As part of the ruling class’s plan to step up racist terror against all workers, Barack Obama — whose election as the first black President supposedly signaled an era of a sharp decline in racism — has set a goal of deporting 400,000 immigrant workers in 2010, an all-time high. This increase in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) terror represents a steady trend over the last eight years — a 132% increase in spending on immigration enforcement and a 142% increase in deportations. That totals over 2.6 million racist deportations, two thirds of which (1.7 million) were non-criminal deportations.
Representing the clearest form of U.S.-style fascism, these raids are designed to intimidate Latino workers, both documented and undocumented, in order to drive down wages and further disorganize the working class. In one brazen example of the anti-working class nature of these raids ICE thugs — spurred on by the company — raided Smithfield Pork’s North Carolina plant in 2007 to break a workers’ unionizing drive. To drive the point home, seven months later they raided the local neighborhoods. Since then workplace and neighborhood raids have been common. Prior to the 2010 immigrants’ rights march in Washington, D.C., Obama had ICE raid D.C. area restaurants and neighborhoods to intimidate Latino workers.
Deadly Immigrant Prisons
At any one time, ICE imprisons around 32,000 immigrants to await deportation. In January 2009, of the 32,000 inmates 18,690 had no criminal conviction. ICE uses 363 detention sites nationwide to handle its massive prisoner load. With no judge to appeal to, and nothing forcing authorities to press charges, immigrants can remain imprisoned for a very long time. In 2009, one prisoner had been jailed for over five years!
A 2009 Amnesty International report described conditions in these prisons as beyond the bounds of international human rights standards and even below ICE’s “official” deplorable “guidelines.” Despite most prisoners being non-criminal offenders, inmates are handcuffed, shackled and forced into overcrowded cells. Frequently a thousand miles from their homes, inmates have no immediate rights to a phone call or a lawyer, sometimes leaving their families not knowing their whereabouts for months.
Many complaints have been filed regarding the non-existent medical care at these facilities. Amnesty International even noted that from 2004-2009, 74 prisoners died in ICE custody due to the hellish “health” conditions. In Arizona, pregnant women are shackled to their beds during and after childbirth. Many don’t even find out what happened to their children until days after giving birth and are not allowed to nurse them until many months later.
Anti-Immigrant Hysteria Builds
Deadly Racism
The anti-immigrant hysteria stoked by the media and politicians to support the massive ICE terror operation has led to increases in anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hate groups and violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that from 2003-2007, when CNN’s Lou Dobbs began his racist anti-immigrant rants, hate crimes against Latino workers rose 40%!
This increase in racism and violence has been encouraged by a criminal injustice system that doesn’t view murders of Latino workers as a crime. Four teenagers who brutally beat to death 25-year-old Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, PA in 2008, while shouting racist slurs, received only misdemeanor convictions. A month later, when Jeffrey Conroy stabbed Marcelo Lucero to death on Long Island, he was acquitted of murder charges, receiving only a first-degree manslaughter conviction. The trial revealed that Conroy and his friends had regularly engaged in racist attacks on Latino workers.
In May 2010, Seattle police brutally beat a Latino man while shouting racist epithets, only stopping when they realized he was “not the guy they were looking for.” Despite the incident being videotaped, no charges were filed against the officers. Later that month Border Patrol agents murdered Anastasio Hernandez with a taser in San Diego. In June a Border Patrol agent in El Paso, TX shot and killed 15-year-old Sergio Huereka while he stood on the Mexican side of the border. INS has shown no intention of investigating or charging any of these officers.
No Borders for Bosses’ $,
Only For Workers
Under capitalism, investments and those that control them are free to travel throughout the world seeking workers to exploit. Only the working class is bound within national borders and severely punished for moving to find work. Capitalists control national borders in order to control the working class.
Capitalists use racist immigration laws worldwide for similar purposes. In the U.S., Latin American workers are targeted; in France it’s workers from Northern Africa; in Germany it’s Turkish workers; in China it’s workers from Southeast Asia. In all cases these bosses’ laws are used to drive these populations further underground, making them easier to exploit. The end result is a divided working class and super-profits for the bosses as they use anti-immigrant racism to drive down all wages.
Capitalists punish immigrant workers, but it’s their system that creates the conditions forcing workers to search the globe for work. European imperialism destroyed African economies with over 200 years of theft. Yet now the European countries complain that African workers looking to escape mass poverty at home are migrating to Europe. The mass immigration of Latino workers to the U.S. began 30 years ago as U.S.-led neo-liberal economic policies destroyed the economies of Latin American states and the livelihoods of millions of Latino workers.
Anti-Immigrant Laws Attack all Workers
Racist terror has been the preferred weapon of choice for the U.S. ruling class in its struggle to keep workers divided and oppressed. Immigration laws are designed to terrorize not just immigrant workers but all super-exploited workers, who now have to fear police round-ups or being beaten or murdered by racist thugs.
The new immigration laws passed under Clinton further institutionalize and intensify the fascist U.S. police state, the world’s most oppressive, with over 2.6 million prisoners. Obama has cleverly used workers’ outrage at Arizona’s efforts to massively arrest Latino immigrants in order to build support for his fascist Dream Act.
The Act would force immigrants to turn themselves into the police for cataloguing with the “promise” of college. But since most can’t afford tuition, they’d be headed for the military to become cannon fodder for imperialist wars.
And even the “promise” of citizenship is
phony — 4,000 vets were deported last year, with
another 4,000 slated for this year.
The bosses’ hope the Dream Act will both build nationalism among immigrants while maintaining the capitalists’ carefully-cultivated system of anti-immigrant racism. Obama’s actions make it clear that he wants both the Dream Act and intensifying police terror.
Workers have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands in the U.S. to voice their opposition to this new Apartheid but, like Bush, Obama has shown that his allegiance lies with ruling-class exploiters, not with workers. Racism is capitalism’s lifeline, its source of super-profits and its primary weapon against the working class. Still, U.S. workers could learn from the international fight-back against anti-immigrant racism. In France undocumented immigrant workers struck for nearly nine months to gain “legal” status. In China migrant workers have shut down auto and electrical plants over low wages and horrific conditions.
But reforms can’t solve workers’ problems. Whatever reforms workers might win are taken away when capitalist crises impel bosses to maintain profits at workers’ expense. Only by building the PLP to eventually lead a communist revolution will workers be able to live in dignity, not in fear. Only then will we be able to smash all bosses’ borders and unite as one international working class.J
Sources:
[1] America’s Voice, “Obama Administration Immigration Deportations Exceed Bush’s Record,” 5/20/10.
[1] Center for Immigration Studies, “Immigration Raids at Smithfield,” 7/09.
[1] AP, “21 People Arrested During Immigration Raids at Area McDonalds,” 3/26/10.
[1] Washington Post, “Raids Throw Shadow Over Immigration Reform Rally,” 3/22/10.
[1] Global Detention Project, “United States Detention Profile,” 3/09.
[1] Amnesty International, “Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA,” 3/09.
[1] NPR, “Fresh Air,” 12/10/09.
[1] Amnesty International, “Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA,” 3/09.
[1] New America Media, “Pregnant and Shackled: Hard Labor for Arizona’s Immigrants,” 1/26/10.
[1] NPR, “All the Rage,” 4/1/10; SPLC, “’Patriot’ Groups, Militia Surge in Numbers in Past Year,” 3/2/10.
[1] The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, “Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crimes in America 2009,” 6/09.
[1] NYT, “Guilty Verdict in the Killing of Long Island Man,” 4/19/10.
[1] Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Videotaped ‘Stomping’ Dominates Seattle Top Cop Selection,” 5/9/10.
[1] NBC San Diego, “Illegal Immigrant Shot with Taser Dies,” 6/1/10.
[1] MSNBC, “Mexico Slams Border Patrol Shooting of Teen,” 6/10/10.
[1] Time Magazine, “Arizona’s Next Immigration Target: Children of Illegals,” 6/11/10.
[1] USA Today, “Hispanics Flee Arizona Ahead of Immigration Law,” 6/9/10.