The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.37           October 21, 1996 
 
 
Equal Rights For Immigrants!  

The entire labor movement needs to champion the call for equal rights for immigrants. The October 12 march on Washington is a good place to begin by demanding a halt to the bipartisan assaults on the rights and dignity of this section of the working class.

The unions should take the lead in condemning the latest probes against immigrants' rights, approved overwhelmingly in Congress and immediately signed into law by President William Clinton as part of the 1997 budget. The provisions in it, while initially directed against workers born in other countries, will be used by Clinton and other capitalist politicians to gain acceptance for narrowing the democratic rights of all working people.

Doubling the Border Patrol will mean twice as many cops carrying out terrorist acts like the brutal police beating of Mexican workers that sparked protests in Riverside, California, last April. The measures allowing the summary deportation of immigrants seeking asylum will be used to erode workers' expectation of their right to legal protections and appeals.

The anti-immigrant measures in the spending bill build on those included in other anti-working-class legislation enacted by Congress and signed by Clinton, such as the welfare and "antiterrorism" laws. At the same time la migra, the immigration cops, have been stepping up raids at factories in the Midwest and throughout the country.

These attacks are aimed at dividing the working class -at terrifying one section of the class and convincing other workers to view them as less than equal human beings. The capitalist rulers hold up immigrants, particularly the undocumented, as a scapegoat. They want U.S.-born workers to believe that toilers born in other countries are the real cause of unemployment, crime, and the other social and economic crises capitalism breeds.

Clinton tried to portray a kinder image around the new immigration regulations, threatening to veto an earlier version that included barring public health funds for legal immigrants with the AIDS virus. But that probe was just a smoke screen for the real assault on immigrants' rights, on which there is broad bipartisan consensus within the ruling class. The debate among the rulers ranges from Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy's call for clamping down on undocumented workers to "save American jobs," to ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan's anti-immigrant demagogy that he uses to build an incipient fascist movement.

The working class should welcome greater immigration to the United States and other imperialist countries, from France to Australia. It broadens the experience and composition of the working class, bringing together workers from all over the world inside the major capitalist centers. It increases the possibilities to build the international working-class solidarity needed to lead the fight to overturn capitalism, form a government of workers and farmers, and begin constructing a new, socialist society.

Defenders of immigrant rights need to act independently of the capitalist two-party system. We need to be out in the streets, like the sans papiers (undocumented workers) in Paris, who marched along with French-born workers - 20,000 strong on September 28.

No human being is illegal! End the deportations now! Equal rights for all immigrants!  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home