Which way for the immigrant struggle?

The week before the March and Rally for Immigrant Rights set for Oct. 21 in New York City, sponsored by the newly formed New York United for Immigrant Rights, Workers World talked to Teresa Gutierrez, a leading organizer of the May 1st Coalition. The May 1st Coalition is a member of NYUIR.

WW: The Oct. 21 demonstration comes about six months after the huge protest marches that swept the country last spring. Looking back on those protests half a year later, how would you characterize them?

Gutierrez: The massive demonstrations of immigrants last spring were a phenomenal step forward for the class struggle in this country. The spring mobilizations were a welcome development not least because there has been such a longstanding period of reaction. It had appeared that the capitalist ruling class and its representatives in the U.S. government had the upper hand completely, and that the mass struggle was dormant.

But then came the demonstrations of March, April and May. This development shook the ruling class. It frightened and deeply worried them. It gave a glimpse, even in the midst of periods of reaction, of the vast, crucial struggles that are on the horizon. This is the meaning of the actions carried out last spring by a vital and previously unheard-from section of the working class: that everyone who witnessed them knew that they were a glimpse of the future.

Why haven’t these huge numbers been seen again in the months since?

Massive demonstrations of millions of people, especially demonstrations as thoroughly working-class in character as those last spring, made up as they were of some of the most oppressed strata of our class, are difficult to sustain. There are practical considerations. For example, many who attended the demonstrations missed work and lost a day’s pay. How many times can a worker do that in a given period?

It would be at a different phase in the struggle that we would see millions continue to come out month after month, week after week. Sustained protests in the streets of that size and character would be a revolutionary or near-revolutionary development. We are not in such a period yet.

And it’s not just the immigrant-rights movement where you see this. The anti-war movement is at nowhere near the level of struggle that we wish, the level that would be commensurate with the atrocities being carried out by U.S. imperialism in Iraq and elsewhere. There should be outrage at the racist, gross way the media is treating North Korea right now, but the U.S. has been very successful in demonizing North Korea. The reality is that none of the progressive movements are currently able to sustain an ongoing high level of mobilization and mass struggle.

How did the bourgeois media view the immigrant-rights protests?

Bourgeois pundits in the mainstream media paid and are still paying close attention to the state of the immigrant-rights movement. They are deeply interested. After all, when millions of workers demonstrate, and one of those demonstrations is on a weekday, May Day no less, and workers stay out of work to take to the streets, you can be sure they are monitoring the situation closely.

When the demonstrations that many groups called in September turned out to be nowhere near as big as those last spring, the bourgeois commentators declared that the movement was dead.

But it isn’t?

Not at all. It’s true that organizers around the country report a tepid mood now among immigrants. But this is not because they’ve lost interest or hope. And it doesn’t at all mean that the struggle won’t flare up again. But the reality is that, although the mass demonstrations had a huge impact, and succeeded in getting the repressive Sensenbrenner bill defeated in Congress, the reactionary anti-immigrant offensive is rolling forward. And it has a chilling effect.

Can you detail some of the specifics of this offensive?

The Senate voted to allocate $6 billion to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. This is one of the worst outrages.

At the same time, massive raids are being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. In cities across the country, ICE is trying to push immigrant workers further underground and terrorize them away from organizing and fighting for their rights. These ICE sweeps are similar to the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.

According to the Detention Watch Network, from April through September of this year, 3,704 immigrants were picked up in these raids. News accounts report that as a result, some neighborhoods are turning into ghost towns. These numbers, by the way, could be a conservative count since most of the statistics come from ICE news releases which could be underreporting the scope of the raids.

In addition to the border wall and the ICE raids, local and state governments, most notably in Pennsylvania and Arizona but also elsewhere, have been passing vicious anti-immigrant legislation. So all in all, there is a calculated attempt to create a thoroughly intimidating and threatening climate for immigrant workers, especially the undocumented. A friend and comrade just sent me an email from Philadelphia where a local pizza shop, Geno’s, had a huge sign on its front door: “If you are legal, come in, if you are illegal, go home.”

This is all a result of the immigrant-bashing sweeping the country. Lou Dobbs, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, the Minutemen—the diatribes from these forces create the conditions for these kinds of hateful racist acts.

But the ruling class doesn’t really want to get rid of immigrant workers, does it?

Without immigrant labor, the economy would collapse. So why the witch hunt? To drive immigrants further underground. To further manipulate this reserve army of labor.

This is also deeply connected to the economic crisis workers face in this country. The Million Worker March Movement wrote in a piece directed to the immigrant-rights struggle that “the corporations want to super-exploit immigrant workers. They just don’t want to be responsible for paying them the value of their labor or to provide social services and basic democratic rights. They are using the anti-immigrant legislation to mask the truth about the massive unemployment and the crisis facing U.S. workers and the huge financial debt of the government.” The MWMM said the bosses are “trying to make immigrants the scapegoats for the crisis. This criminalization is also aimed at creating a xenophobic hate of foreigners against the rising tide of change developing throughout Latin and South America that challenges U.S. global policies.”

This perspective focuses on immigrant workers as part and parcel of the class struggle in this country. And this is right on, and a real contribution to the debate. It says that attacks against immigrants must be seen as attacks on all workers. Otherwise the ruling class can pit immigrants and U.S.-born workers against each other to the detriment of all except the bosses.

The immigrant-rights movement has to do its part as well, reaching out to the African-American community, building unity. Links should especially be made to the survivors of Katrina and the activists who are fighting on their behalf. It would be a powerful movement if these two struggles genuinely linked up and marched forward hand in hand.

The ruling class goes out of its way to foster divisions between the Latin@ and Black communities, because the bosses know that if the Black and Latin@ communities unite they are a powerful force, a mighty force, one that can unite the struggle of all the immigrants from Asia, the Pacific, Africa and all over the world.

We must also be passionately working to win over U.S.-born workers of all nationalities to come out in solidarity with immigrants. We need to call on the labor movement to step forward. We need anti-war forces to join up with us, progressive clergy, other social forces—we have to make this a movement in which the immigrants are not on their own, but are buttressed on all sides by allies who stand with them and refuse to be divided.

So you see this as key to moving forward?

Absolutely. We need unity, a multinational united force, to build on the gains made from the demonstrations last spring and reignite the momentum that we saw was so powerful.

We need to boost immigrant workers and show them that they are not alone. We need to build confidence and raise consciousness among immigrants, including those without documents, pointing toward the great outpourings of last spring and also toward current developments in Mexico, the Philippines and elsewhere, where workers are in motion.

The Oct. 21 demonstration will be an important step in this direction. It will show that the immigrant-rights movement is still very much in motion, developing, building, growing. No matter the size of the demonstration on the 21st, what is important that the momentum continues.

It’s really important to be clear that the movement is ongoing, that it’s heading forward, that mobilizing has already begun for a massive national demonstration for immigrant rights on May 1, 2007, so that those immigrant workers who may have a wait-and-see attitude at this point can see that there is a basis for coming out into the streets again.

At the same time, we have to understand that this is a dynamic struggle. It ebbs and flows. Not every demonstration will draw a million people—but every demonstration, every meeting, every action will be a blow against the racist anti-immigrant forces, and I’m confident that step by step, day by day, this movement will grow. The government can pass anti-immigrant laws but those laws will be repealed in the streets, I fully believe.

When immigrants in this country, whether documented or undocumented, again enter the class struggle in the United States, they can change everything in this country. It was the struggle of immigrants in the U.S. that led to the historic International Women’s Day as well as May Day. Immigrants will make that kind of history again. That page is just around the corner.