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    Vol.60/No.25           June 24, 1996 
 
 
Yearn For More Porous Borders  

Two letters came in this week questioning the Militant's stance on immigration. Reader Brian McGarity asks, "Isn't allowing non-tax paying foreign nationals to work in place of union brothers and sisters self-defeating?"

This is not a new discussion in the workers' movement. At the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907, Morris Hillquit, a founder of the U.S. Socialist Party, presented a nationalist view on the question. "Capitalism's importation of foreign labor cheaper than that of native-born workers," Hillquit said, "threatens the native-born with dangerous competition and usually provides a pool of unconscious strikebreakers. Chinese and Japanese workers play that role today, as does the yellow race in general. While we have absolutely no racial prejudices against the Chinese we must frankly tell you that they can not be organized. Only a people well advanced in its historical development, such as the Belgians and Italians in France, can be organized for the class struggle."

Hillquit was answered well by Kato Tokijiro, a delegate from Japan. "The Japanese are under the heel of capitalism just as much as are other peoples," Tokijiro said, after explaining to Hillquit that he was influenced by the racist notion of the so- called yellow peril. "It is only dire need that drives them from their homeland to earn their livelihood in a foreign land. It is the duty of Socialists to welcome these poor brothers, to defend them, and together with them to fight capitalism. The founders of socialism, above all Karl Marx, did not address themselves to individual countries but to all humanity. Internationalism is inscribed on our banner." (The transcript of this debate can be found in Pathfinder's Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International pp. 15-20.)

Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin amplified these points in a later article titled "Capitalism and Workers' Immigration" in the Russian newspaper Pravda in October 1913. "Only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations," Lenin wrote. "And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the ... national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth."

Workers from neocolonial countries immigrate to North America, western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand today in order to escape the unlivable conditions created by imperialism in their homelands.

They are often battle-tested fighters and bring important experiences from the class struggle in their countries of origin, making the working class in the imperialist countries more international and for that reason stronger. It would be self- defeating for the labor movement to see them as "non-tax paying foreign nationals," rather than brothers and sisters who should have equal rights with native-born or immigrants with proper job documents.

Capitalism breeds competition among workers and reinforces prejudices. Rulers pit workers in capitalist countries against each other, against foreign born workers, and against workers in exploited countries, while trying to convince the working class some of us are to blame for all social ills, instead of seeing where the crisis really comes from - the innate development of capitalism.

"The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited," Lenin explained. "Class-conscious workers" realize "that the breakdown of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive."

The bosses have no borders when they want to exploit labor. The national borders of the employing class in each country are defined by the area within which the bourgeoisie can use its currency and its army to protect its currency. The proletariat truly has no country and should not be deceived by the divisions the wealthy rulers seek to foster with their borders.

Unions in the United States should fight to organize and win equal rights for all workers - regardless of their country of origin or whether they crossed the border without checking in with the hated la migra. At the same time, the labor movement should call for the cancellation of the third world debt and offer its unconditional and active solidarity to struggles by workers in Mexico, Brazil, or anywhere in the world. Workers who live and toil in Mexico can take care of organizing themselves.

In reply to our reader from behind bars in Woodbourne - it was the imperialist powers, specifically the British colonizers, who ran the Maori off their land in New Zealand, not immigrant workers. Communists stand for the right to self-determination of the Maori people. But wouldn't Maoris in any powerful upsurge of their struggle against oppression reach out to and politically attract all those who truly want to fight against racism, national chauvinism, imperialist subjugation, and capitalist exploitation? Including immigrant workers demanding equal rights? Proletarian internationalism is a principle all workers and oppressed nations can be won to. That's what the Bolsheviks proved in Russia. - MEGAN ARNEY  
 
 
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