Stop the criminalization of immigrants!

author : Freedom Socialist Party | Radical Women topic : immigration

In December, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that would make felons of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants and anyone who helps them. Equally racist "guest worker" bills in the Senate promise to control the immigration "threat" through new bracero

programs that amount to indentured servitude.

Painting immigrants as lawbreakers and potential terrorists, politicians of both parties want to justify the super-exploitation of newcomers and provide native-born working people with scapegoats for their afflictions, from falling wages to the draining of social service dollars. All the while, they are spending $315.8 billion on an imperialist war.

But who are the real criminals? Not the desperate young people, workers and families fleeing the ravages of "free trade" and U.S. Domination around the world!

The mega-corporations know no borders. They are the criminals, lining Mexico 's border towns with maquiladoras and paying poverty wages -- while taking no responsibility for the murders of hundreds of women workers in Juárez, for environmental destruction, or for other devastation caused by their contempt for the people and things that generate their wealth.

But in the streets and the schools, immigrants and their defenders are rising up in a thrilling movement, one with the profound potential to better the lives of all working people in the U.S. We must demand

unconditional amnesty for all undocumented immigrants and open borders for working people!

Amnesty is a necessity for current immigrants, but only opening the borders will prevent the criminalization of future immigrants and keep them safe. This would stop employers from using the threat of deportation to sexually exploit women. It would allow families to stay together. It would

prevent a repeat of the vile bracero program begun during World War II and lasting for two decades.

To win lasting justice and security for immigrants, however, capitalism must go! The liberating solution is socialism -- a democratic system designed to serve the needs of working people, of all homelands, rather than only the interests of those who profit from their labor.

Issued by Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women