------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 19, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
EDITORIAL: NO TO IMMIGRANT BASHING!
Working class and progressive organizations should reject the U.S. government's "war on terror," which has become an excuse for a broad- based assault on civil liberties and rights at home while pursuing imperialist war and occupation abroad.
The capitalist state cannot be trusted to protect the interests of the masses of people here. On the contrary, it exists to perpetuate an exploiting system that has divided this country and the world into haves and desperate have-nots, thereby making strife and struggle inevitable. Acting on behalf of the billionaire corporations, the imperialist state headquartered in Washington is responsible for terrible wars and atrocities all over the globe that have made hundreds of millions of people furious at the U.S. The examples are legion, but Vietnam, Chile, Palestine, El Salvador, Indonesia, Korea, Yugoslavia, Angola and of course Iraq spring to mind.
The 9/11 Commission's recommendation for an intelligence czar, and the Department of Homeland Security's color-coded alerts and constant bombarding of the population with threat warnings, will not ameliorate any of this. Beefing up the "security" apparatus--in other words, the armed forces of repression--with tens of thousands more riot police and border guards is really a confession that this capitalist government has no answers to the growing social problems facing the masses of the people.
The main targets at present of this growing police state atmosphere are immigrants--particularly, but not confined to, people coming from the Middle East and South Asia. In the panicky run-up to the Republican National Convention, "suspects" have been swept up around the country for such "crimes" as videoing public buildings. The FBI has announced a new round of dragnet-like interviews in Arab and Muslim communities nationwide. A similar program in 2001 and 2002, in which the FBI questioned more than 8,000 Muslim and Arab men, yielded not one arrest of a suspected terrorist. Civil liberties groups say this is nothing but the reemergence of racial profiling, which was discredited earlier as a weapon against African Americans and Latinos. The public is supposed to accept all this as necessary while sensational news of "terrorist threats"--none of it substantiated--is leaked regularly to the media.
Increasingly, the rollback of liberties is extended to all immigrants, especially those from oppressed countries, where economic development has been distorted first by colonial rule and then the domination of imperialist finance capital. One year ago, the persecution of immigrants led a group of unions for the first time to organize a national march for immigrant rights. The unions had come to realize that they could not combat the plague of low wages and non-existent or substandard conditions and benefits without dealing with the plight of immigrant workers. They demanded amnesty for the undocumented, a reform of immigration laws, and an end to government raids meant to intimidate the workers' efforts to organize for better conditions.
Now Tom Ridge's Department of Home land Security has given border patrol agents sweeping new powers to deport undocumented immigrants without even allowing them to take their case to the immigration courts. The new rule applies to anyone picked up within 100 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders without the necessary papers. All this makes a further mockery of that famous statue in New York Harbor that promises, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
Just a few miles from that statue, thousands of New York police, supplemented by numerous federal agencies, will be deployed to protect the well-heeled delegates to the Republican National Convention at the end of August.
Outside the convention, for a week, organizations representing a broad variety of social causes will be trying to demonstrate despite heavy police intimidation. In a city where a majority of the low-paid, difficult jobs are filled by immigrant workers, the bosses are hoping that the anti-immigrant "terrorism" propaganda will minimize their input and the expression of their grievances--from opposition to the occupation of Iraq and Palestine to demands for justice and dignity here.
It is important that the rest of the movement take up the cause of immigrants at these demonstrations, show solidarity and reject the institutionalized bashing unleashed by the Bush administration in the name of its spurious "war on terror."
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