Mike advocates sanctions on employers for hiring undocumented workers: "If U.S. citizens had to present their U.S. Passports to an employer and that employer faced a five year stretch in a nasty Federal pen for violating that passport check, well...."; and "Punitive measures would need to be focused on them, not the working class, who only have their skills and time to sell to make a living."
That's not in the interest of undocumented workers, nor is it in the interest of the labor movement: punishing employers for hiring undocumented workers effectively punishes undocumented workers and unions that need them to grow.
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I think that we have to agree to disagree here. I think it's in the interests of potential undocumented proletarians to get documented to come to the U.S. to work because that lowers the fear factor in terms of organizing unions and getting better wages and working conditions for our class as a whole. I've also pointed out that the way the undocumented immigrants get to the land of the brie and the home of the wage-slave is fraught with risks to life and limb.
Not only that, it boosts ethnic division amongst the citizen workers of the U.S.--these nationalists are not ready for open borders, much less One Big Union, my preferred solution.
The present set up, which allows a certain flow of the undocumented through to the USA and into the lower strata of the American working class, also contributes to the ideological justification for another layer of police apparatus aka La Migra and the Border Patrol--a kind of garrison State mentality. I believe that it is in the interests of most of the capitalist class to leave this situation in place, especially employers who hire the undocumented. Finally, I do not think that the working class has interests in common with the employing class.
Best, Mike B)
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