Airline officials have admitted the disaster was caused by a mechanical failure and are focusing on the tailfin, which tore off in midair. The crash came three months after Newsday reported that a task force of aviation industry and government regulators investigating the 1996 crash of TWA flight 800 determined it was "too expensive to make aircraft fuel tanks less flammable" and is cheaper for the airline industry to allow future explosions, with the resulting deaths. This is yet another example of how safety and human life are being sacrificed on the alter of profit for big business.

Airline safety will continue to deteriorate under the profit drive of the aerospace and airline companies until the labor movement wages a fight for safer operations of the industry. Only when the unions fight for universal social security protection, real health and safety enforcement, and effective protection of the environment--regardless of the consequences for any boss--will we be capable of reversing the disastrous trend in the airline industry.

The crash has also brought into the open how American and TWA use their monopoly over travel to Santo Domingo to gouge Dominican workers with outrageously expensive airfares.

All working people should denounce the inhumane treatment by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which is denying visas to Dominicans who want to come to the United States to retrieve the bodies of their relatives and loved ones. We should denounce the federal government's refusal to grant amnesty to all Dominicans without papers who want to bury their family members in their own country and come back to the United States where they live and work, and join the demand by Dominicans for immediate immigration waivers.

The response by the INS to the crash is simply an extension of the everyday attacks on the dignity and rights of a growing section of the U.S. working-class. Long-standing strict limits on legal immigration force hundreds of thousands of toilers from the semicolonial world to enter the U.S. without papers each year. Under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed into law by William Clinton, the INS was expanded into the largest federal cop agency, one that has stepped up factory raids and deportations which have reached record numbers in recent years. Also in 1996, under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the government is allowed to hold immigrants in "preventative detention" indefinitely on the basis of "secret evidence."

These repressive measures, far from aiming to stem the inflow of labor from the Americas and elsewhere, are intended to heighten insecurity and fear among immigrants. The wealthy rulers hope to intimidate this layer of the working class, and make them believe they are "illegal," in order to maintain them as a superexploitable labor pool and discourage their involvement in the labor movement and other social struggles.

The harassment of Dominicans surrounding the American Airlines crash an outrage of the American "justice" system that must be answered.

Equal rights for all immigrants!

Grant immediate waivers to the Dominicans now!
 
 
Related article:
Dominicans demand immigration waiver after airliner crash  
 
 
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