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Vol. 81/No. 6 February 13, 2017
(front page, Socialist Workers Party Campaign statement)
‘Amnesty for immigrants! Stop the deportations!’
The following statement was issued Feb. 1 by Osborne Hart, Socialist
Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York.
President Donald Trump’s executive orders preparing to deport thousands
of workers without papers and barring refugees from entering the U.S.
are a threat to the working class as a whole. The Socialist Workers
Party demands amnesty for all undocumented immigrants in the United
States today.
The capitalist rulers depend on competition and division among workers
to maintain their rule and keep filling their pockets from the wealth
produced through our labor. From unemployment and racist discrimination
to maintaining pariah conditions for immigrant workers and refugees,
their system of exploitation depends on keeping workers pitted against
each other.
To advance the fight to overcome these divisions, the Socialist Workers
Party calls for stopping all deportations and ending the criminalization
and denial of civic rights to immigrants, those fleeing the effects of
imperialist wars abroad and those seeking a better life here alike.
Build solidarity and unity among working people. Fight for
government-funded public-works programs to provide jobs at union wages
for all — building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and other things
working people need.
The bosses use their government to open or close the influx of
immigrants as their capitalist economy expands or contracts. The one
thing that never changes is their effort to force this section of the
working class into a less-than-legal status — enforcing
superexploitation and driving down the conditions of all working people.
For decades the nationalist-minded trade union officialdom has refused
to take on this challenge. They say it’s impossible to organize workers
without papers. We say: organize the unorganized, regardless of what
papers a worker has. The U.S. labor movement was built by joining all
workers in struggle — native-born, former slaves and wave after wave of
immigrants.
Both Trump and his liberal bourgeois opponents say they speak for “we
Americans.” But there is no such thing. To see clearly what workers face
and chart a road forward, we need to start with the fundamental class
division between the capitalist rulers and the working class.
The propertied rulers’ capitalist system is in deep crisis today, facing
declining profit rates, contraction in production and trade, and growing
conflicts over resources and markets. The deepening competition between
capitalist rulers worldwide has produced growing carnage, devastating
economic crises and dispossession of millions of human beings around the
world. Washington and other imperialist powers have engaged in nonstop
wars since the turn of the millennium in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.
Workers need our own party to organize independent of the bosses and
their political parties, to defend our interests on the road toward
taking power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers. The Socialist
Workers Party is your party.
Let’s fight together: Unionize all workers! No deportations! Speak out
against attacks on Muslims and mosques! All U.S. troops out of the
Middle East!
Related articles:
Gov’t orders target refugees, immigrants, workers’ unity
Workers debate how to defend immigrants, jobs
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