When the US House of Representatives passed the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (HR 4437) in December 2005, the politicians did not conceive of the anger and mobilizations it would inspire. The act sought to make it a federal crime to enter the US without papers, to make those who "assist" an immigrant without documentation liable for up to five years in prison, to build a 700-mile fence on the US-Mexico border, and to impose other draconian measures.
The act was such a direct and immediate threat to the many millions of immigrants to the US, mainly Latino, that those with papers and those here "illegally" came out by their millions in a series of demonstrations. The demonstrations took off in March 2006, brought out millions on April 9 and 10, and culminated in the biggest May Day demonstrations in US history. Cities and towns that had never seen public demonstrations of hundreds for any reason saw demonstrations of thousands, as masses of working-class immigrants and their supporters came onto the pavement to push back the racist assault on them.
Twelve million Latino and other "illegal" immigrants normally "hidden" for reasons of legal status, outside of political activity, burst onto the streets in a manifestation of not just their humanity but also their consciousness as workers. Of the many new realities that this movement has been responsible for, the most striking are that the immigrants themselves have come out of the shadows to organize their communities into action, that they have created a specifically Latino movement, and that the movement, because of its social base, its material interests and its solidarity, is overwhelmingly proletarian.
The working-class core of the movement has demanded an end to deportations, amnesty for all workers here illegally, legalization of the undocumented, the reunification of families torn apart by a border that crossed them, no militarization of the US-Mexico border, and an end to raids and arrests by US law-enforcement authorities.
Latinos are not only the largest ethnic minority in the US but also the fastest-growing group of organized workers. Latinos have been at the core of nearly every major labor battle and union-organizing drive in the US over the last period.
US unions, long resistant to immigration, have started organizing immigrant workers and supporting immigrant rights at least in words. UNITE-HERE (clothing and hotel workers) and SEIU (service workers) had tens of thousands of their members marching under the banners and signs of their organizations in the spring demonstrations.
While the core and base of the movement has been working-class, immigrants and their labor are so integral to capitalism's economy, both above and under ground, that many business and commercial interests that rely on immigrants have opposed the new anti-immigrant laws. Many of these support an alternative "guest worker" plan that would permit them to continue to exploit the labor of immigrant workers, while denying immigrant workers the rights of native-born workers. Immigrant labor is too important to the US economy to be eliminated, and there is near-unanimity in the ruling class on the need to find a way to continue to exploit the labor of immigrant workers.Many US capitalists recognize the use of immigrant labor, not just in and of itself, but as a way to keep all wages low through competition among workers and the denial of the right to organize unions, keeping even those here "legally" away from the possibility of collective bargaining at job sites and workplaces where immigrants work.
Thousands of middle-class Latino immigrants have joined the movement and supply much of its leadership. This is a testament not just to the weakness of the organized working class but also to the reality of a genuine cross-class Latino identity that the movement has helped to create and articulate. The racism and xenophobia that is at the center of the House bill and ruling-class discourse about immigration is a direct attack on the rights and position of all Latinos, regardless of class.
While this growing consciousness will have a profound impact on the political struggle in the US over the coming period, working-class Latinos have formed the overwhelmingly majority of movement. Their interests and demands are different from those of the assimilationist middle-class leaders who, after the sea of Mexican and other Latin American flags that accompanied the first of the large demonstrations, successfully urged the participants to return with US flags the next time.
Immigration is inevitable under an international capitalist (imperialist) economy. While the imperialists demand the "free flow" of their capital around the world and "free return" of extracted resources and profit from the economies it has penetrated, the free flow of people is denied. Can there be a more damning indictment of modern capitalism than the reality that it forces down national barriers to its rapacious exploitation and then erects physical barriers to the victims of that exploitation?
Socialists stand for a world without borders, in which human beings are free to work, live and study where they please.
The liberal opposition in the US congress is incapable of waging a real fight for the rights of immigrants, since its main concern is the right of employers to exploit immigrant labor. We echo the demand of the Immigrant Rights Strategy Convention held in Chicago in August 2006 for an immediate moratorium on raids and deportations of immigrants.
The US labor movement as a whole needs to take up this cause and put the struggle against deportations and for full legal rights and an end to discrimination against immigrants at the center of a campaign to organize the unorganized into unions. Without this it will be impossible to unite a working class fractured on national, racial and ethnic lines, and without that unity no victory for the labor movement, even in its strongest and best-organized sectors, is possible.