Workers Vanguard No. 1033	1 November 2013

Labor Must Fight for Immigrant Rights!

Immigration “Reform”: Ramping Up Border Crackdown, Guest Worker Servitude

As soon as President Obama emerged victorious in the latest budget wars against the Republican Party, the Wall Street Democrat announced what was next on his agenda: immigration “reform.” There is more than a casual link between the two items. As the spectre of a new financial meltdown loomed, the impasse over the budget and the debt ceiling was resolved only after leading financial titans and industrialists signaled that the intransigence of the Tea Party yahoos was damaging the interests of the capitalist ruling class as a whole. Now Obama aims to push through an immigration overhaul that serves these same interests, beefing up border militarization and reinforcing the brutal exploitation of foreign-born workers as part of an onslaught against the wages and living standards of the entire working class.

Obama was a key mover behind the immigration overhaul contained in Senate bill 744 (S.744), which was drawn up by four Democrats and four Republicans and passed by a two-thirds majority in June. On top of the massive increase in “border security” and the record number of deportations under his watch, totaling some two million, S.744 mandates $40 billion for another 20,000 Border Patrol agents and 700 more miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. The effect would be, as always, to shift the perilous routes taken by desperately impoverished Mexicans and Central Americans trying to cross over, leading to ever more deaths from drowning, dehydration and exhaustion and killings by the Border Patrol.

The border measure originated as an amendment tacked on to win the support of recalcitrant Republicans for the bill’s 13-year “path to citizenship” and its expansion of “guest worker” visas. Strewn with all-but-insurmountable legal and financial obstacles, the “path” would offer the eleven million immigrants only a slim chance of a reprieve at the end of their ordeal. Nevertheless, racist reactionaries in Congress ludicrously decry the measure as an amnesty, much as they denounce Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act—at bottom, a gift to the insurance and health care corporations—as “socialism.” Against the likes of Ted Cruz, the Democrats can even play up their chutes-and-ladders path to citizenship to bolster their electoral support.

Chamber of Commerce types who throw their money at the Republicans fear not only that right-wingers in Congress will torpedo the overhaul package but that the Tea Party’s undisguised hatred of darker-skinned people, foreign-born or native, will continue to cost the party in national elections. Latino votes count large in this calculation. Even Asian Americans, who not too long ago went Republican by a slight majority, now vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

While Republican-controlled state governments in the South and Southwest have enacted draconian anti-immigrant measures, some states run by the Democrats, like California, have loosened up a few restrictions that were irrational from a bourgeois viewpoint. For example, several states have tried to join several cities in opting out of the federal Secure Communities program, under which those jailed for even the most minor offenses have their fingerprints sent to Homeland Security, on the grounds that it makes it more difficult for local law enforcement to police immigrant neighborhoods. While there may be differences in what they say and how they say it, any policy disputes between the Republicans and Democrats boil down to how best to enforce U.S. capitalist rule.

Centrally important to business interests is the Senate bill’s tinkering with the visa program for guest workers. Recruited to fill specific jobs, these workers, who mostly are paid a pittance, are relegated to a netherworld where they lack fundamental rights. In a New York Times (1 September) op-ed piece titled “Subcontractor Servitude,” Jennifer Gordon describes how Jamaican guest workers brought in to clean luxury hotels and condos in Florida were made to pay exorbitant recruitment fees as well as extortionate rents for the tiny apartments they were packed into and then had their paychecks repeatedly bounce. When the fed-up workers went on strike, the subcontractor they worked for threatened that if they did not return to the job, la migra would put them on the next plane home. According to the National Employment Law Project, more than half the jobs added during what passes for the economic recovery in the U.S. have been in low-wage sectors where subcontracting is prevalent, as it increasingly is worldwide.

This situation underscores that defense of foreign-born workers against the capitalists and their state is in the vital interests of the working class as a whole. The vast majority of immigrants are driven to the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries as a result of the entrenched poverty imposed by imperialist subjugation of their homelands. Thus the NAFTA “free trade” treaty, which greatly strengthened U.S. economic dominance of Mexico, spurred a massive increase in emigration. The immigration laws of the capitalist state, which are centrally driven by the need to manage the flow of cheap labor, are necessarily chauvinist and repressive. The economic crisis that erupted in 2007 led to the expulsion of immigrants not only in the U.S. but throughout the capitalist world. In Greece and several other European countries, the increase in official anti-immigrant repression has helped feed an explosive growth in fascist shock troops whose ultimate targets are the trade unions and all other working-class organizations.

We would welcome any measure that provides some actual relief from anti-immigrant oppression—something not on offer with S.744 or the various House bills now being hashed out. But as Marxists, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on an alternative immigration policy, which would mean accepting the parameters of a system based on exploitation and oppression. Our demand is that all immigrants and foreign workers be entitled to immediate and full citizenship rights.

As with the fight against black oppression, which is embedded in American capitalism, the working class must actively combat the bosses’ efforts to pit the native-born against the foreign-born—a divide-and-rule tactic they have used since before the Civil War. The labor movement must fight every instance of wage and other discrimination against immigrants, oppose deportations and undertake concerted action to organize immigrant workers into the unions with full rights. Such struggles would go a long way toward promoting the understanding that the multiracial, multiethnic proletariat has distinct class interests—counterposed to those of the racist, chauvinist capitalist rulers—that must be politically expressed through their own class party.

The pro-capitalist union tops take the exact opposite stance, collaborating with the bosses in regulating the flow of immigrant workers in order to protect their own privileges and reinforce the chains binding workers to the Democrats. In 2007, when Bush was in the White House, Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO officials tried but failed to come up with an agreement on guest-worker visas. But this spring the two sides helped prepare the way for the Senate bill by working out a program that pegs the number of visas to employment needs, up to a maximum of 200,000 annually. The heavily immigrant Service Employees International Union, the mainstay of the Change to Win federation, similarly calls for regulating work visas in line with “the needs of our economy.”

A large number of new visas will be for technical professions, as Silicon Valley and engineering firms clamor for skilled personnel they cannot recruit domestically due largely to the woeful state of U.S. science and math education. But a number will go for hotel, restaurant, farm and other manual labor. From the meatpacking plants and warehouses to the service industries, organizing foreign-born workers will be a crucial part of reviving the unions after decades of the capitalists’ one-sided war against labor. But in the view of the hidebound labor bureaucracy, these same workers mainly represent a threat to remaining union jobs. So in hammering out the visa deal, AFL-CIO bargainers insisted that in the construction industry it would apply only to unskilled workers—a nod to racist job-trusting in the skilled trades unions.

At the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles in September, Maria Elena Durazo, chair of the federation’s Committee on Immigration Reform, defended the leadership’s support to S.744 by pointing to a provision that allows guest workers, who up to now have been bound to a single employer, to change jobs. This is scant solace for those like the Jamaican cleaners who would still be offered the lowest possible wages and face the ever-present threat of deportation. The AFL-CIO chiefs have a critical word or two for the bill’s reinforcing of the E-Verify employment database check, a cornerstone of Obama’s anti-immigrant crackdown that doubles as another weapon for the bosses to break union organizing drives. But far from opposing E-Verify, the labor statesmen simply offered tweaks to the procedure, trying to perfect a measure designed to drive those without papers out of the workforce.

Immigrants have been and will be in the front lines of labor’s fight against its exploiters. A century ago, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin noted in “Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration” (October 1913) that “capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth.” Indeed, from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, immigrants to the U.S. included many militants from Europe who helped forge early labor and socialist organizations, running head-on into open chauvinists like AFL head Samuel Gompers. Immigrant radicals were also instrumental in the founding of the Communist movement in the U.S. and elsewhere. In more recent decades, those from Latin America brought into the U.S. proletariat their experiences of convulsive social and class struggles against murderous U.S.-backed capitalist regimes.

Like doubly oppressed black workers, immigrants will play a leading role in forging a revolutionary proletarian party that will lead the exploited and oppressed masses in sweeping away the decaying capitalist order through socialist revolution. As the Bolsheviks in power did, and as the Paris Communards of 1871 did before them, an American workers government would grant full citizenship rights to all who labor, whatever their origin. Through a series of workers revolutions internationally, a world planned economy will be established, laying the basis for finally overcoming material scarcity and, with that, the last remnants of national borders and class divisions.