For a Workers’ Dream Act
The Infrastructure Bill passed the House of Representatives after a months-long battle in which the progressive wing of the Democratic party held off its vote in order to force a compromise with corporate Democrats in the Senate, namely Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, on the other component of Biden’s agenda, Build Back Better aka the Reconciliation Bill. With Infrastructure on its way to Biden’s desk, the Reconciliation Bill is still being held in the Senate where corporate Democrats refuse to sign on to it despite significant cuts to its reach.
Tucked inside the Reconciliation Bill is a provision that would grant immigrants, who came to the U.S. prior to 2011, a 10 year protection from deportation akin to the one granted by Obama in 2012 to immigrants who had been brought to the U.S. as children. While the debate over this provision is still pending, it is still a question as to what it would take to legalize the 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to live in this country. For that, the answer cannot come from the NGO dominated world of civil rights and immigration attorneys. The immigration question is not one of civil rights but one of labor; it therefore needs to be answered by labor. The answer must come as a thorough legalization effort sponsored by the organized labor movement of the U.S.
Reasoning
Undocumented immigrants do not come with capital to invest in the U.S. They are not here to evade paying taxes in their home countries. They are not the majority stockholders of any corporation. Undocumented immigrants come here to become workers in the informal U.S. economy, whether this is in productive fields such as agriculture (a major employer of undocumented immigrant labor, estimated to be one million workers), food production, manufacturing, construction, or in the service economy (restaurant work, childcare, cleaning services).
During the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. saw an increase in its productive capacity with the advent of new technology, new industrial practices, and of course, the inter-imperialist conflicts known as the First and Second World Wars. This in turn required an immense amount of labor which was filled with immigrants, usually from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, though they would also bring in guest workers from Mexico such as through the Bracero Program to fill the labor gaps caused by the wars. This in turn also saw an increase in union activity as many immigrants, themselves escaping persecution of their labor organizing in their native countries, saw their interests align with interest of all the other workers against those of the Gilded Age capitalists.
Immigration laws were then less restrictive for the majority of immigrants, with notable exceptions (Chinese coolie labor). That would change in the course of the 20th century as the country went from being a global manufacturing powerhouse, needing hundreds of workers concentrated in factories, to a major imperialist power employing the cheap labor of people in Third World countries, or outsourcing manufacturing to partners such as China. Rather than needing a hundreds of workers at point of production, the expansion of the service based economy in the U.S. required much smaller work environments in which bosses have much more freedom to exploit their labor without any meaningful consequences. The places where manufacturing did rise were those places with the most oppressive labor laws in the country, such as the Sunbelt states.
It is the context of this rising service economy, and attacks on labor by capital, that Reagan provided a new regime in immigration enforcement with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Originally drawn up as a bipartisan effort of legislators to target employers hiring undocumented workers, following opposition from agricultural capitalists, the bill came to include a clause that allows them to escape legal ramifications. The employer sanctions model thus strengthens capital against labor, handing the employers that super exploit undocumented workers a tyrannical power.
The property and licenses of the capitalist are secure, while the worker is at the mercy of the boss who holds the threat of reporting them to immigration should there be any dispute over wages, safety, breaks, or organizing. No worker stands to gain from supporting a regime of terror used to extract more value out of the most vulnerable workers of our society. The increased repression over undocumented workers goes hand in hand with the attempt to break the unions and legalities that protect documented labor (i.e. why hire legal construction workers that can organize to form a union when instead you can hire undocumented workers you can easily exploit, underpay, and sometimes even straight up rob by just threatening them with deportation).
The proposal
It is imperative that the workers movement produce its own independent policy on the matter of immigrants based on class solidarity. Such a policy should be thought out to strengthen the relative and tactical position of labor against capital. The core basis of any such policy must be to protect the worker and punish employers, by removing the fear of detention and deportation. If undocumented workers will report the abuses of their employers, or if they choose to organize themselves into a union, they should be treated with the protection of asylum.
This must be thought out in contradistinction to both right wing anti-immigrant racism, and liberal multiculturalism that celebrates exploitation (“America runs on immigrants!” a deeply disturbing slogan). A proletarian line on the matter must call into question the very institution of wage slavery, instead of negotiating between mass deportations and cheap labor.
Here we present some of the points this policy must have:
1) Union sponsored citizenship. Any immigrant who has been a member in good standing of any trade union for a determined amount of time should have an expedited path to citizenship. Unions form to provide workers with representation and to organize them for power at the point of production. All union members should be able to translate this power to other areas of life. Citizenship will grant immigrant unionists the ability to vote, run for office in their districts, as well as accessing other benefits granted to their citizen union brothers and sisters. This would also provide an incentive for more immigrants in the workforce to join unions, or file to form unions at their workplace. No union member should be denied the democratic rights afforded to all other workers.
2) Legalization for all immigrant workers that organize their work place. To counter the tyranny of the bosses over the lives of their immigrant workers, any immigrant who participates in the efforts to organize their workplace should be able to legalize their status. This will take away the ability of the bosses to hang the threat of deportation over the head of their immigrant workers, and will in turn lead to a monumental increase in the number of industries that could be unionized. Immigrant workers in the service industry, motivated by a desire to protect themselves from deportation, will push for the organization of their workplace and surely exhort other workers to do the same.
3) Protection from deportation for immigrants who denounce their boss for labor or safety violations. The authorities that govern labor relations rely on workers who denounce their employers for the prosecution of any safety or labor violation. Wage-theft is the single most prevalent form of theft in the U.S. A lot of its victims are immigrant workers. In the same way the victims of violent crimes are given a path to legalization in the form of a U-Visa, so should immigrant workers be protected when they take it upon themselves to denounce their boss. This will not only ensure that immigrants feel safe to report the bosses’ crimes to the authorities, but it will also curtail the prevalence of wage theft in the service and construction industries, make these industries safer for both the workers and the public, and increase the number of complaints received by the NLRB and other labor authorities so they have more power to punish those responsible to bad labor practices.
Citizenship through labor
The working class must aim to redefine citizenship in relationship to its goals; its liberation of labor in the form of Workers' Democracy. In the kingdoms of the ancient world where property was possessed as the singular right of the divinity of kings, all were bonded to his will. Where property rights developed, "the citizen" emerged to declare their participation in governance and their right to property. Men dispossessed of property, bonded as property, and women, would lack the title of citizen mostly everywhere until the 20th century. Only struggle brought them into their rights demonstrating that rights are coextensive to power.
Since then throughout the Western world, citizenship has become universal but only in terms of nationalism or racialism. In the United States, citizenship is firstly determined upon the accident of birth on the land, i.e. jus soli.. But who works the land? In the greatest hypocrisies of the class dictatorship in this country, most of those who work the land were not born from the land. Labor law makes it impossible for the agricultural worker to organize, and immigration law makes them slaves, bonded labor to the masters who own and manage the land.
We propose a new direction forward in bringing citizenship to our brothers and sisters: citizenship through work. That citizenship be defined not just by blood or soil, but the toil of the soil, the working of the factories, the laying of the bricks. Work is the sole social basis of our communities. The citizen worker is the individual who must wield power in this country.
Conclusion
It would be naive to think that the proposals here outlined would lead to actual legislation without a bitter fight between the forces of labor and capital. The Republican and Democratic parties both represent particular capitalist interests that would strongly rally against any of these proposals. This is an initiative meant to solely benefit the working class. The opponents of these initiatives would not be able to oppose them without exposing themselves as the enemy of workers.
On one side, the Republicans rally for strong immigration enforcement to bolster the funding for their sponsors in the private prison and security industries. Far from wanting less immigrants, they want for immigrants to exist in the shadows of society where they can be easily preyed upon by business interests. On the other hand, Democrats in their imperialist ambitions seek to do away with any restrictions capital has to move internationally by enacting free trade agreements with which their corporate sponsors can enjoy vast pools of cheap labor in other countries. This would create the conditions for more immigration into the U.S., allowing for the capitalists here to hire more immigrants to avoid employing U.S. citizens who could be more class conscious, and therefore much more resistant to exploitation. In the same light, a large base of support of the Democratic party, minority business owners in big cities, would relinquish their support for the Democratic party if they see them pushing legislation threatening to help organize their workers. A capitalist is a capitalist at the end of the day.
But probably the most significant change these proposals could have is exposing those who hide their nativism and xenophobia under the disguise of unionism. No unionist worthy of the name should enthusiastically cheer the deportation of fellow workers and the separation of their families. It would force trade unions to think beyond narrow interests such as control of market share, and think about their ability to organize all workers of their industry, immigrant or not. It would force more trade unions to practice solidarity in its truest and most powerful form.
Capital is global. It has reached every corner of the Earth and subjected it to the demands of the international market. This has caused communities from around the world to migrate to the points of concentration of capital in search of jobs and a better quality of life for their families. If the working class is then international, so should be our solidarity.
