PHOTO CREDIT/ADRIAN GARCIA
The issue of immigration and immigration reform must be understood within the context of a global capitalist system and the transformation of an economy based on wage-labor to one based on electronic production. Workers, including the undocumented, cannot survive without jobs. Yet it is exactly that—“jobs” —which the global corporations continue to eliminate as they scramble to maximize profits.
As more goods and services are produced with less labor, driving down wages and eliminating jobs altogether, poorer workers migrate to richer countries in their quest for survival for themselves and their families. Today one in three workers worldwide are migrants.
In the U.S., the effect of technology at the workplace and globalization is unemployment and underemployment, and it is affecting more and more workers who once had stable employment and benefits. Over a third of the workforce consists of part-time, contingent, minimum-wage or below minimum-wage workers. Structural unemployment is estimated to be around 40%. Today in the U.S. one in three children live in poverty and it is estimated that three million children are homeless. Fifty percent of all Americans live at or below poverty while a high percentage of seniors face their “golden years” living precariously.
The migrant workers are an integral part of this section of the U.S. working class. Their protests, civil disobedience and demands for immigration reform, decent housing, health care, education for their children, and jobs and a way out of poverty are pushing the struggle forward, and represent the demands of every worker.
To continue their rule in the face of a dying system, the ruling class cannot allow the working class to unite. They must use divide and conquer tactics to keep workers fighting each other for the crumbs. The immigration reforms, issued by executive order but not passed by Congress, must be viewed as one such tactic.
One of the effects of these executive orders will be to exclude over six million of the undocumented living in the U.S. Many families will continue to be separated. Militarization of the border will increase. While some immigrant workers will likely benefit from work permits, they will not be eligible for such benefits as health care. Migrants will continue to be used as scapegoats to divide workers along color lines. The rulers will continue to proclaim that migrants are “taking the jobs” (that the system itself is eliminating.)
New electronic forms of production promise a world of abundance for all without the backbreaking toil of yesteryear. But left in the hands of the tiny class who own this “private property,” workers become superfluous, increasingly faced with a violent police state when they present their demands.
Let us unite now around our common economic interests and fight forward to a new cooperative society; one in which we share equally in this abundance. To get there, we have to embrace the immigrant worker as part of our working class and defend their human rights.
