Workers without borders

After more than a week of massive demonstrations across the country for immigrant rights, followed by student walkouts—an estimated 40,000 youth walked out of their schools in Los Angeles alone—you would think there would be even more pressure on the sponsors of the Sensenbrenner-King bill to withdraw this draconian piece of legislation, which criminalizes all undocumented workers and those who aid or employ them.

Its sponsors, however, are hoping for an anti-immigrant backlash and are counting on the decades of poisonous agitation by the capitalist media against “illegal aliens,” enhanced by the economic crunch facing many U.S.-born workers who are losing their jobs and benefits. Day after day, the media claim that the crimes of capitalist bosses against workers are because immigrants are “taking your jobs.”

Meanwhile, a slew of other bills, some supported by Democrats and Republicans, sound less repressive but still make it impossible for most immigrants to ever get permanent residency and would set up “guest worker” programs. They are waiting in the wings in case the Sensenbrenner bill fails in the Senate.

It is important for every worker to know that anything short of full amnesty and full rights for immigrants is a victory for the bosses and a setback for all workers. When workers who dare demand unpaid wages, or organize a union, or complain about long hours and hazardous conditions are threatened with deportation, the working class as a whole is under attack.

This is a global economy, as everyone should realize if they look at where the things they use come from. Especially because of the imperialist-dominated rules of trade and commerce encoded in the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and various “free trade” agreements, capital is free to go where it wants in pursuit of higher profits.

For a very long time, this export of capital from the more industrialized countries has been undermining the economies of other countries all over the world, especially where they had been colonized by force. This imperialist domination of the world began over a century ago. Karl Marx wrote about it in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto, when he said that cheap commodities were the bourgeoisie’s “heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls.” Once the countries were penetrated by foreign capital, however, the commodities didn’t remain so cheap and the people were further impoverished.

What is more recent is the massive movement of labor from the super-exploited areas in search of jobs. Even though in much of the world, especially the wealthy imperialist countries, these workers face anti-immigrant laws, they still will risk everything, including their lives, to slip over the borders because the economies of their home countries have been decimated. Where there once was a market for home-grown agricultural products, that market has been taken over by the transnational agribusiness companies. So peasants from Mexico, for example, who used to raise a family on a small plot of land, are now working in hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York for miserable wages—if they get paid at all.

The capitalist laws that criminalize immigrant workers have one intention: to keep this growing sector of the working class from being able to organize and fight for better wages and conditions. The laws are not to keep them out altogether. Far from it. The bosses need immigrant workers, but they want them here under semi-slave conditions. It’s a huge two-tier strategy to divide the working class.

According to the 2000 census, immigrants made up 12.4 percent of the workforce. But that’s only half the story. In the preceding decade, half the new workers were immigrants. New immigrants accounted for the entire labor growth in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, and 72 percent of the growth in the Pacific region.

Many are paid less than the minimum wage. Twenty percent of all low-wage families are headed by immigrants. And they are often in the most dangerous jobs. By 2002, immigrant workers made up 15 percent of the workforce but accounted for 69 percent of workplace fatalities.

The recent demonstrations revealed the pent-up anguish of immigrant workers over their situation and their anger over been treated as criminals when all they want is a job. But they also revealed their hope that organization, being able to come out in large numbers for the first time, is the answer.

It’s up to the labor movement and all progressive people to help keep that hope alive. In this time of massive layoffs in the industrial sector, the slashing of wages and the phasing out of union benefits like pensions and health care, the potential of the working class to mount a massive fightback is the only thing that can turn the situation around. This offensive by the bosses is worldwide—as we are seeing in France right now. It doesn’t come from immigration. It comes from the growing competition that always accompanies capitalist overproduction—when the rapid growth of the means of production far outstrips the market for their products, leading eventually to crisis and catastrophe.

It’s time to struggle once again for the truth that an injury to one is an injury to all. The greatest solidarity must be built between U.S.-born workers and immigrants, whether “legal” or undocumented, in order to turn back the assault of the billionaire corporations. That’s only possible if labor comes out unequivocally for amnesty and full immigrant rights.