ILTT Open letter to the workers movement re: the AMLO and Biden anti-immigrant policies
Migrants grieve in front at a Mexican immigration detention center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on Tuesday. Christian Chavez/AP
Workers, seeking economic and political refuge from the crisis of capitalism unfolding in the semi-colonies of Latin America, are being detained on both sides of the US/Mexico border as they try to come to the imperialist center for work.
The Democratic Biden regime, seeking to avoid the bad press endured by ex-president Trump for detention of migrant workers and families, has made Mexico their proxy enforcer. AMLO (President of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador), a dutiful semi-colonial henchman, complied, restricting the rights of Latin Americans to pass freely, denying them visas to stay in Mexico and detaining them while waiting for entry to the U.S.
As a consequence of the inhumane detention conditions 39 detainees in the Ciudad de Juarez died on March 27th when a fire was lit protesting Mexico’s deportation orders back to their countries of origin. Guards refused to open the gates during the fire condemning the detained to their deaths. AMLO tried to download responsibility onto the detention center guards and the immigrants themselves. But workers understand the responsibility lies in the anti-immigration policies of the USA and their enforcer and partner in crime AMLO himself.
Protesters in the City Of Juarez have been assaulted, slandered and have sustained injuries at the hands of the state. Workers must unite under the banner “An injury to one is an injury to all!” We say build workers mobilizations and strike to free the detainees and open the borders!
AMLO’s role as chief executive of the Mexican ruling comprador class is to obsequiously assuage the interests of U.S. imperialism, navigating the flow of migrant workers, the drug cartels and the competing imperialist interests. China needs workers for its new factories and requires safe terrain to operate. Will AMLO create safe havens for Chinese capital as it has done for the U.S. dominated maquiladoras?
Just as low wage Maquiladora jobs did not resolve Mexican’s workers’ poverty, Latin American workers are not fooled by China’s promises of ‘Win-Win’ deals the Bolivarian ‘left’ hangs its hat on. The workers know these deals either from the North or the Far East are aimed at keeping wages low in the semi-colonies. That is why workers across the world are on the march toward the massive economic centers.
Workers in Latin America have only to look to the South African ‘Win Win’ experience, where in 1994 a quarter of all employment was industrial manufacturing, whereas now, with Chinese agents subverting the trade union militancy, the figure for industrial manufacturing is 12%. South Africa has mass unemployment and is just another source of bargain “Win-Win” raw materials. Likewise, Venezuela has been put in a Chinese economic vise by a long-term, bargain basement price oil supply deal, to the detriment of the state’s ability to support consumer goods production, even the production of basic necessities.
U.S. imperialism requires Latin American and Mexican workers to feed the assembly lines of the maquiladoras in the borderlands. Yet while labor shortages have spiked in North America pre-and post COVID and despite the need for workers in the United States, barriers to entry are maintained for both political, read racist, and economic reasons, read no profits in retraining.
Politically the U.S. immigration policy is a racist war of terror against migrant workers consciously being waged to stoke the embers of xenophobia and nativism; race and ethnic hatred are the capitalist’s tools used by media and politicians to drive a wedge into the heart of working class solidarity.
Economically, on top of and as consequence of the under-development and super-exploitation of the semi-colonial world, limiting legal entry creates pressure on hundreds of thousands of displaced workers, political and economic refugees to cross the borders without state approval and legal documents required to live freely and work legally. The capitalist employers exploit their vulnerability by cheating on labor laws, wage laws and health and safety regulations. The undocumented who make it to the US live a super-exploited, subterranean existence living in fear of ICE, La Migra, detention, familial separation and deportation.
The workers movement and the left cannot expect AMLO to undo the structures of semi-colonial oppression he has been hired on to administer and has agreed to enforce. It has become the task of the comprador ruling class of Mexico to control flows of labor across Mexico; AMLO can no sooner dismantle the detention centers than he can liberate Mexico from imperialism. Like other semi-colonial leaders, trapped by the reality of the power of imperialist finance capital, he is merely a foreman for imperialism.
We reject the fake left leaderships who build the Popular Front which deprives the workers, small farmers and oppressed across Latin America of their agency. The national big bourgeoisie sees the offers to support AMLO, if he would just ‘do the right thing,’ as the supine weakness of the far left, and as a signal they can bring on the Falcones or similar death squads. Perhaps they think that as an extension of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ AMLOs’ turn toward China means he can lean on the ‘bourgeois progressive’ Chinese Communist Party to implement a branch of the Belt & Road initiative to develop the forces of production in Latin America and to open Mexico’s borders to the wider Latin American labor market.
The democratic demand that “the visa requirement to enter Mexican territory be annulled in favor of all Latin American citizens” demanded by this de facto peoples front and others would essentially decriminalize Latin American migrants while in Mexico, yet it is not a transitional demand but a mere protest culture manifestation with no threat to Capital’s profit for the workers movement to limit itself for the following reasons:
* It serves international finance capital by trapping migrant workers in Mexico seeking work at semi-colonial wages in the Win Win factories and maquiladoras
* It invites Latin American capitalists to pass freely into Mexico
* Does not call for open borders for workers into the U.S.
* Does not call on workers organizations to take up integration and hiring of migrants
* Does not fight for workers who do the same work to have the same contract on both sides of the border.
The fight for migrant labor rights of passage, free from detention and abuse can only be won by the mobilization of the workers organizations. Open the U.S. borders to immigrant workers. While finance capital crosses borders freely workers are detained and brutalized. Workers organizations must fight for migrant workers’ rights. In the factories and maquiladoras on both sides of the borders we demand: SAME WORK SAME CONTRACT SAME RIGHTS-elevate all labor to the highest standards!
For full citizenship and labor rights for all migrant workers.
We demand AFL-CIO stop affiliation with the US AID which subordinates labor unions around the world to US imperialism.
We demand AFL-CIO, SEIU, ILWU and other labor federations open membership to immigrant labor.
We call for labor self-defense guards, marches, labor actions and strikes at the borders to free the detainees and in the towns, cities and workplaces to protect and defend immigrant labor!
We demand jobs for all! Thirty hours work for forty hours pay! Open the books of all the employers, banks and finance capitalists and their politicians and lackeys!
Against inflation we demand labor set up worker run price and wage committees to set and enforce living wages and affordable prices!
Companies which do not comply must be nationalized without indemnification and run under workers control.
For a workers government which expropriates the capitalist class at the hands of workers militias deputized by the workers assemblies!
To win the fight for workers rights in the semi-colonies as in the imperialist centers, workers need a revolutionary workers party and new workers international that uses class struggle methods to displace collaborators from the leadership of the unions, to resolve the crisis of leadership raising up new leaders from the ranks-in particular youth and women–to apply the methods of the Transitional Program.
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/07/2022
