In any social struggle we begin with the existing conditions, not from a utopia. Today's undocumented workers are demanding amnesty, and we should support them. But even if undocumented workers who are already here won amnesty, that is not the end of the story. As was the case with the amnesty of 1986, not all will be eligible for any amnesty that Washington might conceivably grant, and after amnesty, more undocumented workers will come, especially from Mexico but also from elsewhere. As long as a great disparity in wages and benefits exist between the USA (as well as other rich nations) on one hand and much of the rest of the world on the other hand, people will come here (and go to other rich nations and even only just relatively richer nations than their homelands) looking for jobs.
On 12/20/06, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> In truth in U.S. history this kind of thing has gone on with immigrants in
> one way or another but mostly regionally and with much more potential for
> change of status.
That is not true. Conditions for many immigrants were a lot worse in the past. Some, like the Chinese, Japanese, and so on (beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47>), were categorically excluded from citizenship, and organized labor, except the anarchist and communist margins, was all anti-immigrant. When the Japanese were put into concentration camps, most leftists ignored them completely. During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, both US citizens and non-citizens, were deported, and the Mexican population in the USA "dropped 40%" (Richard D. Vogel, "Mexican and Central American Labor: The Crux of the Immigration Issue in the U.S.," <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/vogel200606.html>).
Objective and subjective conditions for struggle are much better today. Categorical racial and ethnic exclusion of the sort that existed in the USA has been abolished. Even the mainstream of organized labor is generally opposed to the criminalization of undocumented workers and doing what it can to organize them, for immigrant workers, documented and undocumented, are the present and future of the labor movement. Undocumented Latino workers have strong allies among documented Latino workers and Latino citizens, some of whom have conquered some political power, for in many cases Latino families are composed of people of various citizenship statuses. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>