‘DREAM Act’ is Attack on Immigrant Youth

LOS ANGELES, April 7 — We’re fighting to bring people to march with PLP on May Day for internationalism and communist revolution. There were immigrants’ rights marches here the last two Saturdays, giving us a good start. The immigrants’ rights groups are mobilizing for Obama’s “ comprehensive immigration reform” and the DREAM Act. We’re fighting in the streets, schools and factories to make this a struggle to unite the whole working class against the capitalist crisis and show the solution is communism. In the March 28 march, when PLP youth answered every liberal chant with a different one, many others joined in. When we chanted that we’ll have a world without borders, a good section of the march took it up.

Then on April 4, about 2,000 mainly Latino immigrant workers, marched through downtown Los Angeles in support of the DREAM Act, re-introduced in both houses of Congress on March 26. The latest version of this immigration legislation puts undocumented immigrant youth on a path supposedly to citizenship if they’ve lived in the U.S. for at least five years, graduated from high school and completed two years of either college or military service. But the DREAM Act does not change an undocumented immigrant youth’s current ineligibility for government financial aid for college.

For most working-class immigrant youth it’s far easier to join the military than enter college, which is prohibitively expensive. In effect, the DREAM Act offers undocumented immigrant youth the promise of citizenship in exchange for service to U.S. imperialism. In fact, the timing for this Bill fits right into Obama’s current effort to send more troops to Afghanistan. The Pentagon has been a major supporter of the DREAM Act. It would result in 279,000 newly eligible people for either college enrollment or the military, and 715,000 more between ages 5 and 17 in the near future. A contingent of PLP students and teachers participated in the march, leading chants for international working-class unity, and distributed leaflets that explained the fascist nature of immigration reform proposed by the U.S. ruling class.

We passed out 1,600 leaflets which called for marching on May Day with PLP for workers’ unity and communist revolution. We also distributed about 400 CHALLENGES. After the march the PLP group, mainly Latino immigrant high school students, analyzed the illusions created by the DREAM Act among immigrant youth and the need to understand how these type of reform movements ultimately serve the ruling class’s efforts to build patriotism and recruit youth into their army. We also discussed organizing against imperialism in the military. Participating in this DREAM Act march helped PLP youth understand the importance of fighting for revolutionary communist politics that expose how immigration reform potentially can lead workers into supporting U.S. imperialism. The group of students and teachers also vowed to redouble their efforts to bring more youth to march with PLP on May Day.

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.

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.

French Fascists on Racist Rampage vs. Immigrants

PARIS, October 13 — The French government is on a racist anti-immigrant rampage. France’s gendarmerie — the national police force, organized along military lines — is on a war footing to hunt down undocumented immigrants.

Immigrants have been so terrorized that they’re jumping from windows to escape the police. On September 21, Mrs. Chulan Zhang Liu became the fifth immigrant worker in two months to die after leaping from a window.

Ivan, a 12-year-old Russian boy, was seriously injured in late August when he fell from a window during a police round-up in Amiens.

This terrorism has steadily increased over the past five years. On January 11, then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy crowed that, “We deported 24,000 illegal aliens in 2006, which represents an increase of 140% compared to 2002.” His target is deportation of 25,000 immigrant workers this year.

Anthropologist Emmanuel Terray compared the anti-immigrant round-ups to those of Jews in Nazi-occupied France. “Once they’ve decided they want to stop and question people who haven’t committed any particular crime, except that of being here, or else that of being a Jew in 1942,” said Terray, “they…look for them where they are; they set traps for them. You’ve got to know that, at the Belleville metro station, operations of this type take place practically every week. According to what the local people tell me, one week it’s the Chinese, another it’s the Arabs.”

On the police union website, cops have admitted that “the only people who are stopped in these operations are those who are likely to be illegal aliens because of the color of their skin.” (Le Monde, 9/25)

The French government estimates there are up to 400,000 undocumented immigrants in France. Most are workers, especially in construction and restaurants.

The rulers have become so barbaric that, for the first time in ten years, sick people are being deported to countries where they cannot get treatment. Last June, an immigrant worker suffering from hepatitis C was deported against a doctor’s orders.

The National Assembly and the Senate have just passed the Hortefeux law, imposing drastic conditions on family reunification. Under this law, anyone who wants to enter France under the family reunification procedure — including spouses of French citizens — must first pass a French language and “values” test. The legal resident or French citizen with whom they’re being re-united must have an annual income of at least $21,783.

The law also provides that family members from “countries where many documents are fakes” (code language for Africa) must submit to a DNA test to prove they’re related to the person here. People are mobilizing against this racist terror. Last year Marseilles primary-school teacher Florimond Guimard participated in an anti-deportation rally. He followed a police car hauling away a deportee. For that, he was charged with “group violence with an arm” (the “arm” being the car Guimard was driving). He risks three years in prison and a $64,000 fine.

The defense of Guimard has become the rallying cry of the anti-deportation movement. On October 20, there will be nation-wide anti-deportation rallies. But beyond fighting racist deportations, we must destroy the capitalist system that brands some workers as “undocumented immigrants.” That can only be accomplished through communist revolution.