Under capitalism, immigrants are exploited for super-profits and demonized by the bosses in a relentless effort to divide the working class. Unitarians from across the country are congregating in Phoenix from June 20 to June 24 to stand in solidarity with immigrant workers and oppose Arizona’s racist, anti-immigrant law, SB 1070. Despite President Obama’s announcement (see page 2) to suspend deportations for a limited group of students and workers, many Unitarians understand that immigrants will remain under attack in Arizona and elsewhere as long as our society is geared to create profit for the few at the expense of the rest of us.  

Obama’s cynical election-year ploy will allow an estimated 800,000 undocumented immigrants under the age of 31 to obtain driver’s licenses and renewable two-year work permits, but only if they came to the U.S. before they turned 16 and are in school or have a high school diploma or GED.

It does nothing for the 11.2 million remaining undocumented workers in the U.S. who fail to meet these criteria, including the children and youth who have been failed by the bosses’ decaying education system. (According to recent U.S. Census data, 41 percent of Mexican immigrant teenagers in New York City — with or without papers — have dropped out of school.) Even for the relative few who may benefit under the changed policy, there is no path to citizenship or permanent residency. 

Obama: Immigrants’ False Friend

After campaigning as a champion of immigration rights, Obama has escalated racist attacks against the undocumented. His administration has installed more border agents and more fencing between the U.S. and Mexico. Since taking power in 2009, it has deported 1.4 million people — a record 400,000 per year, double the rate under Republican George W. Bush. Families have been ripped apart in midnight raids; dozens of immigrants have died from abuse and neglect in detention centers controlled by the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

While this reign of terror has met the bosses’ need to intimidate workers who provide cheap labor, it angered Latinos who voted for Obama in the last election under the illusion that a liberal Democrat would serve their needs.  The “bluntly political move” (NYT, 6/16/12) to suspend some deportations may help Obama win pivotal states like Florida and Colorado in his election race against Republican Mitt Romney. 

The new policy is also a significant step toward the passage of “comprehensive immigration reform” (CIR), a bipartisan campaign that is backed by the Unitarian Universalist Association. CIR plays into the hands of finance capital, the section of the U.S. ruling class that is most committed to maintaining and expanding U.S. global supremacy. It is a losing proposition for immigrants — and for all workers.

In addition to creating a slave-labor force of “guest workers,” CIR includes the Dream Act, a bipartisan proposal to offer two routes to legalization: full-time college attendance leading to graduation (with no work permitted), or enlistment in the military. Since few undocumented youths have the means to be full-time college students for three or four years running, the Dream Act would effectively funnel young immigrants into the military to fight the bosses’ imperialist wars. 

In 2006, the rulers used their loyal stooges in the unions and the Democratic Party to build a popular movement for CIR, including demonstrations by millions in the streets. After the stock market crash and the end of the housing bubble, and the waves of layoffs that followed, the immigration reform movement retreated. The Dream Act was shelved.

Republican Party opposition reflected the thinking of some capitalists who wanted to build gutter racism and blame immigrants for the economic crisis. But finance capital’s first priority is to stave off the challenge of rising imperialist powers like China, and to expand the U.S. military and build workers’ allegiance for the broader imperialist conflicts to come.

As Obama noted last week, the new limited deportation policy is aimed at “talented, driven, patriotic young people….These are young people who pledge allegiance to our flag” (Washington Post, 6/15/12). 

Global Scapegoats

The oppression of immigrants is a global phenomenon. Find a capitalist country in economic crisis, and you will find a surge in anti-immigrant racism. It targets Africans in France, Roma people in Italy, Turks in Germany, Latin Americans in Spain, Muslims in Holland, Poles in Ireland, Indians in Singapore. Immigrants are scapegoated for the mass unemployment that stems from the boom-and-bust chaos of capitalism. They are labeled as parasites and accused of taking benefits without “deserving” them or contributing to society.

In reality, as studies have repeatedly shown, immigrants take the dirtiest, most difficult, and most dangerous jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. They pay taxes for benefits they are ineligible to receive. Their reward is to be attacked by racist scum like the Minutemen in the U.S., the Freedom Party in Germany, and the National Front in France.

Like capital, workers have no borders. The North America Free Trade Agreement and other treaties enable U.S. exports like corn to flow freely across borders and destroy local economies in other countries. These ruling-class pacts have forced millions of workers to uproot themselves and come to the U.S. to feed themselves and their families. At the same time, tens of thousands of jobs in auto and other industries have migrated from cities in the Midwest to Latin America, Asia, and right-to-work (non-union) states in the South.

These developments were created by capitalism, with its inherent need to maximize profits by driving down labor costs and creating unemployment throughout the world. Capitalism is the only reason why hundreds of millions who want to work cannot find it.

PLP Fights In Immigrant Workers’ Struggles

The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party has a proud history of participation and leadership in immigrant workers’ struggles, from the Hormel strike in Minnesota to organizing garment worker shops in Los Angeles. But the ultimate victory can come only from a communist revolution. PLP’s solution is to overthrow capitalism and fight for a world without exploitation, racism, sexism or nationalism. Attacks against immigrants will end only when we have a world without borders, run by and for the international working class. That’s what PLP is fighting for. Join us!

The hell of capitalism is intensifying for the working class of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of workers are demonstrating in the streets every day, opposing the bosses’ stranglehold on their lives. They are struggling against massive unemployment which has risen 43 percent since 1999. About 75% of the country’s population of 180 million — 6th largest on earth — earns no more than $2 a day. While Pakistan has the 7th largest standing army in the world and a nuclear arsenal, 110 million people are hard-pressed to even eat two meals a day.

Of its ten million industrial workers, half are controlled by fake, essentially company unions, puppets of the bosses while the other half are excluded from worker-led unions altogether. Eighteen million farm workers are completely unorganized. Child labor is spreading. There is no electricity from 14 to 22 hours a day and no natural gas for two to three days a week.

Industries are closing down and fleeing to even lower-wage levels in Bangladesh. Inflationary prices of essential commodities have climbed from between 300 to 500 percent.

Target Women

Women, who comprise half the population, are targeted for killing in the name of “honor” by the bosses’ religious and cultural customs and face acid attacks, torture, gang rape, forced marriages and forced prostitution. Fifty percent are physically abused, 15 percent sexually and 90 percent psychologically.

Kiln workers (brick producers) have no rights at all. Every family member is forced to work 12 to 18 hours a day and suffer virtual slavery, sold by one owner to another.

Whenever workers strike against many of these horrific conditions, to divert their struggle, the bosses raise non-issues such as “national security” or opening or closing NATO supply routes, as well as divide workers on a nationalist basis. 

Recently the government began a police operation, supposedly against target killers, gang warriors and ethnic/religious/nationalist terrorists. But they started it in Liyari, a poor working-class neighborhood. This reign of terror continued for ten days but the people fought back, strongly resisting the police oppression, bringing the operation to a halt. Now the police cannot even enter the neighborhood. 

Bosses Profit on Workers’ Backs

The Pakistani economy is crumbling and is becoming increasingly dependent on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the USAID and Coalition Support Fund to run its murderous capitalist system. Its domestic debt is in the hundreds of billions, has the lowest foreign investment in 60 years and the highest inflation rates, all leading to Pakistan’s ruling class trying to sustain itself by intensifying the exploitation of the working class. Workers are forced to sell their children and body organs to escape a life of hunger and poverty and unfortunately many are driven to suicide.

Corruption, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and nepotism prevail on the soil of Pakistan while the bosses push a federal budget that only benefits the rich. A 20 percent “increase” in public-sector salaries is a wage-cut in the teeth of 300 percent inflation. It’s even worse for private-sector workers who do not even receive the government-announced minimum wage.

A Dictatorship of the Ruling Class

Various bosses’ electoral parties vie for power in order to grab more profit for each. Their elections use the working masses in the name of democracy but actually establish a dictatorship of the ruling class that exploits the working class even more vigorously. In several provinces the bosses are using nationalism as a major tool to divide our class in order to prevent rebellion:

   • Baluchistan — The rulers provoked an insurgency in which thousands of workers have been killed and/or “disappeared. This province is Pakistan’s largest in area, has immense resources and is of great geo-strategic importance for international imperialists, sharing borders with Iran and Afghanistan and has a newly built port. Since the fundamentalists’ presence is relatively low and the majority of people have a progressive outlook, the bosses are fueling the fire of nationalism to divide them.

   • Punjab — Pakistan’s most populous province will be divided by creating a new Saraiki province which has large numbers of extremist and fundamentalist groups, leading to even more destruction and chaos and badly affecting the country’s crumbling economy.

   • Sindh — This is Pakistan’s second largest in population. In the last five months, 880 people have been killed in Karachi, the province’s largest city. This is an outgrowth of rivalry between various ruling political parties that are trying to seize control of different parts of the city. They represent militant groups involved in land-grabbing, weapons dealing, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and ransom.

These bosses provoked a war between the Sindhi and Urdu-speaking populations. Nationalist parties are killing each other’s working-class activists. Many are losing their lives in an unholy combat between different ethnic groups. Karachi is a port city used by NATO to ship supplies. Interestingly, 7,000 containers have disappeared here.

   • Kyber Pukhtoonkhawa — Nationalism is at the root of fighting between two large ethnic groups, the Pukhtoons and Hazarawals. It suffers from terrorist attacks as well as U.S. drone bombings. The province borders Afghanistan and China and is a battleground for the “war against terror.” It is a safe haven for various terrorist groups fighting for or against U.S. imperialism, especially in the FATA territory.

Pakistan has fast become a laboratory for nationalism, racism, fundamentalism and sexism, the results of which can be applied worldwide. But it also provides increasing opportunities to build a base for PLP everywhere — in the factories, farms, offices, campuses, villages, kilns, among women and wage workers. The Party is striving to become more and more involved in class struggles in these areas, organizing PL clubs.

Amid this poverty, injustice, exploitation, mass unemployment and gender discrimination, only a PLP-led international communist revolution can free the working class from these capitalist evils.

OAKLAND CALIFORNIA, June 18 — PL’ers along with parents, teachers, students and Occupy Oakland Education have been fighting the closing of five Oakland elementary schools that serve mainly black and Latino youths. We’re currently occupying Lakeview Elementary in Oakland and are running a free summer school, “The People’s School.”

The bosses already decided the fate of the schools. Lakeview Elementary is scheduled to be transformed into Administrative Offices. Another will become a charter school, one is being leased to neighboring Emeryville, (for revenue) and the other three will close, pushing their students elsewhere creating even more overcrowding.  

In discussions with people, we are working to make communist ideas the topic of conversation. (More next issue.)

NEWARK, NJ, June 4 — The attacks on students and education workers in the Newark Public Schools are continuing.  As previously reported in CHALLENGE, there have been budget cuts, school closings and dual locations of charter schools.  The newest attack comes in the form of layoffs of about 200 teachers and support staff.  These workers were notified a month before school ended that their positions will be eliminated next fall because of budget cuts.

These attacks are part of a larger, nationwide plan to “reshape education in the United States and put this country on track to be an educational, economic, military, and diplomatic global leader” (cfr.org — U.S. Education Reform and National Security).  In other words, the ruling class will continue to use the education system to prepare the working class to fight in imperialist wars and maintain U.S. domination throughout the world.

In response to the latest attacks, a newly formed caucus in the Newark Teachers Union organized a demonstration of over 200 education workers, community activists, parents and students outside the Newark Board of Education.  This call for worker-parent-student unity reflected the struggle within the caucus to develop class consciousness.  Through weekly caucus meetings, members and friends of Progressive Labor Party have fought for all caucus members to understand that an attack on one is an attack on all.  

Now the real work begins.  As our base has expanded, the bosses’ attacks have given us many more opportunities to engage with our co-workers, students and parents.  In one school, a PLP member struggled with her co-workers and their initial response to “lay low.”  As individuals, she pointed out, we are more susceptible to the bosses’ attacks. Only when we unite do we realize the potential and strength of the working class.

By fighting these attacks against the schools, we will organize, build our CHALLENGE networks and recruit new members.  The struggle continues.