Senate’s anti-immigrant bill

It’s no surprise that a body of 100 people who are overwhelmingly white, male, millionaire U.S. citizens is reactionary and at the service of the capitalist ruling class. It should be no surprise that this same body is also incompetent. That body is the U.S. Senate. And its latest example of reactionary incompetence is the immigration bill it passed Sept. 29.

If the Senate wanted to help workers, it would legalize the status of the 12.4 million immigrants who have been building the economy here. It would allow them to live, work and raise their families in the U.S. without fear of deportation and repression. Such a situation would benefit all workers here, as it would more easily allow unionization. It would strengthen the mutual interest of U.S.-born and foreign-born workers, who could then jointly struggle for higher wages and better working conditions.

If the Senate, instead, were competent in helping those capitalists who exploit low-wage immigrant workers, like the owners of large farms and orchards, it would pass a guest-worker program. This would damage the workers’ interests but would stabilize the supply of low-wage labor.

This year, for example, increased repression against immigrants prevented many workers from Mexico and Central America from reaching West Coast farms. The abundant crops rotted in the trees or on the ground, ruining many farmers. This disaster demonstrated how absolutely strategically necessary immigrant workers are to the economy.

Instead of either of the above, the Senate passed a bill to build a 700-mile-long fence on the U.S.-Mexico border in order to prevent Mexicans from entering that half of their own territory that the U.S. had stolen from Mexico in 1848 through a war of territorial expansion. The war ended with a treaty, the Treaty of Hidalgo, that guaranteed Mexicans could always pass over that border.

It was such an insult to pass this bill that even outgoing Mexican President Vicente Fox, a crony of Bush and former Coca-Cola executive, had to register an angry complaint.

The $26 billion authorized by the new bill will serve only to murder more immigrant workers, who will look for a way to cross the border as long as there are jobs here and not in Mexico, whose economy has been undercut by NAFTA—the trade treaty with the U.S. and Canada.

When Congress last winter threatened to pass the even more onerous Sensenbrenner-King anti-immigrant bill, the strongest workers’ demonstrations ever seen in this country were organized by immigrant groups from March until May. What is needed now is solidarity from U.S.-born workers with immigrant workers to build a movement that can say no to the dangerous, reactionary incompetents on Capitol Hill and in the White House.