“Free me. Free my children. We came looking for refuge, and we’re being treated like criminals.”
With this cry, 78 mothers staged a hunger and work strike at the Karnes Detention Center in Karnes, Texas (a private, for-profit ICE detention center run by the global prison corporation, GEO Group Inc.).
Their children’s health is deteriorating. They can’t eat the food. The water is heavily chlorinated because of the thousands of “fracked” oil and gas wells in the area.
Some are sexually abused by guards. Some are put in isolation rooms along with their children because of their protests.
Who is imprisoning these women and children here in the “Land of the Free” — and why?
Immigration in the past period of economic expansion served the growing labor needs of industry. In an economy increasingly based on electronic and laborless production, large numbers of workers are no longer needed to fuel capitalist industry.
In a global workforce of 3.1 billion workers today, some 2.4 billion — more than three out of four — are considered “vulnerably employed,” unemployed, or inactive. A growing section of this “global reserve army of labor” is a mass of workers who are permanently unemployed or nearly so. Without fundamental change, their future is bleak. Capitalists will not care for workers they can no longer exploit.
The immigrant mothers and children, along with a growing section of workers in this country, are fighting a desperate struggle for survival. They are fighting for their basic human right to exist and live free of police terror in a dying capitalist system. Their struggle for survival is one and the same.
