http://themilitant.com/2018/8209/820920.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 82/No. 9 March 5, 2018
(editorial)
Amnesty now! No deportations!
The Socialist Workers Party says, “Stop the deportation of the
‘dreamers.’” We stand for this as part of the fight to win amnesty for
all 11 million workers who don’t have papers recognized by the courts
and the cops in the U.S.
The bosses need a layer of workers without “proper” documents. They want
workers they can pay less, work harder, intimidate and use as scapegoats
to boost profits and divide the working class. The capitalists depend on
this pool of superexploited labor. They cannot compete worldwide and
accumulate capital without it.
The U.S. rulers have never sought to deport all undocumented workers in
the country. What they want is tighter control, so they can speed up or
slow down the flow of cheap labor to match the ups and downs of their
capitalist system.
There is less anti-immigrant sentiment in the working class today than
ever before. U.S.- and foreign-born workers toil side by side in the
same factories; our children go to the same schools; we live in the same
neighborhoods. Workers don’t want to see friends, neighbors and
co-workers torn from their homes and thrown out of the country.
At the same time, anti-immigrant rhetoric from sections of the ruling
class still gets a hearing. When capitalist production and trade fall,
competition for jobs grows in the working class. Workers need a
perspective of how to fight these conditions.
The SWP campaigns for the labor movement to fight for a
government-funded public works program to provide millions of jobs at
union scale to build infrastructure, schools, health clinics, child care
and other things working people need.
Workers in the United States — wherever we were born, whatever language
we speak, whatever our skin color — face the same class enemy. Today
less than 7 percent of workers in private companies belong to a union.
It is only by rejecting the bosses’ dog-eat-dog divide-and-rule moves
that we can organize the working class as a whole, rebuild a fighting
union movement, take steps toward independent political action and
transform our unions into instruments of class struggle.
When there is an economic downturn the fight for the political soul of
the working class intensifies. The stakes are high.
Class-conscious workers fight to win the labor movement and the working
class to demand: Stop the deportations! Amnesty now! Organize the
unorganized!
Related articles:
Demand amnesty for immigrant workers!
Propertied rulers debate who to let in, keep out
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home