Mississippi Terror Raid:Workers Shouldn’t Be Suckers for Anti-Immigrant Racism

LAUREL, MISSISSIPPI, August 28 — The Gestapo-like raids carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cops struck again, arresting 595 workers employed by Howard Industries, world’s largest manufacturer of electrical transformers employing 3,000 workers in southeastern Mississippi. And the traitorous AFL-CIO applauded the raid! (See below)

In May, ICE carried out a similar raid, arresting hundreds of workers at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. These raids are terrorizing many small towns nation-wide. At the same time the Laurel raid was taking place, a rumor of an ICE raid in Perry, a small Iowa town 100 miles from Postville, was panicking the Latino community, 25% of Perry’s population.

Hundreds of heavily-armed ICE agents raided Howard Industries’ Laurel and nearby Ellisvile facilities. They arrived in unmarked cars and white vans, sealed the plants and rounded up “suspect” workers, questioning them in mobile trailers.

Just as the Nazis used yellow stars to identify Jews, Latino workers were segregated from other workers. U.S. citizens were given blue armbands to divide them from immigrants. Agents wearing flak vests stopped motorists driving near the plant and told them to leave the area.

The raid’s blatant fascist-like racism shocked many. An immigrant rights group in Jackson, the state capital, criticized the raid, saying families with children were involved. “It’s horrific what ICE is doing to these families and these communities,” said Shuya Ohno, a spokesman for the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. “It’s just hard to imagine that this is the United States of America.” (NY Times, 8/27)

A woman entering a local church with four small children said several of the youngsters’ parents had been detained. The woman, a translator for many of the families, said: “I don’t like this at all. I don’t understand it. They have come here to work. It’s very sad.”

But this is exactly the U.S.A. today, a country led by a ruling class which needs more racism, more fascist terror. The raids’ aim is not really to deport all undocumented workers, or even to find those guilty of “identity theft” as ICE claims. The goal is to terrorize immigrant workers, and all workers, so they accept super-exploitation, rotten working conditions, more social service cutbacks and get used to the kind of mass terror that the bosses and their police agencies will use against ALL workers who refuse to swallow these conditions. These attacks will continue no matter who’s elected the next President.

Plants like this one here will become more important for the bosses’ war machine as it gears for wider wars, from Afghanistan to the Caucasus. The ruling class realizes that the U.S. population is changing. According to Census figures, in several decades most U.S. workers will be immigrants, Latinos or blacks. So racist super-exploitation will be needed more than ever to keep the bosses’ super-profits rolling in.

But this also becomes a contradiction for the bosses: they need those workers they’re terrorizing for their war plants and their military. So, while we might hear a lot of empty talk about “the end of racism” — “after all,” they tell us, “look at Obama” — the opposite is happening.

This makes it primary for PLP to organize among these factory workers, and all workers and soldiers, to win them to fight racism, understanding that capitalism cannot live without racist exploitation. All workers must see these ICE raids as an attack against the entire working class. The AFL-CIO did the opposite here. Rather than unite the workers and organize them all, it pitted unionized workers against immigrant workers.

Robert Shaffer, regional AFL-CIO official, applauded the raid, saying he’s complained for a long time about how companies in southern Mississippi hire undocumented immigrants, disgustingly adding the racist comment that the region “looks like a little Mexico.” The same union traitors who, because of their pro-boss sellout politics, have failed to organize millions of workers — citizens or immigrants — nationwide, are now blaming the victims for their own failures.

Workers who fall for this racist trap are cutting their own throat. We must defend our fellow immigrant workers when the bosses attack. Our motto should be, “All for one and one for all; same enemy same fight, workers of the world, unite!”

All Workers Must Oppose Anti-Immigrant Racism

NEWARK, NJ, August 3 — A multi-racial and international group of 32 people met here today to discuss the fight against anti-immigrant racism. The unity of black and white citizens and immigrant workers (from Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador) is the best way to confront this growing form of racism which affects the entire working class.

An immigrant described the police harassment of day laborers waiting for jobs in an area of Orange, NJ, as “muy malo” (very bad). Elsewhere in New Jersey, homes have been raided and immigrants dropping off their children at school have been issued multiple traffic tickets up to $5,000! This summer two town councils proposed that landlords rent only to people with documentation.

One town, Bound Brook, has since dropped the resolution. The other, Middletown, has tabled it. But with hundreds arrested at factories lately and the racist murder of Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, PA, by six white youth, we felt the urgency to meet and decide on action.

We noted that criminal bosses aren’t arrested for paying dirt wages and physically abusing workers. Because capitalism is based on exploitation of workers, this kind of racist super-exploitation is “legal.” The racist media tries to divide us by blaming the victims — undocumented immigrants — for the bosses’ attacks through the subprime crisis, mass wage and service cuts, and endless wars. Immigrants have historically been the targets of this ruling-class strategy. One woman recalled that her Italian father, who had no documents, suffered similar racist attacks.

In the early stage of the bosses’ “War on Terror” in Dec. 2001, when Middletown teachers struck, the media labeled them “the enemy of children and parents” because “educators’ benefits must be sacrificed” for the bosses’ war efforts; 228 strikers were arrested.

A woman speaker asked us to picture a world without borders based on a society without social inequalities: communism. During the discussion, one man reading CHALLENGE commented, “This paper is very important.”

A social worker from a family-help center said we need to reach out to communities. Members from three churches spoke, too. One Unitarian related what she learned at her June General Assembly: that Boston and Connecticut churches have e-mail chains ready to respond to attacks.

If the tabled anti-immigrant proposal isn’t rejected in Middletown, we plan to go door

Fascist Anti-Immigrant Raids Attack All Workers

In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

POSTVILLE, IOWA, May 29 — The above statement by anti-Nazi Pastor Martin Niemöller is clearly related to the U.S.-Homeland Security Agency’s immigration police (ICE) attack on undocumented immigrants. The Des Moines Register reported (5/12): “Months in planning, Monday’s raid involved 16 local, state and federal agencies, led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).” The largest single workplace raid in U.S. history saw 389 workers — mostly from Guatemala and Mexico — arrested in minutes at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant. They were herded onto buses and interned at the National Cattle Congress Fairgrounds, some 80 miles away in Waterloo. There they were kept in a makeshift camp, behind a chain-link fence, watched by armed immigration officers for three days until processed and sent to jails state-wide.

Nearly 300 have pleaded guilty to reduced charges of document fraud and will serve short prison sentences before being deported, while others await immediate deportation or have been placed on temporary release for compassionate reasons.

The appearance of dozens of buses, helicopters and heavily-armed ICE, state and local cops resembled a scene from a Nazi-era film. And the aim is the same: to terrorize workers.

Rosa, a 40-year-old mother of two, was working on the kill floor that morning when she heard the cries of “la migra” — a warning about ICE cops — ringing through the plant and saw her friends drop their tools and run. She slipped into a freezer and hid among the dead chickens, sitting alone in the cold for several minutes, thinking that everything was over. She would be caught, sent back to Mexico with nothing. The better life she had planned for her children was not to be.

The plant, which produces kosher and non-kosher products, was already a hell for workers, paid less than Iowa’s $7.25-an-hour minimum. The ICE investigation revealed abuses like a supervisor covering a worker’s eyes with duct tape and beating him with a meat hook.

But that wasn’t the main aim of the raid. The company has not been charged with anything, even though accused for years with many health violations. Not much has changed since Upton Sinclair wrote his novel “The Jungle,” exposing horrendous conditions in the meatpacking industry in Chicago and across the Midwest.

The aim of the raid, and many others occurring nation-wide, is not really to arrest those “guilty” of “identity theft.” Its real aim is to terrorize undocumented workers, and all workers, into working for less and less, thereby reaping increasing super-profits for a capitalist system desperate to pay for its wars and economic crisis.

The lie spread by the bosses’ media — and by many of their lapdogs among the union “leaders” — that immigrants are “stealing jobs” from citizen workers is exposed by the fact that, according to a report in the NY Times (5/31), Iowa bosses can’t get enough workers. The state has the second lowest unemployment rate in the country, 50% less than the national rate. Iowa employers are desperately seeking employees. Why? “Companies want to be in Iowa because wages are lower than elsewhere in the nation or region,” says the Times. While the bosses in general approve the idea of terrorizing workers into accepting lower wages, there’s a section that doesn’t want the fascist attackers to go “too far,” to scare off workers from filling these low-wage jobs and limiting their profits.

This fascist attack occurs alongside the growing imprisonment of undocumented workers (see page 2 on the growing U.S. prison population). El Nuevo Herald (Miami Herald Spanish edition), reports (5/28 ) that the jail in Del Verde, Texas, is filled with arrested undocumented immigrants, even though this hasn’t stopped the flow of these immigrants. This and other jails throughout the Southwest are big money-makers for private prison companies that run many of them. The border is also militarized as U.S. and Mexican rulers put their Plan Mexico into operation, under the guise of “fighting the drug cartels,” thereby militarizing the entire region.

The essence of Pastor Niemöller’s 60-year-old declaration is that all workers and their allies must oppose these growing fascist attacks. We in PLP are organizing exactly that, and across all borders.

Shades of Hitler: Anti-Immigration Pogroms Rising

ARIZONA, Feb. 12 — The Giants-Patriots championship game was one of the most exciting Super Bowls in recent history. In the U.S, almost 100 million watched it on TV. But there’s another side to this game, almost ignored by everyone. It had a touch of the racism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics when in the middle of another sporting event attracting millions, Hitler put forward his racist “master race” garbage. But the black runner Jesse Owens upset Hitler’s applecart by winning four track events.

Somewhat similarly, while millions were enjoying the Super Bowl in Arizona, the same state’s politicians who were hosting the championship game were — along with their cops — in the forefront of pogroms against immigrants occurring nationwide. The NY Times (2/12) reports about the situation in Arizona: “The signs of flight among Latino immigrants here are multiple: Families moving out of apartment complexes, schools reporting enrollment drops, business owners complaining about fewer clients.”

The Sherrif’s Department runs ads asking people to report on undocumented immigrants. Local politicians are behaving like the Minutemen. “It’s like a panic here,” said Ms. León, a daycare worker. “This is all having an effect on the community, mostly emotional.”

But Arizona is not alone with these pogroms. Last week, there were protests in Danbury, Conn., because local cops can now legally behave like immigration agents. On February 7, ICE (Immigration cops) raided a plant near Salt Lake City, Utah, arresting 50 workers. Virtually simultaneously, ICE raided Micro Solutions Enterprises, a Van Nuys, California plant making parts for copier machines, and arrested 120 workers.

The ICE cops arrested over 7,000 immigrant workers last year just raiding workplaces, and they plan to arrest even more this year. It’s no coincidence that these fascist-like raids are occurring amid an economy meltdown and rising unemployment. The bosses, their politicians and cops want workers to blame other workers (undocumented immigrants) for the problems caused by capitalism itself.

Undocumented immigrants didn’t run scams like subprime mortgages, stealing billions from working-class families, and are not in charge of the endless wars spurring this capitalist meltdown. Workers who fall for these racist pogroms scapegoat undocumented immigrants are cutting their own throats. These Gestapo-type raids will also be used against any workers fighting cutbacks, layoffs, plant closings, etc.

We in PLP believe that a divided working class is the best weapon the bosses have to make ALL workers pay for their crisis and wars. Now more than ever, our slogan must be, “Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world, unite.

Black Students Lead Action Vs. Racist Minuteman Honcho

SOUTHWEST –– Chris Simcox, founder of the racist anti-immigrant Minuteman Civil Defense Corps recently returned to a university in the Southwest.  He previously visited the campus in April (see CHALLENGE, May 9), and was shut down by a multi-racial coalition of about 700 students and workers led by friends of PLP members.  It was the largest demonstration in campus history.

This semester, the same conservative student group brought Simcox to campus again. Because of the success of the last protest, the police attempted to crack down on any further show of multi-racial protest. This time, instead of five cops, there were 15. The event was held inside an auditorium rather than outside in the “free speech” zone. Also, to get inside the auditorium, you had to show a valid photo ID and write your name on a sign-up sheet. Although it seemed problematic to get in, many students wanted to do some sort of protesting to counteract and hopefully shut down his racist speech.

In order to stop this event, we needed a plan. So, before the protest started at 2:00, we passed out 500 flyers that showed the ties between the Minutemen and white supremacist groups and called for all students and workers to unite to shut Simcox down.  A group of about 30 black students were outraged to hear that Simcox was at their campus again. One student said, “I remember him from last semester, isn’t he that racist guy who got booed off stage?” Another stated his anger toward Simcox because he is “no better than the Klan.” They all seemed to be right-on with forcing him to leave their campus.

We then planned for everyone to meet near the entrance of the auditorium early and all but two people were going to go inside to shout Simcox down. When it got to be 2:00, the whole group of black students got out their ID’s and walked together towards the booth where they had to give their information. The doors suddenly closed and the cops denied them access. The cops explained that they were ordered not to let anyone inside the auditorium past 2:00. It was 2:02. The group of students was even more outraged…especially after witnessing the cops granting access to a white person at 2:04! My friend and I talked with them about options to act against the blatant racist actions of the school and police. One student suggested, “We should have an old-fashion sit-in.” My comrade and I explained how silent or peaceful protests would not show the school that we are not going to tolerate them allowing a racist to speak on our campus. So we all picked up posters and started chanting, “Minutemen, Nazis, KKK…Racists, Fascists, Go Away!”

Inside, about 15 anti-racists sat together and when Simcox came out to speak, they all stood up and started chanting for him to go home.  After a few minutes, they were forced to leave by the cops. When they walked out of the auditorium, they were greeted by dozens of black students chanting “Hitler rose, Hitler fell, racist Minutemen, Go to Hell!” The police made several attempts to shut us all up by taking away our posters and trying to separate us, but we remained together and stole our posters back. We demonstrated collectively and when the cops tried to tell us that we were not in a “free speech zone” we just chanted louder.

After Simcox left, we were able to speak with all the students who had protested. We got their phone numbers and invited them to a student meeting in which we were going to talk about what happened and relate it to the capitalist system as a whole.

The fact that so many black students showed up to oppose Chris Simcox was an important step in breaking the ideology that claims the Minutemen only affect the Hispanic community. We want to replace this idea with and understanding of how racism against one “race” hurts all workers. Our experience showed us the possibilities of working together in opposition to ruling-class ideology. It solidified for us the reality of needing to attack racism as one class: the working class against the ruling class.

Multi-racial Protestors Drive off Border Watch KKK

Chanting “Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras!” (“The workers’ fight has no borders!”), a multi-racial group of workers, documented and undocumented, sent the racist vigilante U.S. Border Watch packing.

The Border Watch, like many such anti-immigrant groups, has recently been expanding its “operations.” They’re notorious for harassing day laborers waiting for work at pick-up sites.

Just two days prior to the event, our PLP club heard of the Border Watch’s plan for an anti-immigrant demonstration in our city. We quickly called friends and supporters and together wrote a leaflet exposing racist anti-immigration policies, from France to the U.S., urging all workers to stand united against racism and the capitalist bosses who profit from it.

The day of the event (and prior to our arrival), many fearful migrant workers went into hiding as the Border Watch thugs bullied their way around. However, our arrival on the street emboldened many day laborers, who then joined our anti-racist ranks.

Because the Border Watch Klan was just across the street, one day laborer, unsure of whose side we were on, approached us to ask if we were with the Border Watch or not. I explained we were opposing them and stood united with the workers.

At first he could not believe that students and workers would stand with them against the Border Watch Klan, but he soon joined in our anti-racist chants.

We quickly outnumbered the Border Watch, who feared our counter-attack. Together the crowd chanted, “Obreros, unidos, jamas seran vencidos!” (“Workers, united, will never be defeated!”) and drove the Border Watch racists down the street, away from the day-labor site.

As our numbers grew, it became clear that the racist capitalist system favored the Border Watch thugs when a row of police cars barricaded the workers on one side of the street, protecting the Border Watch Klan from harm’s way.

As the demonstration wore on, misleaders from LULAC (a Latino political action group) and organizers of the Cesar Chávez March Committee appeared to try to steer our anti-racist militancy into a display of liberal patriotic nationalism. This can be just as dangerous as the nationalism of groups like the Border Watch. The bosses employ both ideologies in order to win workers on both sides to fight and die for U.S. imperialism at home and abroad.

By the close of the demonstration, many workers were won over to PL’s militant anti-racism. They were eager to meet with us afterward to plan future actions. We made many new contacts and will continue to struggle with other workers as we fight against the racist capitalist system. Only communist revolution will free workers from racism and nationalism.

Defend Anti-Racists Who Disrupted Fascist Anti-Immigrant Vigilantes

MORRISTOWN, N.J., January 28 — Two anti-racist protestors who were arrested last July for militantly disrupting a fascist anti-immigrant rally will be put on trial February 13 here on charges of “disorderly conduct” and “defiant trespass.” A conviction in this frame-up could lead to jail time.

On July 28, 2007 in this town with a growing immigrant population, several hundred anti-racist protestors gathered to oppose the latest in a series of fascist groups rallying and spreading their racist, anti-immigrant venom. Billed as an “anti-illegal-immigrant rally,” and including groups with names such as the “ProAmerica Society” and “You Don’t Speak for Me,” the anti-immigrant racists were welcomed to the steps of City Hall with open arms and the use of the city’s electricity for their sound system by Donald Cresitello, the Democratic mayor of Morristown. KKKresitello had recently made national news by applying to have his police force deputized as immigration cops, over the objection of most people who live in Morristown and even of the town’s police chief.
The prosecutor is pressing to bring the two brave anti-racist fighters to trial. It is critical that as many people as possible attend the trial to show the defendants that we support their courage and to show Morristown officials and anti-immigrant fascists throughout the U.S. that we will not be intimidated and that we will confront them wherever they dare raise their murderous heads.

While anti-immigrant groups claim to only want enforcement of immigration laws, they are truly the new face of the Ku Klux Klan. Since that day in Morristown, immigrants all over the U.S. have been the victims of laws enacted to criminalize the act of hiring or renting apartments to undocumented immigrants. There are growing numbers of physical attacks on those perceived to be immigrants by racists such as those who came to Morristown.

These gutter fascists are only one side of the coin. Terroristic raids by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) immigration police have also spread. Some of the most vicious immigration raids have been conducted in Morristown itself, including one in which the ICE cops questioned a 5-year-old child about the whereabouts of her uncle, while holding a gun to her mother’s chest. And in Mount Kisco, NY, a town cop has been charged in the murder of Rene Perez, an immigrant town resident. An audio tape was recently released on which Mount Kisco cops can be heard mocking the death of Mr. Perez to the lyrics of an old song “Walk Away Renee.”

The Republican presidential candidates are now trying to outdo each other in who can be the most disgustingly anti-immigrant in their proposals. Any act or policy of one candidate that can be described as “pro-immigrant” is immediately pounced on by all the others. The Democrats are slicker. They are clearer about the ruling class’ need to enlist many young immigrants into the military. The DREAM Act and proposed “legalization” programs are schemes to win immigrants to patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice for the rulers in imperialist oil wars.

One group of protestors in Morristown that day last summer decided to show its opposition by gathering and praying in a church parking lot on the other side of town. But most anti-racists knew that protesting from a distance would do nothing to stop these virulent anti-immigrant racists. PLP led a spirited group of protestors who knew that only by confronting these groups directly and refusing to allow them to spew their hatred unchallenged can we hope to bring a stop to their racist movement. Come to Morristown on Feb. 13 and support the anti-racists facing these phony charges!

Fresh Direct’s Anti-Immigrant Attack Is Rotten to the Core

NEW YORK CITY, December 23 — Two recent stories show how the racist noose, Jena-style, is tightening around the necks of undocumented immigrants, thereby sharpening exploitation of all workers and intensifying fascist control in the U.S.

On December 20, two days before a vote to have the United Food and Commercial Workers Union represent warehouse workers at Fresh Direct here, a multi-racial group of unionists and community and church groups rallied to support them. The bosses at Fresh Direct, a rapidly-expanding company that raked in a $240 million profit in 2007, fired hundreds of undocumented workers. They had threatened the workers with deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which the company had invited to the warehouse. Fresh Direct bosses are deliberately using ICE to divide and defeat the union drive.

A black worker, responding to an ad for a job there, encountered a comrade and later joined the rally. “I’m against deporting workers who’ve been working in the U.S. and dividing their families,” he declared.

Our ability to fight exploitation and criminalization of undocumented workers depends on such an internationalist working-class outlook and an increasing willingness of all workers to fight back for our class, not on uniting with the politicians for so-called immigration reform. In fact, a key element of such “reform” will be a guest-worker program that will allow bosses like those at Fresh Direct to “legally” super-exploit and divide workers.

On December 13 about 80 people held a candlelight vigil sponsored by the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) at Manhattan’s ICE Center, where immigrants awaiting deportation are processed before being sent to detention centers. Nearly two million people have been deported in the last decade; ICE detains more than 280,000 a year.

The NSM flyer exposed the fact that “New York City collaborates with ICE in many ways: In 2006 the City’s Dept. of Corrections received over $18 million from the federal government in exchange for targeting non-citizens, more that any other city in the country….Without revealing their identities, ICE officers routinely question and then detain suspected non-citizens caught up in the criminal justice system, many of whom have yet to be convicted or even charged with a crime.”

The New Sanctuary stance to protest in the streets against raids and racist terror is a welcome development. But the struggle must sharpen. Immediately after the vigil participants arrived, a handful of gutter racists from Morristown, NJ appeared with whistles, American flags and signs saying, “Deport them all.” A comrade chanted in their faces. “We are workers, we’re not illegals,” trying to win the protestors to stand up to the racists. A few protesters joined her, but most chose to ignore them, saying, “Don’t worry. Our message is stronger than theirs.”

The comrade pointed out that allowing such racists to go unchallenged permits the growth of violent racism that historically results in fascist genocide. She explained how Morristown racists throw rocks and bottles at day laborers in New Jersey and work with politicians like Morristown Mayor Crisitelli and Colorado Senator Tancredo. But while Tancredo proclaims he’s made “immigration a front-burner issue,” it’s the liberal ruling class that’s primarily behind the legalization of fascist treatment of immigrants.

They don’t want to deport most of the undocumented immigrants, just enough to terrorize them and all workers in order to super-exploit them even more. These liberals want to use the so-called Dream Act to force undocumented youth to serve as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and militarize the U.S./Mexico border, all in the name of “national security.” A couple of the comrade’s good friends later told her they agreed with her and that we need to discuss the issue in the Sanctuary group.

History teaches us that capitalism is built on racist exploitation and that defeating fascist terror requires a revolutionary communist party. PLP’ers join mass organizations like the Sanctuary Movement to bring these ideas to workers and their allies.

Spitzer’s Licensing ‘Gift’ Really Nazi ‘Yellow Star’

In October, New York’s liberal democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer, proposed allowing undocumented immigrants to get drivers’ licenses. The “immigrant rights” movement pushed the idea that Spitzer was taking a bold, pro-immigrant stance.

Spitzer’s plan was developed not out of concern that undocumented workers need to be able to drive to and from work legally, and to get car insurance, but rather “as a way of bringing a hidden population into the open.” This fits with “homeland security” concerns consistently pushed by the Democrats. Some right-wing flunkies of the ruling class favor licensing undocumented workers. Colonel Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney and West Point professor, figures this plan would address the problem of “hundreds of thousands of people run[ning] around the country without any oversight when there’s a war going on.” (NYT, 10/9/07)

But even that sham was too much for the openly anti-immigrant racists. Many upstate New York county clerks indicated that if the plan was enacted, they would simply disobey it. Within weeks, Spitzer held a meeting and then a joint press conference with Michael Chertoff, the head of the fascist Office of Homeland Security, and announced that New York would agree to a three-tiered driver’s license program. That plan would have given undocumented immigrants a license which could not be used to travel across borders or to fly, and would have left them open targets, easily identifiable by cops and immigration agents.

Spitzer’s apartheid licensing system would have led undocumented workers into the eagerly waiting arms of immigration agents (ICE) just as surely as the yellow stars on their clothes led Jews to the waiting arms of the Nazis. However, Lou Dobbs, CNN’s ranting racist, and his fellow media apologists for the ruling class, continued their vitriolic campaign, viewing even this plan as a “gift” to these workers. Within days, Spitzer announced that he was withdrawing the entire proposal.

Unfortunately, many workers still believe that liberal Democrats will look after their interests and protect them from the ravages of the gutter racists. Each of Spitzer’s proposals, however, shows the error of that belief. The liberals simply have a different way of building fascism. They know that the wider wars of the future require winning immigrants to patriotism, while maintaining a level of terror to keep workers in line. That is why they keep Dobbs & the Minuteman racists around, and allow them to build their movement.

Liberal Democrats are no more the friends of the working class than are the gutter racists. Today, we fight against all forms of racism and fascism, and for the international unity of the working class. Once our struggle is won, members of the working class will not have to carry an identification card to prove our entitlement to the fruits of our labor.

Racist Attack in Spain Hallmark of Capitalism

The recent kick in the face and groping of a young Ecuadorean immigrant by a racist thug on a commuter train here revealed the extent of racism in Spain. This racist attack became worldwide news because it was filmed by a train’s videocamera. The young girl (a minor) was so traumatized and fearful that she refused to leave her house and denounce the attack until it became public. But the young punk is out on bail and now claims he was “drunk” and “doesn’t remember a thing.”

Such attacks are not isolated. They occur daily throughout Spain. Local authorities and politicians in some areas openly support these racist gangs. But the biggest racist attack immigrant workers suffer is the super-exploitation of their labor, with miserable wages and in many cases semi-slave-like working conditions.

The union hacks and the official “left” refuse to fight racism but openly collaborate with the bosses’ attacks on the entire working class — selling out strikes and militant actions by rank-and-file workers. This has prevented some young workers from seeing that unity with all workers — not joining racist neo-Nazi gangs — is the only way out of the alienation and misery of capitalism.

Leaders of immigrant workers’ organizations are also partly to blame. They prefer to separate themselves from all workers in Spain in order to get some public crumbs (grants, etc.) from the authorities.
The fragmentation of the working class here is a big problem — strengthened by the division of workers into different regional areas (Basques, Catalonians, Galicians, etc.). The racist and national oppression under capitalism can only be fought with the multi-racial and multi-national unity of Spain’s entire working class. This unity is now more crucial than ever since the subprime and other crises hitting world capitalism (real estate speculation was huge here, as in the U.S., the UK, Ireland, etc.) are causing Spain’s economy to reel.

Racism is a universal aspect of capitalism, from Jena, Louisiana, to Barcelona. We must fight it with an internationalist ideology and anti-racist unity of the working class. That has been the politics PLP and CHALLENGE have fought for since its beginning.