PHOENIX, May 2 — On May 1, hundreds of thousands of workers marched in many cities nation-wide — including thousands of students who walked out and marched in Arizona itself — to protest Arizona’s new racist anti-immigrant law and to demand a better life for themselves and their class brothers and sisters.
This law is among the most openly racist ones passed in recent years. It requires Arizona cops to demand immigration papers from anyone they “suspect” to be undocumented. This is an explicit call for cops to arrest anyone who “looks” Latino or has a Spanish accent or any other racist stereotype they might use.
This open police state law — part of the growing fascist trend in the U.S. — seems to “upset” even the biggest ruling-class tools, up to and including the president. Obama claims to oppose it as “misguided,” saying Congress needs to pass “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” (CIR) to combat such laws. But he is using it to pose as a “lesser evil” to win those who oppose such laws so he can advance his own racist scheme.
U.S. rulers need these 12 million undocumented workers as a source of low-wage labor to maximize profits. As a representative of the ruling class, Obama is using the threat of an Arizona-type law to create a more subtle and exploitative form of indentured slavery and misery for undocumented immigrants than the petty racists of Arizona could ever imagine.
Obama’s CIR would require immigrants to register with ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement), work for a decade or more without causing “trouble” for their boss, and to pay taxes and fines. This slavery will result in immediate deportation for any worker’s opposition to injustice or exploitation.
This maneuver aims to intimidate workers from fighting back, including native-born workers who might be won to think that oppressing the immigrant workers would solve their own problems of mass unemployment and wage cuts.
Moreover, Obama and many liberal political groups want to enact the so-called DREAM Act. These misleaders and hacks claim it will allow immigrants who grew up in the U.S. to attend college. But this is a lie.
The DREAM Act requires qualifying students to attend college for at least two years straight with no time off. This prevents them from holding the kind of job that could help pay college tuition, placing this education beyond their reach, especially since most undocumented students do not qualify for financial aid. Thus, they would have to “choose” the Act’s other provision — military service.
Obama and his ruling-class bosses are not trying to help immigrants whatsoever. Actually, they’re focused on future world wars with China, Russia and/or Europe. This immigration “reform” is their attempt to win immigrants to willingly rebuild war industries with cheap labor and expand the military by enlisting to receive citizenship. It is inter-imperialist rivalry that drives the ruling class.
Capitalism creates borders via military adventures and then uses them to foster divisions within the working class, pitting immigrant against native-born workers. The bosses spread the lie that one group of workers is “taking another group’s jobs.” But it’s the bosses who do all hiring and firing. It’s the bosses and their profit system that causes mass racist unemployment, with double the rates for black and Latino workers, thereby increasing super-exploitation.
And meanwhile these same bosses are ever ready to cross these borders themselves in their unending drive for maximum profits, and will use wars to protect these profits.
To answer this we workers ourselves need to cross these capitalist borders and unite in international solidarity to destroy this bloodthirsty system that oppresses us all.