.