By N. IRAZÚ
The immigrant movement is now at the center of struggle within the United States. It is the spearhead of Donald Trump’s racist and anti-worker policies. In his position as president—and toying with the idea of staying that way indefinitely—he decided to use the immigrant population of Los Angeles as a laboratory for his mass deportation campaign. FBI and ICE agents swept up thousands of immigrants from their workplaces, stores, churches, and schools.
Protesters in Los Angeles did not remain silent. They confronted ICE and its Gestapo tactics in the streets. The Trump administration, in mid-June, then used this resistance as a pretext to put Los Angeles under de facto military occupation, mobilizing the California National Guard and deploying the Marines against the people of LA.
The cruelty of the immigration raids in Los Angeles and elsewhere sparked huge protests throughout the country, and were a major theme of the massive No Kings marches on June 14. The response of the masses to this campaign of terror cannot be minimized; nor can the fact that it is a campaign of terror be denied.
The immigrant struggle in this country is nothing new; the weight of the immigrant proletariat in the class struggle in the U.S. has always been felt. It is a proletariat kept under a regime of exception, living between deportation and legality, super-exploited by the owners of industry and commerce in this country.
The Chicago martyrs, immigrants whose blood gave rise to May Day, staged the Haymarket Revolt, which occurred on May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square, Chicago. The Great Immigrant Strike of 2006, under the Republican administration of George W. Bush, where millions of immigrant workers and their allies refused to accept anti-immigrant measures, demonstrated the power of this section of the working class in our own time. They brought here the traditions of struggle from their native lands, reinforcing the living history of the American workers’ struggle.
While Trump seeks to subdue and terrorize the immigrant proletariat across the country—and at the same time that thousands of people are rising up in repudiation of this offensive—the Democratic Party offers nothing but nice words and legal maneuvers in the face of an openly illegal siege by the National Guard and Marines. To let oneself be carried away by the siren song of the Democrats would be to sign the death warrant of the struggle against this government; it would be to give up the only possibility of liberation—to stay in the streets.
We have to organize ourselves independently of the parties of the rich. Organizing our neighborhoods, our universities, and our workplaces will be crucial to building a collective response, defending ourselves, and resistance. No other force will stop this offensive.
The struggle has already established links with the trade unions, partly in response to repression by the government itself, which continues to lash out at the organized proletariat. Union leaders such as David Huerta of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) have been arrested. Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a member of SMART (International Association of Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers), was deported to a concentration camp for immigrants in El Salvador. Student-workers such as Mahmoud Khalil (Columbia University) and Rümeysa Öztürk (Tufts Univerisity), affiliated with the UAW (United Auto Workers), have been persecuted for their public support for the cause of Palestinian freedom, a people subjected to occupation and genocide by Israel, with the backing of both the Republican and Democratic Parties.
We must call on the unions to denounce these attacks and to stand up in unceasing struggle against the government’s terror campaign. Activists should help raise awareness among the unions’ rank-and-file membership about the need for solidarity in this struggle and about the power that workers have. As the attacks we are experiencing continue to increase, only the working class can respond to them decisively.
We have to raise the need for working-class action (picket lines, strikes, slowdowns, etc.)`to counter these policies, as well as organizing workers’ self-defense to protect the whole of our class, both citizen and immigrant. That’s because, as we well know in the workers’ movement, “A blow against one is a blow against all.”
Concretely, we need to build a united front of struggle, organizing the broadest sections of the population who are outraged with this government, uniting trade unions, organizations fighting for the most diverse causes, and independent activists in a great movement capable of defeating this government that threatens the civil liberties of the entire working class.
Freedom of movement is a basic human right. Immigration restrictions do not help workers and they do not keep us safe. They make workers’ lives more precarious and devalue human life on a fundamental level, making it harder to speak out and organize against injustice on the job and more generally. Rather than ceding ground to the far right as they make immigrants their scapegoat for capitalism’s problems, we need to stand our ground and fight for papers for all.
Even so, the only way to ensure that the attacks on immigrants and all working people come to an end is for the working class as a whole to take political command, creating a truly democratic and internationalist workers’ state that seeks to dismantle the brutal capitalist system and all its barbarities. This will require a socialist revolution.
Stop the deportations! ICE out of our communities! Let’s stay in the streets! Papers for everyone! The struggle of immigrants is the struggle of the working class!
