Washington, DC April 10 — Today tens of thousands of workers and students from around the country rallied here to demand immigration reform.  Thousands more rallied in 14 other locations around the U.S. Many protesters went far beyond supporting the current plans of bosses for reform, calling for an end to deportations and discrimination against immigrants (undocumented or not).
A dozen PLPers from DC and PLPers from other cities greeted the DC demonstrators with a revolutionary call to action, urging them to join the upcoming communist May Day demonstrations. The revolutionaries said that only the abolition of all borders through global communist revolution can finally stop the racist and nationalist attacks on immigrants around the world.
Over 500 May Day leaflets along with over 400 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed to marchers and a dozen workers signed up to work with PLP.
Workers want an end to all deportations and detention centers, an open border, and no discrimination against any worker or student based on their official immigration status. But the U.S. bosses are proposing a reform that only helps them and actually intensifies exploitation of workers. It will take communist revolution to abolish borders on the basis of global working class unity and equality.
The U.S. Senate reform bill calls for more severe border “security”, requiring that 90% of all undocumented immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. be captured and deported before any of the provisions that provide a pathway to citizenship go into effect. The increasingly repressive border patrols and fences have already led to deaths of many workers attempting to cross the border in search of a job. 
Imperialism destroys the jobs and economy in their home country, driving them to seek employment anywhere they can—and then represses them for trying to find a job to support their families. Workers will continue to cross borders, legally or not, in search of jobs.  These workers will become the next wave of undocumented workers. They will lead increasingly vulnerable lives in the shadows, especially since the Senate bill requires that the E-verify employment surveillance system be beefed up before any path to citizenship is allowed.
The Senate bill requires that current undocumented workers register, pay $500, undergo a criminal background check right away and again in six years, and ultimately have to wait 13 years before they can achieve citizenship. These workers become vulnerable as soon as they register! Any past, current, or new misstep could prevent them from beginning or finishing the 13-year [probation] period. If a participant opposed the boss on a job, for example, through striking or other action, he/she might easily get arrested on a picket line and then deported. The bosses want to intimidate this section of the working class as much as possible to keep workers divided and scared and reduce class struggle against them.  But workers will fight back!
Despite this grim forecast, the idea of some “path to citizenship”, however difficult, appeals to millions suffering from ICE repression. The misleaders of the movement in the labor bureaucracy are fully supporting the bosses’ immigration reform, delivering workers into the hands of the Democrats and now even some Republican politicians. Their uncritical embrace of the bosses’ proposals fails to address the divisions in the working class and weakens the working classes’ understanding of how capitalism continues to exploit them severely even with this immigration reform.
Communists, on May Day (and every day!), call for the universal, global solidarity of workers, understanding that workers are all the same throughout the world and that distinctions based on race, nation, or immigration status are mere bosses ploys to make super-profits by keeping us divided and weak. It is time to move forward to building the international PLP to lead global revolution for communism and abolish the bosses’ phony, self-serving borders, forever.