“I would not be here if it wasn’t for the support of hundreds of people like yourself around the world,” replied Calero. Brown responded: “We know all about that. It was exactly the same here. We [strikers] were 40 people in a cast of thousands.”

Workers at the metal factory, a majority of them immigrants and women, won a union agreement, or contract, during the strike. As their fight progressed they reached out to other unionists for financial support and reinforcements on the picket line.

Calero visited Sydney during his international “Fight to Win” tour to speak on the lessons of his defense campaign and thank those who helped win his fight to remain a permanent resident in the United States.

Defense campaign supporters held a public meeting the evening before the McMahon visit. Calero told the 15 people present that his defense was not fought primarily in the legal arena. “Nothing had changed with the laws” used by the rulers against hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, he said. “What changed in my case was the fight they did not expect”—a fight organized so that “even if we didn’t win we would make the government pay the highest political price.”

Ron Poulsen spoke for the Communist League. “The labor movement in Australia faces similar attacks on immigrant workers as part of a broader assault on workers rights,” he said. “The government’s actions have included seldom publicized factory raids to grab workers without papers and the brutal expulsion or detention of thousands of asylum-seekers labelled ‘boat people.’”

Participants asked about the campaign for the release of the five Cuban revolutionaries imprisoned in U.S. jails, the struggles of immigrant workers in the United States, and the impact of Washington’s new “national security” laws.

Calero also spoke at a lunchtime meeting of 10 people at the Bankstown campus of the University of Western Sydney. One student asked him for suggestions on waging the campaign to close the detention centers where asylum seekers are held and end the brutal treatment they face. The question sparked a wider discussion. Calero explained that this “was a question not just for immigrants but for the entire working class.”

Calero also met meat packers at Primo, a large plant where several workers had supported his campaign, and workers at the Rheem water heater factory, where there have been rolling stoppages and company lockouts over a new enterprise contract.
 

That was how Róger Calero, an editor of Perspectiva Mundial and staff writer for the Militant, described his defense campaign on student radio K103 here September 8 during his visit to this city in the south of Sweden.

Andreas Bergerheim, a member of the Young Socialists, joined Calero in the interview. Young supporters in Sweden of the socialist worker had moved into action as soon as they heard of his arrest last year, he said. “We started to collect names and send letters,” said Bergerheim, “mainly by asking people in working-class suburbs like Angered.”

Asked whether there are similar cases in Sweden, Bergerheim explained that he had “met with young people in Hagfors who had guarded a Salvadoran family from being deported for several weeks, 24 hours a day. It was a real social struggle. They had the support of the whole community.” He also talked about the fight of Nadina, a young Bosnian girl who faced deportation despite a severe eye sickness that would not be treatable in her native country. Nadina and her family were deported September 12.

At a public meeting in Angered the next day, Calero was welcomed by Martha Hernández, a cleaner at a meatpacking plant. She said that after being approached by a co-worker she had signed a petition to defend his right to stay in the United States. Catharina Tirsén spoke on behalf of the Communist League.

In the discussion Calero noted that he had found out about similar attacks on immigrant workers in each country that he had visited.

He spoke by phone with one of the youth who had taken part in the Hagfors fights. She told him that one family member had his visa application approved, and the rest of the family plan to renew their applications.

“I never thought we could win this,” she said. “Sometimes that is what you think when you are in the middle of the fight,” Calero said. “But if you just keep fighting and reaching out like you did, you have the best chances of winning.”

Dag Tirsén contributed to this article.  
 
 
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