Photo: Susan Melkisethian
With no hope for immigration reform, class unity is key
No hope for immigration reform.
Now what?
With the end of 2013, the hopes and aspirations of the 12 million undocumented immigrants for immigration reform, of any kind, even a bad one, have died. The majority of Americans polled agree that immigration reform leading to citizenship should be passed. Yet Congress refuses to act.
Something is out of whack. If the people’s will is for immigration reform with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, shouldn’t Congress adhere to the people’s will? Isn’t this what we’ve been told, “a government of the people, by the people for the people?”
Yet that’s not what’s happening. Immigration reform has become a political ping-pong game between Democrats and Republicans alike. Both political parties have no desire or intent to pass instead immigration reform if it’s going to benefit members of the opposite party. The undocumented immigrants have become collateral damage in their so-called rivalry.
When in fact, the U.S. two-party system is controlled and influenced by the one percent—the capitalist class and the corporations—these parties might differ in tactics, but they’re united by their strategy of keeping political power over the workers, the 99 percent.
Now what?
Will undocumented immigrants pack up and go home? Will they stop coming? Migrants don’t move because they wish too, they move because they have to—in search of jobs and lately escaping the violence in their home countries, such as in Mexico.
With no hope for immigration reform, undocumented immigrants find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Going back is not an option. So they’re staying and waging a fight for a better life here in the United States. They are joining the fight for their human rights with their U.S. brothers and sisters who are also beginning to fight for their economic, human, and democratic rights.
For the workers, class unity is central to winning all our struggles, because we are involved in much more than a fight for jobs and decent wages.
Computers and robots are replacing human labor, and the jobs are disappearing for everyone, documented and undocumented alike. It is increasingly impossible to have an economy based on a few people privately owning the tools of production and the rest of us working for them and using our paychecks to buy what we need.
With the jobs disappearing, we are in a fight for a new society where the people own the tools of production collectively, and we simply distribute to people what they need. We are fighting for a new world without poverty, where everyone’s needs are guaranteed.
This why the growing class unity is a beacon of light and hope, in what otherwise appears to be a bleak future. For this unity to grow and mature it has to be rooted and driven forward by the demands of those who have the least.
After all, the fight is for a new world without poverty, where everyone’s needs are guaranteed.
