Articles  on Immigration

1. ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION & MULTICULTURALISM-GREECE

2. THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN WORKERS IN GREECE

3. CLASSICAL MARXISTS ON IMMIGRATION

4. US SOCIALISTS ON IMMIGRATION

5. IS THE USA A MIRROR IMAGE OF SOUTH AFRICA?

6. AFL-CIO ENDORSES OPEN BORDERS

8. HOW MASS IMMIGRATION CHANGED THE  US BUILDING TRADES

9. ZERO IMMIGRATION

10. IMPERIALIST IMMIGRATION

11.GLOBALIST LEFT VS REVOLUTIONARY LEFT

12. MARXIST CRITIQUE OF SWP ON IMMIGRATION

13. ZERO UNEMPLOYMENT ZERO IMMIGRATION

Illegal immigration and multiculturalism

Greece in the paths of the New World Order

"Left-wingers", liberals and neo-liberals of every shade, are proposing a "humanist"-moralist approach to the issue of illegal immigration. This would perhaps be an interesting proposition, if the goal of socialism were to offer consolation to the dwellers of the valley of tears, promising heaven as a reward for their stoic patience. But this is the purpose of the Christian religion. The purpose of socialism is obviously to teach the poor, not to endure the miseries of life, but to change it. For this, they need to know the causes and the nature of social problems, like that of illegal immigration. Moralist approaches lead to contradictions and dead ends, and, as everybody knows, are often used as an alibi for the greatest crimes. It is in the name of moral principles and humanitarianism that the peoples of Iraq and Yugoslavia are being slaughtered, while NATO has turned these principles into an official alibi for its new strategy. For those reasons, we must be wary of moralists. In dealing with them, we should - to say the least - hold on tightly to our wallet.

Illegal immigration is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon. Yet Greece has received an enormous number of illegal immigrants, out of any proportion with its size and resources. This fact is not unrelated to the infamous Schengen agreement, which defines Greece as a country responsible for the initial reception of refugees - a door open for the whole of Europe. As a result, we have a dramatic rise of unemployment, and the modification of its nature. It is no longer conjunctural. It has become synonymous with the social marginalisation of the Greek worker. The destruction of his social conquests and rights. Of course the government and some of its fervent "enemies" are denying all this. But working people know very well what is happening, as they are the ones called upon to pay the bill.

Our fathers of the nation, first of all, maintain that illegal immigration has no significant impact on employment. Foreigners are employed in menial and dirty jobs that the well-nourished Greek worker would not deign to do. We read in the press recently that Spanish workers have equally aristocratic inclinations. That's why "their" government decided to bring within the next few years one million Romanians and Moroccans, to do the jobs that the locals ostensibly snub. It is to be noted that Spain has now officially more than 20% unemployment.

Here is what a father of the nation, a member of the great "anti-racist" family, has to say:

"All these conditions have created, as you have seen in the poll, in a great section of the population, the impression that foreigners are the cause of all the tribulations and disasters. This is perhaps the easy solution. We, who are always the same, are never at fault. It is always the others who are responsible. The others - who ? The foreigners: dark-skinned, black-skinned, yellow-skinned, sometimes even fair-skinned - because of Germany. But the truth is usually different. The truth is that foreigners don't steal the jobs of our kids, instead they do the jobs that we don't deign to do, because we consider them to be below our social standing. Painters, garbage-collectors, housemaids, road construction workers, gardeners, agricultural workers."

Thus spake Yakoumatos, an MP of the New Democracy party, speaking in a meeting under the subject "racism and xenophobia - initiatives for the legalisation of foreign workers", organized by the PASOK-controlled Athens Labour Council. A representative case of a political con-man - "anti-racist". He impulsively admits his class racism - the only racism that really exists. The honest jobs, that allow the drones of his clan the means to live in luxury, he considers below human dignity!

Following close, the groups of extra-parliamentary "left" - this substitute of western social-democracy, adapted to Greek conditions. They do nothing more than to serve the official sophistries, reheated. In one of the journals of this political milieu, we read:

"Most of the jobs occupied nowadays by foreigners, have been abandoned by Greek workers for years. Housemaids, gardeners, scrubwomen, nurses for the elderly ... land workers and shepherds, the rest in hard menial jobs, construction, quarries, and sweatshops"

All these unrewarding and heavy jobs have been abandoned by Greek workers "for years"! It seems we didn't even produce stones. We used to import them!...

Further down, the columnist adds in petulant tone:

"Let all those ridiculous racists tell us ... the thousands of Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Russian women that are in the hands of ruthless procurers, whose job are they taking? (newspaper "Ergatiki Exousia" ["workers' power"]).

Is it true that the indigenous worker is snobby, that he considers some jobs to be below his dignity, or is there some other (well-known) secret? The chairman of the parliament, Apostolos Kaklamanis, spoke at least with more squareness to the journalist Yiannis Diakogiannis: "Cheap labour, not only for farm work, but also for the industry and the construction sector, has often been the ulterior unavowed aim".

A former cadre and minister of New Democracy, industrialist well known for his cynicism, Stefanos Manos is even more precise: "immigrants are god's blessing, we need them because they work with one third of a Greek worker's wages, because they cannot go on strike, they cannot form unions, they can do nothing".

So the foreigner is not for some "undignified" jobs, he is for every job, as long as he does it with one third of the wage, with no other rights, with the head bowed.

A natural law?

Another fairy tale widely circulated, presents the mass influx of illegal immigrants as a physical law: Wars and famines create inevitable waves of "economic refugees", that the state is unable to contain. It does its best. It organizes bodies of border guards, it buys speedboats, trains "Rambos" - all without result. Thus, since we can't prevent the phenomenon, we have to live with it.

It is of course a fact that there is misery in the world and that wars take place. But humanity has seen much worse, without these results. If capitalism didn't use the disasters it produces as an alibi for its policies, if the state did indeed want to stop illegal immigration, there are more simple, economic, civilized and effective ways to do it. Even the gentlemen of the extraparliamentary "left" can realize that the problem could easily be solved if the government prohibited employers to employ persons who are not legally in the country. A few heavy fines would discourage potential violators. There is no need for police dogs, live fences or machine guns. But the government doesn't want. It too is animated by "humanitarian" feelings...

Many are those who feign ignorance, but in fact everyone knows that foreigners are here not in spite of the authorities, but with their will, as cheap labour. As far as citizens of countries of the former "socialist" camp are concerned, there are also other expediences, purely political ones. Especially for Albanians. This doesn't mean that economic reasons lose their importance.

T. Krikellis, former MP of the New Democracy party, in a TV show hosted by a well-known journalist revealed that "In a meeting at the ministry of public order that took place in 1994-95 in the presence of three experts from the ministry of foreign affairs, the issue was raised of supporting Albania by showing tolerance in the issue of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, because the neighboring country had made a definitive turn to the west and should be supported in this course."

Mr. Krikellis pointed out that there had been a related "message" originating from the U.S., addressed primarily to the New Democracy Party as the PASOK government had already accepted the propositions. In other words the U.S. want to pay their agents, in their efforts to resurrect capitalism in Albania (and elsewhere), not at their own expense, but with the wages of the Greek worker.

Who doesn't know that the Greek consulate in Korytsa hands out heaps of visas? One of those suspect characters who have proclaimed themselves "representatives" of Albanian workers, speaks of 300 visas daily, in parallel with illegal entry.

Foreigners not only enter with the indirect approval of the authorities, but are also subject to a selection process. No other country in the Balkans has suffered as many tribulations as Serbia. Besides the war, its people are tormented by an inhuman and long-lasting embargo. Still, there are no Serb illegal immigrants in Greece! You see, in Serbia they don't have their own people, Berisha or Maiko, to support. Instead there is the "last communist dictator", Milosevic, whom they want to overturn.

There are also many Kurds - but what kind of Kurds? Not the kind that are being persecuted by Turkish generals in South-East Turkey. These are few and, when they aren't being delivered to Ankara, they are getting shut in the camp at Lavrio. But we have many from the other kind, those who are under U.N. protection in the unofficially occupied Northern Iraq. Because there, there are also lackeys of the west, whom they want to support. Messrs Barzani and Talabani, who are being used against the other enemy of freedom, the "nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein"!

Of course all this doesn't look like a "law of nature", with which we 'll have to live, as we are being assured. But then, whatever serves the interests of capitalism is nature, whereas what protects the interests of workingmen is against nature.

Some will say: "but aren't immigrants workingmen"?

They are indeed, and the Greek working class has nothing to divide with them. But it has with the governments that are using the misery and pain of other peoples against it, embellishing at the same time their dirty policy with "humanitarian" pretexts.

This is a permanent tactic of imperialism. After WW II the U.S. took advantage of the persecutions and torments to which Jews had been submitted in Europe to gain the acceptance or the tolerance of public opinion to the uprooting of Arabs from Palestine and the creation of a "Jewish" state. They rounded up the more miserable Jews with the promise of giving them a motherland and used them in fact as cops of the region in order to continue stealing Arab oil.

Globalisation and illegal immigration

The phenomenon of illegal immigration has not occurred at a random moment. We live in the days of so-called neo-liberalism and of economic globalisation. In Europe, as far as tariffs are concerned, borders have been abolished years ago. Similar free trade zones have been established in North America and East Asia, while via the GATT (now the WTO) tariffs are gradually being abolished worldwide. At the same time, protectionist currency controls are being abolished and the movement of capitals is becoming totally deregulated. Under these conditions, it would be not only logically but also practically inconsistent not to release controls on the movement of the most important economic factor, namely of labour. So let them leave aside the sophistries about natural laws and snobby Greek workers.

The inconsistency of restrictions in the labour market has often been pointed out in the press of the extraparliamentary "left". In one of them, the columnist Th. Koutsoumbos writes on this issue:

"Contrary to what was the case in the 30s, today "globalisation" knocks down the economic borders. Commodities move freely, and in unconceivable quantities due to the use of modern technology. (Only for the movement of people are "walls of shame" being erected (Germany), with electric fences and police controls...)" ("Nea prooptiki" ["new perspective"])

We don't know what happens with other categories of people, whether some countries welcome tourists and businessmen with "electric fences", but illegal immigrants are certainly passing borders (those remaining "walls of shame"!) in unconceivable quantities, and without the need to use modern technology!.. The fact that this is not being done in a legal way is simply a mater of political expediency. Governments don't want to take upon their shoulders the responsibility and the resulting political cost. They prefer to shovel them to the immigrants themselves and to natural laws. On the other hand, it is also a matter of price: Just as illegally imported cigarettes are cheap for smokers, illegal workers are cheap for the employers. Being illegal they are literally at their mercy.

The gentlemen of the extraparliamentary "left", although most of them deny the very existence of globalisation and brand it a myth (Th. Koutsoumbos is still using quotation marks for it), at the same time become its proponents and apologists. Their slogan "borders open for the working class" is nothing but a formulation embellished with left-wing verbalism for the liberation of labour market. Not only do they recognize as progress the fall of the "walls of shame", but they outbid for the completion of the process. And how could one be for the liberation of the labour market without also being for the liberation of the market in general and thus for the globalisation - and the converse?

Yet gentlemen, you cannot be for economic globalisation, under capitalism, without at the same time supporting political globalisation, that is the abolition of political borders (the "walls of shame") and consequently of the national state. Without in essence pleading for a global imperialist power, that is for the new world order. In short without being, in practice, pitiful western-style social democrats, totally aligned in all important issues with imperialism and the Simitis government. The fact is not accidental that the extraparliamentary "left" had a despicable position on the question of Yugoslavia. That some groups openly supported the NATO bombings, while others did the same implicitly, by regurgitating the cadaveric literature of the CNN in order to persuade us that the "nationalist" and "genocidal" Serbs got what they deserved!

The liberalization of markets is a necessary adaptation of world capitalist economy to the phenomenon of the multinational companies, which initially appeared after the WWII and have seen a tremendous growth in the last two decades. The merger of capitals across borders and irrespective of their national origin is objectively in contradiction with the economic and political existence of the national state. In this sense, abolishing the national restrictions to world trade becomes an inescapable necessity for capitalism. Still this has nothing to do with the much-advertised restoration of conditions of healthy competition. Quite the opposite is true, as protectionism used to dampen competitive inequalities. Now the law of the jungle is being imposed everywhere. In the market of commodities, as well as in the labour market. The globalisation of markets is the means for the conquest of the world economy and the abolition of labour rights by the big beasts, the multinational monopolies.

In the past, and even more so today, under conditions of a deregulated economy, competition forces multinationals to transfer more and more of their economic activities to regions that can ensure them competitive advantages. Wherever there are limitless supplies of "black labour", tax exemption and unaccountability. Particularly to South-East Asia, where wages are up to 45 times lower than the equivalent western-European ones. Also to countries of the former eastern bloc, and wherever else attractive opportunities for cost-squeezing present themselves.

This is a totally new phenomenon, even if the eyeless of the extra-parliamentary "left" fail to see it. They have their reasons for this.

In the past, a North-American company would invest in Brazil in order to conquer more easily the Brazilian market. Nowadays, the target is the North-American and the world market. This leads to loss of jobs for the North-American working class. The same happens to each and every country where the hunt for profit drives capital to migrate.

But what happens to capital that, for various reasons, remains invested in the traditional industrial centers and their immediate satellites? It is obvious that in order to survive, in order to avoid massive bankruptcies in Europe and North America, this capital must make use in the metropolitan centers of exactly the same advantages that are available in the periphery. If Muhammad can't go to the mountain, the mountain must go to Muhammad. Governments take it upon themselves to import in camouflaged ways "black labour" into Europe and North America, which means at the same time importing third-world standards of living for local workingmen. This is the real reason and the aims of the deluge of immigration that causes a stir in the working class, in Greece and elsewhere.

The well-paid strata of labour aristocracy, inside which most of the so-called anti-racists find their supporters, believe they are safe. But the unemployment and poverty of masses causes the European and North-American markets, the two largest in the world, to shrink. It is not enough to produce cheap, one must also have customers to sell the products to. What seemed to be a way out for capitalism reproduces the old problems in a more acute form, worsening the commercial crisis. Competition becomes more acute and squeezing costs even further becomes a matter of life and death. The capital seeks even cheaper labour while at the same time putting in the crosswire of austerity new strata of society.

Computers and communications nowadays, among other things, are unifying the labour market. Since the borders are open everyone can, via the Internet, knock a door in any other place, especially when he is being prompted to do so. This has started happening in Greece too.

"Imagine - tells us an MIT professor (with the belief that this does not concern him personally) in a Scientific American article - a doctor in Sri Lanka who makes $20 a day, administering health care to homeless people in Boston via a kiosk, equipped with a remote video and medical instrument connection and staffed by a nurse. The service might cost $5 a visit, and although not perfect, it would be superior to no health care at all."

Computer-related jobs are daily gaining larger percentages in the labour market, especially among younger people. Here too, in order to offer his services, one doesn't have to go to Boston. He can do it from home! "imagine - says the same professor - 1,000 accountants from Beijing doing accounting services for General Motors at $1 per hour."

Why "imagine" it? It is already happenning. Swissair, for example, has already transported a large part of its accounting services to India.

All this, seen from the point of view of progress and technology, seems seductive. But on the basis of capitalism, it means the globalisation of Sri Lanka living standards.

Immigration during the 50s and illegal immigration.

Many are those who like to compare the current illegal immigration with the immigration of Greek and other South-European workers to the North of Europe, especially W. Germany, in the 50s. In this way, they want to silence the working class.

Why does it complain? And with what right? Didn't it immigrate en masse to Germany? But, what connection is there between that immigration and the one of today? Is really the difference that hard to see?

Then the capitalist world was passing a phase of great expansion, which created increased needs in working hands. Without these hands, what was called "the German miracle" would not have existed, nor would the equally impressive economic and cultural flourishing of the other industrial centers. Conditions of full employment and increased demand for workforce, dictated the establishment of bilateral state agreements under which specified numbers of workers were dispatched to specific industries. This was a legal and coordinated immigration. Immigrants were filling real and great needs in the labour market. They had the same wages and enjoyed the same rights with their local coworkers. The same labour legislation applied to all.

What is happening now? Capitalism is deep in the worst crisis of its history. Workforce requirements are continuously shrinking. Millions of workers are officially unemployed in Europe, and even more are unofficially so. In Greece, out of one and a half industrial workers, before the big immigration wave started, hundreds of thousands were already unemployed, "employed", "semi-employed", "employable". Illegal immigrants, who are another one and a half million, didn't come in order to fill some big or small needs for labour hands. The well-oiled door was opened for them in the middle of the night in order for them to elongate to an unbelievable degree the columns of the unemployed. In order for the battles for jobs to become even tougher, with full conscience that for the local labourer they would be lost in advance.

What should we say and what should the position of the left be, if Greek workers had gone to Germany, not under the conditions that they did, but in order to work with one fourth the wage of the German worker, without social security and working hours, because they could afford it and this was the only way they could find work, taking in this way the position of the German worker? Would the left approve of this? And would the German worker be a racist if he denounced "his" government for this under-the-belt hit? Or would those who blamed him be imbeciles, if not agents of the German capital?

In such a situation, the Greek immigrant would be no different than a scab that, forced by unemployment and misery, and because of his backward class consciousness, accepts work with a lower wage in order to take the place of his brother.

Foreigners, due to currency differences in their countries of origin, due to their way of life, due to the fact that they accept to live without modern amenities, to be packed 4 or 5 to a room, to live in a sweatshop attic, in a shed of a peasant, eating the food prepared by the wife of the peasant, in short due to their limited needs, can settle for a fraction of the average wage, on which the Greek worker couldn't possibly subsist and which he therefore couldn't possibly accept. Thus the modern immigrant, the illegal immigrant, doesn't take his place alongside the local worker. He replaces him. The indigenous worker doesn't just become unemployed. He loses all prospects of ever being reintegrated into the production process, especially when he isn't young and specialized.

Even if the Greek worker can settle, even temporarily, for the employment conditions of the foreigner, even if he gives up his habits and his way of life, with the hope of better days in the future, the employer will prefer the "illegal" immigrant, to the Greek who may in the future take him to a court to ask for his legal rights.

No wonder we are reading in the press news like this one:

Miracles don't happen nowadays in the Duomo. Executions do, however, even if they are symbolic, like the execution of the "Napolitan unemployed". The cathedral was occupied last week by hundreds of unemployed people. The Italian unemployed then marched to the embassy of Gabon. "We want an African citizenship", they said, "because those from outside the [European] community find work easier than the locals. We are not racists. We are just demanding equal opportunities with the Africans"...In the troubled archipelago of the unemployed of Southern Italy, a war is looming among the poor. ("Ta Nea", 2/24/1999)

The modern world has never known a similar situation. The governmental staffs of the new world order have managed, acting under the sign of "humanitarianism" and with the good services of the "left", to return society to an era lost in the depths of history. The position of an indigenous worker nowadays can only be compared to that of the free Italian worker under the Roman Empire in the epoch of its decline. Then the massive use of slave labor made a pariah of him - permanently unemployed, a parasite of society, who eked a meager living thanks to the municipal mess and the state wheat allowances.

But the foreign competitor of the indigenous worker also resembles a slave more than a free immigrant worker. Is it by chance that his transportation to Europe has been called slave trade? From the point of view of his compensation and rights, his employment is nothing but a modernized form of slavery. Moreover, this archaic employment regime is not restricted to himself, who after all has chosen it. Its scope is inevitably being extended to the entire working class. That's exactly the point: using immigrants as a battering-ram in order to eliminate labor rights that have been gained with struggles over the course of an entire century.

Those who are now speaking of the equalization of wages between foreigners and Greek workers, in order to eliminate unfair competition for jobs, are mocking the Greek workers and the foreigners alike. The equalization has already been accomplished. Not because foreigners are now being treated as Greeks, but because Greek workers, in their overwhelming majority, are being treated as immigrants, and this only if they are lucky enough. How could things be different? When there is this inconceivable super-supply of workforce, wages are necessarily equalized at the lowest limit.

If some "leftists" don't have ulterior motives, and are just contemplating the Greek workers as a salvage vessel, they should at least remember the coast guard regulations: a boat designed to carry fifty persons, can take a couple more. But when another fifty climb in, and others are constantly being coming, the result is not that a hundred will be saved - they will all go to the bottom!

The union issue nowadays

"No", replies the "left" almost without exception, "calm down - Things can be fixed with united trade union struggle!"

Workers who hear this will smile indulgently. They know first of all how temporary and fragile are the gains of any trade union struggle. That in the end, the law of supply and demand is imposed on wages too.

Of course, for the union bureaucracy, trade union struggles are everything. But if things were indeed thus, if trade union struggle was not in the end, in spite of its tremendous importance, ineffective, the working class would not be drawn into politics, it would have no reasons to build its own party, aiming at the abolition of wage slavery itself.

But why not organize common struggles that could for a while (who knows how long?) improve the situation? For the aforementioned Th. Koutsoumbos, this is a panacea. In the journal "nea prooptiki", under the heading "racism in the epoch of globalisation", exposing a position almost the entire left shares, he lays on the shoulders of the Greek working class the duty to liberate every immigrant from the bosses' super exploitation!

"But", he writes, "the working class can't liberate itself without liberating every exploited section of society, without first liberating the Albanian workers and other immigrant 'foreigners' from the wild super exploitation of the bosses"

Koutsoumbos has read somewhere that Marx and Engels were saying something similar about English workers, and he believes he can apply the same formula to the Greek workers, banking on their prestige. Marx was speaking about the word-ruler England. Almost the entire world was its colony. It had the world industrial monopoly. From this position, its bourgeoisie was realizing enormous profits. Thanks to them, it could buy out important layers of workers who, according to Engels, "were enjoying in a state of bliss along with them (the bourgeois) the colonial monopoly of England and its monopoly of the world market". Only when England would lose its colonies, the monopoly of the world market, and the English workers their privileges, could they start to think and act in a revolutionary way.

As far as we know, Albania, Pakistan, the Ukraine etc are not colonies of Greece. The Greek working class is not "enjoying in a state of bliss" the crumbs falling from the exploitation of foreigners. Other layers are enjoying them, and, by a devilish coincidence, they are all "anti-racists" and "anti-nationalists". The only thing the working class collects is misery. And, of course, it can't liberate foreigners for the simple reason that their exploitation goes on against its will, and their liberation goes contrary to theirs.

In reality, every working class can only be liberated in its own country, against its own ruling class. Fighting behind the "walls of shame", which can only truly fall in this way, and in any case not upon the heads of working people.

Beyond this, the integration of foreigners in the union movement presupposes their social integration. This last is not a technical issue. Foreigners must first acquire common experiences and the feeling of a common nation, which replaces the solidarity of ghettos. They must become indigenous, native. And this is not simple, not easy, and often not possible at all. But even when it is possible, it takes a long time, which doesn't pass easily and agreeably for everyone.

First of all, a precondition for a common union organization is a common program of demands. The wage of the worker has an upper and a lower limit. The upper limit is determined by competition between capitalists. The lower, by the vital needs of workers. Nobody accepts a wage lower than what he needs in order to survive. One prefers to die slumbering than working. Competition is not absent within the working class. But at this point it gets surpassed, and the common organization of workers becomes possible, in order to demand a common minimum wage which will assure them a decent life.

Certainly the equality of needs is only relative. Needs differ from worker to worker. That's why there are some relative measures in the minimum wage, which bridge the differences. But how can differences of the nature and size that separate the wage that the native worker can accept on one side, and the categories of immigrant workers on the other, be bridged? What will the unions demand?

It is the impossibility of fielding commonly accepted demands that explains the total failure of unions to organize immigrants, not the "racism" of labour bureaucracy, as the "sole consistent", ostensibly, "anti-racists" of the extra-parliamentary "left" conveniently assert. As a result, instead of organizing foreigners, the unions see even the Greek workers desert them, being unemployed or, at best, a small minority at the workplace. The only possible form of organization for foreigners is the solidarity of the ghetto. Of the many ghettoes, in fact. And this has worked in certain instances, for example in the brief strike of Albanians in Almyros. Thus the union movement has been all but extinguished in the private sector and, to the extent that the public sector becomes privatized and subcontracting becomes more common, the dissolution is spreading there too. And if we take into account the fact that unions are the antechamber for the political organization of the proletariat, it is no wonder that the "left" becomes depilated from working-class elements and becomes a current of petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. Unless this state is overturned, the spectre of a dismal future is visible in the horizon. The proletariat risks being reduced, from an organized class and a springboard for the development of society as a whole, to an amorphous, tame, wretched mass, with no present and no hope for the future.

The exploitation of "black labour" in the periphery, the creation in Europe and America of a workingman of "new type", with a humiliating wage, without working hours, who is not protected by any law and is at the mercy of the master, lacking any potential for resistance, have permitted the multinational monopolies to realize surplus profits, and for capitalism to restabilise the world monetary system.

A decade ago it would seem unbelievable that inflation in Greece would reach 1.8% annually, with a tendency to go even lower. Based on the new slavery and the barbaric regime the Simitis government has brought to the labour market, it can now brag that it has ascertained the ticket for entry into the EMU (if this land is finally discovered). Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois have found free labourers, free servants, gardeners, nannies, nurses. Pimps have found plenty of whores. Real estate owners found hefty, untaxed rents, for stables at which even oxen would look down with contempt a few years ago. Gangs of slavers found the new El Dorado. And, in this happy conjuncture, the stock exchange of course rises. While the working masses suffer, new parasitic sectors and new privileged strata are being created.

So how could those who rule us not care for those "human rights", how could they not protect this "internationalism" those who collect the crumbs falling from the overflowing table of the rich?

Only the working class is being directly injured and overpowered, that's why it is the only one that grudges and reacts to the insistence of the ruling class and its foreign patrons, to defeat it, transforming into their "multicultural" manor the country, and the whole of Europe. We have never before seen such "internationalist" fervor from the imperialists. Reproaches for "racism" are being addressed to the working class only, and only from those who have nothing to fear, or at least who think so. Even though extraparliamentarians are thundering against the insignificant "Hrisi Avgi" group and the "Greek patriots". Who dares not beat the donkey, beats the packsaddle!

Marx on the competition between English and Irish workers

The English workers who, as Engels said, were "enjoying in bliss" their share from the profits of theirs bourgeoisie's monopoly, were a privileged minority. The great mass was living in poverty. Marx, as a member of the General Council of the international, concerned himself especially with the antagonism that existed between the poor layers of English workers and the Irish workers, whom the bourgeoisie forced to migrate to England as cheap labour.

Marx in a letter to Meyer and Vogt (April 9, 1870) informs them of his related propositions to the General Council. The paper "Ergatiki Exousia" ["workers' power"], using the method of the guillotine, by pasting together two sentences from two different paragraphs, transforms the revolutionary materialist Marx into a mainstream liberal petty-bourgeois. We believe that the reader stands to gain by reading the entire excerpt that refers to the Irish question, which we cite here, underlining the sentences used by the "Ergatiki Exousia".

I had intended to submit further RESOLUTIONS on the necessary transformation of the present Union (i.e., enslavement of Ireland) IN A FREE AND EQUAL FEDERATION WITH GREAT BRITAIN. Further progress on this matter has been temporarily suspended AS FAR AS PUBLIC RESOLUTIONS GO because of my enforced absence from the General Council. No other member of it has enough knowledge of Irish affairs or sufficient prestige with the English members of the General Council to be able to replace me on this matter.

Time has not passed uselessly, however, and I would ask you to pay particular attention to the following:

After studying the Irish question for years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the ruling classes In England (and this is decisive for the workers' movement ALL OVER THE WORLD) cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland.

On 1 January 1870 the General Council issued a secret circular, written by me in French - {for repercussions in England, only the French papers are important, not the German} - on the relationship of the Irish national struggle to the emancipation of the working class, and thus on the attitude the International Association must take towards the Irish question.

Here I give you, quite shortly, the salient points. Ireland is the BULWARK of the English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of this country is not simply one of the main sources of their material wealth; it is their greatest moral power. They represent, IN FACT, the domination of England over Ireland. Ireland is, thus, the grand moyen by which the English aristocracy maintains its domination in England itself.

On the other hand: if the English army and police were withdrawn from Ireland tomorrow, you would immediately have AN AGRARIAN REVOLUTION IN IRELAND. But the overthrow of the English aristocracy in Ireland would entail, and would lead immediately to, its overthrow in England. This would bring about the prerequisites for the proletarian revolution in England. In Ireland, the land question has, so far, been the exclusive form of the social question; it is a question of existence, a question of life or death for the immense majority of the Irish people; at the same time, it is inseparable from the national question: because of this, destruction of the English landed aristocracy is an infinitely easier operation In Ireland than in England itself - quite apart from the more passionate and more revolutionary character of the Irish than the English.

As for the English bourgeoisie, it has, d' abord, a common interest with the English aristocracy in turning Ireland into simple pastureland to provide meat and wool at the cheapest possible price FOR THE ENGLISH MARKET. It has the same interest in reducing the Irish population to such a low level, through EVICTION and forced emigration, that English capital (leasehold capital) can function with SECURITY in that country. It has the same interest IN CLEARING THE ESTATE OF IRELAND as it had IN THE CLEARING OP THE AGRICULTURAL DISTRICTS OP ENGLAND and SCOTLAND. The £6,000-10,000 ABSENTEE and other Irish revenues that at present flow annually to London must also be taken into account.

But the English bourgeoisie also has much more important interests in the present Irish economy. As a result of the steadily - increasing concentration of leaseholding, Ireland is steadily supplying its SURPLUS for the English LABOUR MARKET, and thus forcing down the WAGES and material and moral position of the ENGLISH WORKING CLASS.

And most important of all! All industrial and commercial centres in England now have a working class divided into two hostile camps, English PROLETARIANS and Irish PROLETARIANS. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who forces down the STANDARD OF LIFE. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself to be a member of the ruling nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He harbours religious, social and national prejudices against him. His attitude towards him is roughly that of the POOR WHITES to the NIGGERS in the former slave states of the American Union. The Irishman PAYS HIM BACK WITH INTEREST IN HIS OWN MONEY. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of English rule in Ireland.

This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class's impotence, despite its organisation. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this.

But the evil does not end here. It rolls across the ocean. The antagonism between English and Irish is the secret basis of the conflict between the UNITED STATES and England. It renders any serious and honest cooperation impossible between the working classes of the two countries. It enables the governments of the two countries, whenever they think fit, to blunt the edge of social conflict by MUTUAL BULLYING and, IN CASE OF NEED, by war between the two countries.

England, as the metropolis of capital, as the power that has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important country for the workers' revolution and, in addition, the only country where the material conditions for this revolution have developed to a certain state of maturity. Thus, to hasten the social revolution in England is the most important object of the International Working Men's Association. The sole means of doing so is to make Ireland independent. It is, therefore, the task of the 'INTERNATIONAL' to bring the conflict between England and Ireland to the forefront everywhere, and to side with Ireland publicly everywhere. The special task of the Central Council in London is to awaken the consciousness of the English working class that, for them, the national emancipation of Ireland is not a QUESTION OF ABSTRACT JUSTICE OR HUMANITARIAN SENTIMENT, but THE FIRST CONDITION OF THEIR OWN SOCIAL EMANCIPATION.

As we see, Marx doesn't have recourse to the pseudo-theory of "racism" in order to explain the existence of two hostile camps inside the working class. He looks for the cause, not in the ideas of people, but in the social conditions that determine them in order to finally point out, as the only solution, the revolutionary change of these conditions. The priestly idea that the problem could be resolved with admonitions about the fraternity of all races doesn't even cross his mind. He sets off the material root of the division that was none other than the English occupation of Ireland. This is the ABC of his materialist method, of which many declare themselves to be supporters and experts - but this is not enough to transform into Marxism their various subjective conclusions.

Marx doesn't try to persuade English workers to accept certain faits accomplits, he doesn't attempt to surpass the division by throwing bridges of morality. Contrarily, he draws attention to the causes of the problem and calls on them to support the revolutionary struggle for the independence of Ireland. Thus would open the road for the economic and cultural development of Ireland, its workers wouldn't be forcibly uprooted in order to be used as cheap labour by the English bourgeoisie. The last would lose its ability to sustain a labour aristocracy and to control by this means the movement of the proletariat. Contrarily to Marx, our anti-racists do nothing else than to muddle the waters and to cover the real causes of the current divisions in the camp of workers. For them, responsible is "racism". There is no other issue toward which they would have to take position and fight!..

Of course Marx is dealing with different questions of a different era. It is impossible to mechanically transplant all his propositions to the present, and especially to Greece. To say the least, the countries of origin of the nations that live and work here are in no way Greek colonies or subordinate partners in a federation, as Ireland was. No part of the Greek working class is gaining from their colonial exploitation. What is timeless in Marx is his materialist historic method. And according to it, there is no possibility of a serious, stable and frank cooperation of the Greek working class with immigrant workers as long as they are being used to degrade the wages, the living standards and to destroy the social rights it had gained with struggles. And, whether we like it or not, immigrant workers, as long as they are in Greece in this massive and limitless scale, can only fulfill this role, willingly or not.

As a result, the Greek capitalists, thanks to the cheap wage of the foreigners, are able to stabilize their economy, to demoralize the Greek working class, dissolve its political and union movement, extending in this way the life of capitalism itself. At the same time, extending the life of restorationist mafias in the countries of the former "eastern bloc", financing their counterrevolutionary regimes with the wage of the Greek worker. Of course, the same is being done by the ensemble of the ruling classes in the countries that compose NATO.

Thus illegal immigration, this modern-day slave trade, of which the "left" leaderships are becoming, openly or in a veiled way, apologists and defenders, is nowadays the greatest obstacle to the social revolution, in the East and the West alike.

The scarecrow of racism

The state with its plans creates the conditions of the nationalist antagonisms and at the same time propagates the myth of 'racism' so as to strangle under the shadow of this scarecrow every thought and attempt of the working class to fight against its social alienation, to fight against the absolutism of the new world order. We should not be amazed if tomorrow any protest against illegal immigration and the multi-cultural mutation of the country provokes the intervention of the courts with the accusation of stirring up racist and nationalist passions.

The myth of racism is used to obscure the true nature of the problem, presenting it as a psychological and cultural phenomenon. The immigrants are swindled and their relations with the Greek people are undermined as a completely perverted image of the real reasons of the resentment of the Greek working people is presented to them.

When the myth of racism is also underwritten by the "left", great political confusion is created and the path to right-wing adventurism is laid. Every increase in right-wing bigotry is due to the result the sell-out by the "left".

Everyone isolates the problem to racism. Grigoris Felonis doesn't pretend to be a 'leftist'. He is an "honorable" member of the central committee of PASKE (the pro-government union bloc) and, as president of the Athens Labour Council, the main speaker in the meeting on racism. This heavy-duty labour bureaucrat is in full agreement with the demoralised 'left'. He too believes that there are no other reasons for the reaction against the mass use of immigrants by the bosses, besides racism, which according to his descriptions is:

"The philosophy of the intellectually lazy. They believe they are unique on earth. That the other, the one different from them, is essentially non-existent, a humanoid. They believe they belong to a race privileged with higher spiritual and bodily forces, which are being bequeathed to the clear descendants of the race."

This is then the problem of the Greek workers. They are frightened lest their "Aryan" race be diluted!

In Dafni, a suburb in Athens with mainly labour population, we had one of the government organised 'brush operations'. There we had certain extra parliamentary leftists who demonstrated as 'multi-cultural' Greece was in danger. The local residents of the area deprecated them. Koutsoumbos, ostensibly shocked, comments in "Nea Prooptiki":

"Our cdes were provoked from people they didn't expect. Frightened housewives and pensioners, whose hide been tanned by the state and capitalists with poverty and super-exploitation, the silent 'populace', usually silent when facing smacks from those "higher up", suddenly raised their voices against those few who had the sensitivity to react to the barbarity of the police".

Concluding:

"we aren't dealing with the traditional phenomenon of racism. Something deeper but equally bestial is developing and embracing popular masses".

These people overflowing with intolerance and contempt for the 'bestial populace", who is only worth receiving 'smacks from those higher up', dare to pose as anti-racists! They pretend to defend, like Hercules, the true interests of the working class. The ones only they, not the "empty-headed" workers, know!

There, outside the public sports hall of Dafni, an anti-racist employer arrived with the same 'sensibility and courage' as the "far left". He was complaining because the police had (provisionally) deprived him of his immigrant employee. If anyone proposed to this gentleman to hire a Greek worker in his place, they would have had the opportunity to witness with their own eyes that the first victims of racist discrimination in Greece is the one against Greek workers. All others follow, however... the Polish worker is being replaced by the Romanian, the Romanian by the Albanian, the Albanian by the Pakistani and the Pakistani by the next cheap hands that will be discovered. Fortunately for capital, 'multi-culturalism' has still many reserves left...

Koutsoumbos believes, along with the rest of the so-called 'left', that the "Brush Operations" are a right-wing turn of Simitis under the pressure of the masses, which sent their message, with the results of the European elections! Thus for them Simitis stands to the left of the popular masses. They criticise the Greek population which, according to their claims, has pro-fascist tendencies, those self-styled endangered remains of democratic citizens!

It's not only in the electoral result that they recognised the stigma of fascism. Fascistic they had characterised the massive mobilisations on the issue of Macedonia, with which the Greek people declared its decision to resist the chicanery of the new world order in the Balkans.

Whatever is the political consciousness of the masses, one thing is certain: among them and the extra parliamentary "left" lies an abyss. On the question of the side of the abyss on which fascism lies, we ask the right to believe that, if nothing else, it isn't on the side of the masses.

The extra-parliamentary left characterises the working class as being inclined toward fascism, attempting to base their calumnies on skin-deep aspects of its spontaneous resistance. On its supposed racism and nationalism. But fascism doesn't simply consist of some external traits. It consists of its fundamental objectives. And these were not the transformation of Jews into soap, or the triumph of the Aryans, but the imperialist union of Europe under one centre of power. In this consisted the 'new order', which the Nazis also proclaimed.

Today American imperialism has exactly the same aims: To unite the whole world under its own hegemony. The cadre of American imperialism don't hide their affinity with German fascism, borrowing from it the term 'new order', even the codename 'Desert Fox', of one of their great operations against Iraq. But conditions are totally different and the past could not reappear, as many imagine, in the exact same form.

The Americans aren't obliged to repeat the doomed in advance attempt of Hitler to militarily occupy Europe. They attempt to base themselves on the consent and collusion of their big and small allies, taking advantage of the common interests created by the multinational forms of composition of capital, from the end of the war until today. That is why their 'new order' cannot be based on nationalism and racism, but on fraud of 'human rights', multiculturalism' and the levelling of national resistance by the steamroller of globalisation. (From one point of view this constitutes an advantage for current imperialism, but at the same time its Achilles' heel. Every time it is forced to use violence, it cannot count on the patriotic enthusiasm of its armies, but only on the doubtful successfulness of a new technological fascism.)

We could suppose that the extra parliamentary 'left', is a victim of naivete and of its hereditary inability to distinguish internationalism from globalisation and the modernised form of the fascist new order. In a few cases this obviously holds true. But we cannot say the same when we judge it as a political current. Because these gentlemen are the exact same ones who cheered the desert storm against the 'Islamist dictator Saddam' and the storm in the Balkans against the 'Stalinist dictator Milosevic'. Someone who can't distinguish between the imperialist new world order and its victims, even at the time when they are bleeding, is not just confused but an accomplice. It is the person who supports imperialist violence and robbery of the people as the foundation of his own privileges and good life.

New World Order and Multi-Culturalism

Imperialism, while dissolving with fire and brimstone the multinational entities created by the course of history, attempts to artificially create, even with the use of violence, new multicultural communities. In Bosnia it holds the Bosnian Serbs in a 'federation', whilst in Kosovo it's trying to maintain the Serbian minority against the Kosovo Albanians. At the same time, the monopolies' Europe advertises its multicultural future.

Are these changes a step forward, a step towards internationalism? Our 'leftist' friends say yes. Some with a subnote, some without. The working class says no and is right. It a step backward. It doesn't lead us into the post nation-state era, but to eras when the nation state was the issue. To the feudal and slave-owning empires. The Ottoman, the Byzantine, the Roman. It isn't the actualisation of the socialist perspective but the political adaptation and servility of the planet to the needs of the transnationals.

Multi-culturalism under the iron cross of NATO is the tool for the dissolution of the nation state for the sake of the new order and globalisation. It not only doesn't bring closer the peoples, but it constitutes an attempt to sink them to the depths of national antagonisms and conflicts. To mutual neutralisation. It is an attempt at generalising the American multicultural model. The plutocracy of the USA is convinced of its functionality. For two and a half centuries now it exploits a whole array of racial and national antagonisms in order to guarantee the stability of its power. It is these antagonisms that have prevented the working class, despite its great strength, from acquiring its own political physiognomy and its own political party.

From this perspective the Greek people are right to be wary. In particular with the Albanian element. It has both an infallible instinct, and long historic experience. Of course the Albanian nation doesn't just consist of Mafiosi eager to get rich. It also consists of people of labour, of wages. But the collapse of the hated Hoxha dictatorship, which called itself communist, has propelled the political pendulum to the other extreme. The pro-capitalist and agent elements are at the top. For the moment Albania is the feared bulwark of American imperialism in the Balkans.

The mercenary coalition with NATO against Yugoslavia, the demonstrations in Athens with the Star-Spangled Banner and the burning of the Greek flag, don't foretell anything good. The stance of the government and the political establishment make the situation even worse. Of course, Andreas Andrianopoulos and the other 'internationalists' are reassuring! Unfortunately they are not trustworthy. Especially those promising to tame the conflicting interests with internationalist admonitions.

"Prin" ["before"], the well-known product of stalinist abortion, makes fun of the worries of the theatrical writer Dialegmenos regarding the demographic change which illegal immigration is causing. They obviously consider without importance the history and traditions of peoples. So does the new world order, which wants to restart history from scratch. But the Greek people will never accept to have decisions on its future taken by national groups that don't have its history and experience and are still proudly marching behind the American flag. All of this belongs to the past for it and no amount of wretched invocations of internationalism can force it to go back to stages of its history, which it has long surpassed. That may be the objective of the new world order but it is in no way to its own interests.

Nationalism - not with the warped definition which cold war anti-communism gave it, but as a right of the peoples to support their national sovereignty, as a demand for the respect to national traditions and cultures - isn't opposed to internationalism, but its pre-condition. It is the irreplaceable vehicle of history, which leads towards internationalism.

Multiculturalism and internationalism are the vision of socialism, the vision of the workers. But this cannot be translated into the right of the capitalist in using 'black labour' so as to crush the domestic worker in every country, nor into the means for imposing the hegemony of the American superpower on an endless array of national minorities and civilisations with no ability of resistance.

The abolition of states under imperialism is a totally reactionary perspective. It is equivalent with a return to barbarity. It promises working people nothing but the generalisation of misery. This can't be, and isn't, the aim of socialism. Its programme is the surpassing of the nation state by moving forward. It aims to generalise prosperity.

Workers' solidarity cannot be understood as, nor can it be, the Christian cue of sharing one dish of lentils into fourteen portions, so the poor can survive and the rich get richer. It is the solidarity of the workers who fight first of all in their own country, for the overthrow of their own ruling class. The common and planned effort to overcome the uneven development bequeathed by history to different nations, as a necessary precondition for the abolition of national states, with the free will of the people and in their interests.

November 1999

Communist Internationalist League - KDE (trotskyists)

Father of the nation: A term used, often ironically, to describe the MPs in Greece.

New Democracy: The right-wing bourgeois party in Greece, equivalent to the Tories in GB or the Republicans in the USA.

PASOK: The "left-wing" Greek bourgeois party, more or less equivalent to the Democrats in the USA.

Extra parliamentary left: The collective name used in Greece to denote the groups that claim to stand to the left of the "official" left (represented by the CP and its various splits).

The expression "the wall of shame" was used in Greece to denote the Berlin wall.

Black labour: The word "black" is used in the Greek language to denote unofficial, shady, illegal or semi-illegal dealings: "black market" has the same meaning as in English, "black money" is money received under the table, not declared to the IRS, etc. Black labour specifically, refers to illegal employment, in which the employed person is being paid in cash, without social security and retirement benefits, and without the safeguards provided by Greek labour legislation.

Hrisi Avgi: a totally unimportant extreme-right grouplet, which nobody would be aware of, if it wasn't for the "leftists" advertising it and using it as a fig leaf for their bankrupt policies.

Andreas Andrianopoulos: A former minister of the right-wing New Democracy party, one of the foremost proponents of "neo-liberalism" and deregulation in Greece. He is best remembered for abolishing state control on the price of gasoline, reassuring everyone that this would result in a fall of gasoline prices. Within a week, the price jumped from 80 to 200 Drs a litre, and remained there since. He too is an anti-racist, of course.

Fourth International Bulletin - Greece - No. 26

Aug-October1998

THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN WORKERS IN GREECE

For a Policy which Unites and Doesn’t Divide

The far left demonstrates its opposition to racism:"Shame to every racist". Similar is the stance of the traditional Left and the Government itself.

The mass media in a certain phase emphasised the responsibility of the foreign born workers in the crime wave. Their stance was determined from the point of view of trying to attract customers. When the government and the ministers started to condemn publicly "racism", the mass media forgot the crime wave and they started to propagate antiracism and humanism. The cooperation of the government and the mass media in a permanent ‘anti-racist’ campaign should ensure that every leftist had serious doubts.

The term ‘racism’, can be given to mean the viewpoint of certain racial views, obviously anti-scientific and reactionary, but as with the reactions of the Greek workers in the mass arrival of illegal immigrants, can not really express their essence, but in reality disorientates and covers up the true issues.

Truly, against whom is the condemnation of racism made? Against the State? The government? The ruling classes or against the working class? Let us remember the articles of the Interior Minister G. Romaiou when he defended the immigrants on the issue of the crime wave. The declaration of the Foreign Affairs Under-secretary George Papandreou, who thanked publicly the immigrants for their contribution in the rebuilding of the country! The directives against the Mayors who in certain villages took measures against the immigrants. The State legalised 400,000 illegal immigrants and an even greater number lives in the country without a legal permit, works essentially without being bothered and with full knowledge of the authorities, in farming areas, industry, but also in public works such as the Metro or the Airport in Spata. In works which when publicised it was asserted would create thousands of new jobs of the unemployed Greeks.

Naturally, the stance of the State, the Government and the ruling classes against the immigrants, isn’t underlined by some humanitarian feelings but from their interests. They constitute an endless pool of labour power, which they can exploit on slave labour terms. With discredited wages, endless hours, and no insurance, holidays and whatever else labour law provides.

In the countryside many campaigns of middle and large landowners occurred against expulsions of immigrants by courts in their parts.

In the central post office in Athens we read the warning by some leftists "Worker beware. Racism is wanted by the bosses". The workers will be shaking their heads, with such a large stupidity. The workers prefer the immigrants and are ‘racist’ towards the Greek workers whom they are trying to transform into immigrants inside their own country.

Let us forget the racism of the bosses! The attack of the far ‘left’ is only felt by the working class. As it is the only class which is affected from the mass arrival of the immigrants and the only one which campaigns about the situation, whilst at the same time cooperating with their immigrant coworkers and shows the best feelings of solidarity - feelings unknown to most of the so-called anti-racists.

Why does the working class complain? As it is supposedly full of racist misconceptions? As it considers the Rumanians, the Albanians and Poles as races below the Greek ones? Such a view is not simply a stupidity but is being served by people who want to conceal the policy of the ruling class, by people who refuse to confront the most intense problems of Greek society: Unemployment.

The working class complains because the one to one and a half million-immigrant workers increase to tragic proportions unemployment and they are being used by the employers as a means of pressure towards the Greek working class. The dilemma for the working class becomes such that it must abandon without a struggle its conquests so as to accept a new middle ages of labour relations or to find itself on the outskirts of production and society.

This is the issue and it is a big crime to underrate as a case of racism and to forget the complaints of the working class by smearing it. If some people think it is mistaken they should patiently explain where it has gone wrong and to show the correct path.

First of all the argument with respect to the immigration of Greeks and other workers of Southern Europe towards W. Germany during the 1950’s and 1960’s decades does not hold in relation with respect to today’s situation.

Then we were experiencing a period of economic development, which created even bigger needs for workers hands. Without these hands it was impossible to talk about the ‘German boom’. The immigrants worked legally and had all the benefits of their German counterparts.

Today industries are shedding workers or closing down altogether. The immigrants don’t cover any gaps in the market but are added to the armies of the unemployed. Under these conditions it is logical to be employed illegally and to be used against the gains of the local working class in every European country. This situation hasn’t arrived from outer space but is a conscious policy of the capitalist governments.

Under conditions of a deep economic crisis and the mortal death agonies, capital attempts to limit cost, usually from the pressure of wages. With this attempt it transfers to the so-called zones of low cost, mainly south east Asia or it transports it to the traditional industrial centres rubbish from every corner of the planet so as to use them as a pool of illegal labour. This is not done to help economically the areas, which it destroys, but to impose the same level of impoverishment of the European workers movement.

Another argument of the far left to which it appears to recognise the impossible contradiction is that the foreign workers do not have any relation with unemployment. Occasionally we hear the slogan:" The capitalists bring about unemployment and not the Albanian workers"!

Of course capitalism is responsible for bringing about unemployment. But that doesn’t mean that the unemployed aren’t doubled in time when foreigners arrive from other countries. They underrate the consciousness of the workers, all those who circulate such stupidities and they conceal the game which the government does with the foreigners

It is truly the height of incredulousness and illogicality, another slogan which the inspirers of the above consider internationalist: "Open borders for the workers". Essentially it constitutes a contribution of the far left to globalisation and the New Order. The imperialist monopolies, after having achieved open borders for their products, capital and money, could not assert that the international domination of the laws of the market has been finalised, without the marketisation of people. Something which would lead to people to have the same fate as that of products. The levelling of the lowest prices or placing on the dung heap of human mountains of scrap heap.

 Let us say it another way: Open Borders - in times of crisis - guarantee for the bosses the lowest possible price for wages. Work for only a plate of food such as in some Asian or African countries. They contribute to making impossible any fight against the policy of unemployment.

 The abolition of borders constitutes a permanent policy for the workers movement. But with the condition of the development of the backward areas of the planet through the organised technological and economic aid of the most developed. Under capitalism the abolition of borders guarantees the domination of the transnational monopolies, the economic disappearance of the weak and the transformation of the whole planet into a sphere of low wages!

 The far left - and in a more concealed way - the traditional left - contributes to the debate of immigration, as elsewhere, a left flank to the policy of Simitis and the European directorate.

 The working class will never conciliate in such a policy however much it is camouflaged with humanistic and anti-racist verbiage.

 The far left alongside the traditional left opens the door to far right demagogy, which exploits the problem of the immigrants so as to win influence amongst the workers and finally tie them to the imperialist bulwark.

 What should we propose; Let us first of all clear up what we mustn’t propose and what we shouldn’t ask from the Greek worker. We must not propose for him to demand the endless and unnavoidable entrance of immigrants into the country. We must not propose a regime of labour relations which gives to the boss the possibility to use immigrants without paying them the same as the Greek workers.

 Obviously the working class has the historic destination to put an end to imperialist barbarity. It is impossible to become a hunter of immigrants. It cannot come into conflict with workers of other nationalities, which the barbaric policies of imperialism has forced them to immigrate, so as to survive. There is no need to add that it would lose its true opponent and true responsibility for today’s sad situation. It would destroy morally and politically its movement.

 The workers movement can only accept guardians, which serve its interests. It must accept policies and slogans which are equally acceptable by the immigrants and which unite all not divide. Independently from nationality the workers must fight for equal rights and equal treatment for equal work. For a basic wage which guarantees a basic standard of living. Greek and immigrant workers should state to the political and economic oligarchy: Stop! Up to here! Let the immigrants be legalised which live and work in the country, but to also stop the further entrance of immigrants, as that will economically destroy the local and foreign born workers and will politically destroy its movement. It will lead, finally to decay and decline of the whole of society.

 KDE September 1998

CLASSICAL MARXISTS ON IMMIGRATION

Marx

The International Workingmen's Association, 1866

A warning

Written: by Marx on March 15, 1865;
First published: in Der Bote vom Niederrhein, No. 57, May 13, 1866 Oberrheinischer Courier, No. 113, May 15, 1866, Mitteldeutsche Volks-Zeitung, No. 184, August 10, 1866.

Some time ago the London journeymen tailors formed a general association 120 to uphold their demands against the London master tailors, who are mostly big capitalists. It was a question not only of bringing wages into line with the increased prices of means of subsistence, but also of putting an end to the exceedingly harsh treatment of the workers in this branch of industry. The masters sought to frustrate this plan by recruiting journeymen tailors, chiefly in Belgium, France and Switzerland. Thereupon the secretaries of the Central Council of the International Working Men's Association published in Belgian, French and Swiss newspapers a warning which was a complete success. The London masters' maneuver was foiled; they had to surrender and meet their workers' just demands.

Defeated in England, the masters are now trying to take counter-measures, starting in Scotland. The fact is that, as a result of the London events, they had to agree, initially, to a 15 per cent. wage rise in Edinburgh as well. But secretly they sent agents to Germany to recruit journeymen tailors, particularly in the Hanover and Mecklenburg areas, for importation to Edinburgh. The first group has already been shipped off. The purpose of this importation is the same as that of the importation of Indian COOLlES to Jamaica, namely, perpetuation of slavery. If the Edinburgh masters succeeded, through the import of German labour, in nullifying the concessions they had already made, it would inevitably lead to repercussions in England. No one would suffer more than the German workers themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of all the other Continental nations. And the newly-imported workers, being completely helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs.

Furthermore, it is a point of honour with the German workers to prove to other countries that they, like their brothers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, know how to defend the common interests of their class and will not become obedient mercenaries of capital in its struggle against labour.

On behalf of the Central Council
of the International Working Men's Association,
Karl Marx
London, May 4, 1866

German journeymen tailors who wish to know more about conditions in Britain are requested to address their letters to the German branch committee of the London Tailors' Association, c/o Albert F. Haufe, Crown Public House, Hedden Court, Regent Street, London.

Engels

Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845

Irish Immigration

We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of this immigration.

The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of St. George's Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population. Thus there are in London, 120,000; in Manchester, 40,000; in Liverpool, 34,000; Bristol, 24,000; Glasgow, 40,000; Edinburgh, 29,000, poor Irish people. [4] These people having grown up almost. without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the English population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and morality. Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject: [5] 

"The wild Milesian [6] features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back -- for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk.... That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish, competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price; at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality with that."

If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses. I have occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of Manchester. The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have, as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it. Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered, and which is the Irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working- people's quarters and poison the air. He builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England. The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England. So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration. And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?

With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle, with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-man should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong, degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status -- in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.

NOTES

4. Archibald Alison, The Principles of Population, and their Connection with Human Happiness, two vols., 1840. This Alison is the historian of the French Revolution, and, like his brother, Dr. W. P. Alison, a religious Tory.-- Note by Engels. Return to Text

5.Chartism, pp. 28, 31, etc.-- Note by Engels. Return to Text

6. Milesian -- the name of an ancient family of Celtic kings of Ireland.-- Note by Engels Return to Text

Kautsky:

Here's a quote from the Erfurt Programme where Kautsky gives a formally
classical but decidely non-class analysis of immigration (note the word
"inevitable"). It is interesting to compare this with quotes from Marx
and Engels on Irish immigration. Kautsky's orthodoxy causes him to
acknowledge that immigration tends to reduce wages, but he presents us with open
borders logic anyway. Question - was Kautsky the first open borders
Marxist?

Very differently from the apprentice or the merchant is the modern
proletarian torn loose from the soil. He becomes a citizen of the
world; the whole world is his home.

No doubt this world-citizenship is a great hardship for the workers in
countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of
labor are comparatively good. In such countries, naturally, immigration
will exceed emigration. As a result the laborers with the higher
standard of living will be hindered in their class-struggle by the influx of
those with a lower standard and less power of resistance.

Under certain circumstances this sort of competition, like that of the
capitalists, may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred
of foreign workers on the part of the native born. But the conflict of
nationalities, which is perpetual among the capitalists, can be only
temporary among the proletarians. For sooner or later the workers will
discover that the immigration of cheap labor-power from the more
backward to the more advanced countries, is as inevitable a result
of the capitalist system as the introduction of machinery or the forcing
of women into industry.

In still another way does the labor movement of an advanced country
suffer under the influence of the backward conditions of other lands.
The high degree of exploitation endured by the proletariat of the
economically undeveloped nations becomes an excuse for the capitalists of the more
highly developed ones for opposing any movement in the direction of
higher wages or better conditions.

In more than one way, then, it is borne in upon the workers of each
nation that their success in the class-struggle is dependent on the
progress of the working-class of other nations. For a time this may turn
them against foreign workers, but finally they come to see that there is
only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward
nations: to do away with the backwardness itself. German workers have
every reason to co-operate with the Slavs and Italians in order that
these may secure higher wages and a shorter working-day; the English workers
have the same interest in relation to the Germans, and the Americans in
relation to Europeans in general.

The dependence of the proletariat of one land on that of another
leads inevitably to a joining of forces by the militant proletarians of
various lands.

The survivals of national seclusion and national hatred which the
proletariat took over from the bourgeoisie, disappear steadily. The
working-class is freeing itself from national prejudices. Working-men
learn more and more to see in the foreign laborer a fellow-fighter,
a comrade.

The strongest bonds of international solidarity, naturally, are
those which bind groups of proletarians, which, though of different
nationalities, have the same purposes and use the same methods to
accomplish them.

Lenin:

"What does 'Down with frontiers' mean? It is the
beginning of anarchy.... Only when the socialist revolution has become a
reality, and not a method, will the slogan 'Down with frontiers' be a
correct slogan."
 

Lenin April 1917 on the National Question

Bukharin:

"If the international movement of commodities expresses the 'mutation
process' in the socioeconomic world organism then the international
movement of the populations expresses mainly the redistribution of the
main factor of economic life, the labour power. Just as within the
framework of the 'national economy' the redistribution of the labour
power among the various production branches is regulated by the scales
of  wages which tend to one level, so in the framework of world
economy the process of equalising the various wage scales is taking
place with the aid of migration. The gigantic reservoir of the
capitalist New World absorbs the 'superfluous population of Europe and
Asia, from the pauperised peasants who are being driven out of
agriculture to the 'reserve army' of the unemployed in the cities.
Thus there is being created on a world scale a correspondence between
the supply and demand of 'hands' in proportion necessary for capital.
An idea of the quantitative side of the process may be gleaned from
the following figures:

Number of Immigrants Entering United States:
Years
1904 812,870
1905 1,026,499
1906 1,100,735
1907 1,285,349
1914 1,218,480

Number of Foreigners in Germany
Years
1880 276,057
1900 778,737
1910 1,259,873


In 1912, 711,446 emigrated from Italy, 467,762 from England and
Ireland, 176,567 from Spain (1911), 127,747 from Russia etc. To this
number of final emigrants ie of workers who relinquish their fatherland
forever and look for a new country, must be added a number of
emigrants of a temporary and seasonal character. Russian and Polish
workers immigrate into Germany for agricultural work (the so-called
Sachsengangerei etc). These ebbs and flows of labour power already
from one of the phenomena of the world labour market.

Corresponding to the movement of labour power as one of the poles of
capitalist relations is the movement of capital as another pole. As in
the former case the movement is regulated by the law of the
equalisation of the rates of profit. The movement of capital which
from the point of view of the capital exporting country is usually
called capital export, has acquired an unrivalled importance in modern
economic life so that some economists (like Sartorius von
Walterhausen) define modern capitalism as export capitalsm
(p39-40) My underlining


"In the same way as the international movement of commoditites brings
the local and 'national' prices to the one and only level of world
prices, in the same way as migration tends to bring the nationally
different wage scales for hired workers to one level, so the movement
of captial tends to bring the 'national' rates of profit to one level,
which tendency expresses nothing but one of the most general laws of
the capitalist mode of production on a world scale.

Within the framework of world economy the concentration tendencies of
capitalist development assume the same organisational forms as are
manifest within the framework of 'national economy' - namely there
come more strikingly to the foreground tendencies towards limiting
free competition by means of forming monopoly enterprises." P.46 My
underlining

Finally in dedication to the globalists who believe in a globalist
conflict free world future where the transnationals dominate all and
sundry using the twin tools of exporting capital and importing labour,
a re-hash of Kautsky's ultra-imperialism, ie globalism with a human
face, written by Lenin in his introduction to Bukharins book.

"Can one however deny that in the abstract a new face of capitalism to
follow imperialism - namely a phase of ultra-imperialism - is
thinkable? No. In the abstract one can think of such a phase. In
practice, however he who denies the sharp tasks of today in the name
of dreams about soft tasks of the future becomes an opportunist.
Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now
going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of
dreams. There is no doubt that the development is going in the
direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises
and states without exception. But the development in this direction is
proceeding under such stress, with such tempo with such
contradictions conflicts and convulsions - not only economical, but
also political national etc etc - that before a single world trust
will be reached, before the respective national finance capitals will
have formed a world union of 'ultra-imperialism', imperialism will
inevitably explode and capitalism will turn into its opposite.
December 1915 Lenin

 

Trotsky:

Here's a quote from Trotsky calling for controls on Japanese and Korean
immigrants into Soviet Russia (taken from Problems of our Policy With
Respect To China and Japan).

 III. On Japanese Immigration

When resolving the question of Japanese immigration to the Soviet Far
East we must take into account the intense interest the Japanese
public is showing in this matter. However, in view of the danger of
Japanese colonization in the Far East, every step we take will have to be
cautious and gradual. It is premature at this time to fix the number of
Japanese immigrants who are to be allowed into the USSR, but, in any case,
Japanese immigration should not be large. It should be strictly regulated
and should result in the breaking up of Japanese-controlled resources by
means of a special agency set up for that purpose. The Japanese colonists
should be settled in a checkerboard fashion, being alternated with a
reinforcement of colonization from central Russia. The land that is
parceled out should be acceptable to the Japanese peasants and should be
suited to the peculiarities of Japanese agriculture. There are areas
of land suitable for the Japanese colonists in the vicinity of Khabarovsk
and further south, but not in the Siberian interior. We must not allow
Korean immigration into these regions under the pretense that it is
Japanese. The question of Korean immigration must be examined
separately. The Koreans can be granted land that is considerably farther
into the depths of Siberia.

--

 US SOCIALISTS ON IMMIGRATION

 Malcolm X On Immigration

" 400 years of black blood and sweat invested here in America and the
white man still has the black man begging for what every immigrant
fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the
gangplank"

"Negroes had been in New York City since 1683 before any of them came
(Irish, Italians, Jews) and had been ghettoed all over the city"

Malcolm X Autobiography

According to our resident leftists Amerikka is a nation of immigrants,
they never stop repeating. Yet some are more equal than others and
this is the model they want globalised the world over.

vngelis

2002-08-06

Samuel Yellen: Immigrants & US Labor

"The rapid concentration of the anthracite properties in the hands of
a few corporations was accomplished at the expense not only of the
general public, which paid through the higher prices and the waste of
an essential commodity, but also of the mine laborers, who contributed
to the increased dividends, interest rates and profits through lower
wages longer hours and poorer working conditions. Precautions were
taken against thepossibility of active opposition on the part of labor
to the debasement of its standard of living. Whatever organisation the
mine workers formed for their mutual protection was destroyed by the
operators. The Miners and Laborers Benelovent Association which came
into existence following the Civil War, was crushed in 1875 after the
failure of a general strike. Two other organisations, the Knights of
Labor and the Miners National Progressive Union arose within the next
15 years but were not successful intheir efforts to organize the
miners. The operators furthermore imported large numbers of workers
from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Italy so as to have on hand
an oversupply of unorganised labor which would both depress wages and
because of differences in custom and language hinder an effective
union of miners. In 1880, for example not 5 % of the anthracite
workers were Slavs whereas by 1904 the Slavs constituted 50%. The
pressure of the immigrant reservoir was soon felt by the workers
particularly during the six years from 1893 to 1899 when they were
given employment " p.133-134 American Labor Struggles 1877-1934 Samuel
Yellen published by Pathfinder press

Clear description for Walters, Proyect et al of their own labor
movement and how the bosses used scab labour to undermine existing
labor struggles. Walters has repeatedly asked for proof as to how
immigrant labor is used to undermine existing conditions. It has been
going on for more than a century. From the moment hire and fire is
based on bosses will they will hire and fire anyone. Immigrants per se
aren't responsible for the situation anymore than a worker who makes
bombs is responsible for the capitalist state having using them. But
to argue that immigration HAS NO EFFECT on wages or conditions is the
same as arguing that making bombs has no connection with death and
destruction. Immigration is one of the tools the bosses use to crush
unions. Arguing with the bosses to open the borders would have been
illuminating during the 1902 miners strike in Pensylvania. I would be
paramount to class treason, which is what it is today. What one should
be arguing is one union rate for the same job, the right to hire and
fire to be agreed by workers democracy, not by deregulated unelected
bosses whose sole concern is the lowering of the rate of labour... but
that is another story still to be written.
vngelis

Farrell Dobbs on Immigration

"A considerable part of the growing proletariat consisted of
immigrants from European countries and to some extent from Asia. A few
million arrived here before the Civil War, but that proved to be the
only a start. During the postwar decades the capitalist government
stimulated immigration in order to swell the labour force available to
the industrial moguls until the influx became a veritable flood. Being
of different nationalities the newcomers had difficult problems of
communication. Language barriers existed between the various groups
and most of them were alien to the English language. Situated within
new surroundings they became prey to the most severe forms of
capitalist exploitation which in some cases including tricking them
into playing the role of strikebreakers. This presented serious
problems to the labor movement. Contact with foreign born workers had
to be developed through many different languages; comparable
adjustments were required in methods of organizing them; and all this
had to be dome in a way that created full labor solidarity against the
boss class..."

Page 53 The Early Years Revolutionary Continuity Published by
Pathfinder USA (!(1980)



I assume Dobbs alongside Marx, Engels is product of his time suffering
form the social and political climate of his generation describing
immigration in terms of floods and other such 'racist' language. After
all the sign of being progressive and modern is to be in support of
the globalisation of labour for the benefit of today's modern moguls:
the transnational corporations.

JOHN REED 

IMMIGRATION AND SCABS

Not obviously being North American and not having an extensive library
close by, one feels isolated in pursuing arguments without the use of
past material and having to rely solely on the political arguments of
opponents. But once in a while material by coincidence appears, which
validates political positions and leads to a better understanding of
todays conflicts and political disagreements.

A case in point have been the arguments with D. Walters over the
definition of 'scab labour', the role of immigration  in ruling class
policy and the nature of the maquila - free trade zones. As these
issues aren't over and we are living through a ferocious capitalist
crisis which has no end in sight, it is good I think once in a while to
review what past socialists experienced, in particular the development
of capitalism in the USA, which by all accounts is the defining
characteristic of our era, as this model is now being implemented via
the EEC into Europe and via NATO into the ex-stalinist states.

In describing the strikes in the coalmines of the southern USA which
were owned by the Robber Barons of the 19th century, Rockefeller et al
he says this about a 1903 strike:
"A large part of those who are striking today were brought in as strike
breakers in the great walkout in 1903. Now in that year more than 70
percent of the miners in southern Colorado were English pseaking:
Americans, English, Scotch and Weslh. Their demands were practically
the same as the present ones. Before that every, every ten years, back
to 1884, there had been similar strikes. Militia and imported mine
guards wantonly murdered, imprisoned and deported out of the state
hundreds of miners. Two years before the 1903 strike 6,000 men were
blacklisted and beaten out of the mines, in defiance of the state law,
because they belonged to the union. Inspite of the eight hour law, no
man worked less than ten hours and when the miners went out Adjutant
General Sherman Bell of the militia suspended the right of habeas
corpus, remarking 'To hell with the Constitution!' After the strike was
broken 10,000 men found themselves blacklisted, for the operators made
a careful study of people most patient under oppression, and
deliberately imported foreigners to fill the mies, carefully massing
each mine men of different languages, who would not be able to
organise. They policed their camps with armed guards, who had the right
of trial and sentence for any crime." ( John Reed "Shaking the World"
Courteousy of TUC appointed bookseller 'Bookmarks' SWP-UK p.15 for
Collier and co. as the source needs to be verified from the PC crowd
for its authenticity).

It is clear that in the 19th century US bosses used immigration as scab
labour to undermine workers already employed in the mines, they also
used blacklisting, shooting, and other such 'human rights' policies.
Most if not all the major strikes up until WWI were defeated and only
the impact of the Russian revolution and the fear of it spreading to
the shores of the USA led to strikes winning partial concessions after
1917. All the major coal companies owned everything in the coal cities
and blacklisting meant eviction from the area.

A few questions now to our 'learned' unionists and non-unionists on
apst.

1. Is 'Multi-ethnic democracy' for the Balkans  a by word for large
scale immigration to undermine existing wage rates just as it was used
in the 19th century by the US ruling class?
2. Is John Reed, like Marx or Lenin to be accused of being sexist,
homophobic and racist as the other two have been already, by the PC
liberals?
3. Why didn't any strikes win in the coal fields throughout the 1870-
1913 period? Which by the way is also the period of the largest
immigration into the USA.
4. Why will strikes win today if we have the same policy as social-
democracy did before WWI?
5. When the famous Lena Goldfield strike of 1912 occurred in Russia and
500 men were gunned down, did the Tsarist empire use foreign labour to
undermine domestic labour?
6. Is the USA (the most successful imperialist state thus far) as it
essentially had an open border policy since its inception, which tried
to see what mistakes the European ruling classes made and attempted to
not repeat them, constantly undermining labour, by importing labour as
scab labour and when this labour reacted, blacklisted them all and
started all over again.
7. This unique, made in the USA class history, isn't the history of the
European labour movement however much people try to pretend it is.
Hence the response has to be different unless we are obliged to not
learn from the past and repeat it.

Luxembourg's Accumulation of   Capital
Is the USA a Mirror Image of South Africa?

Over the years we have entered various discussions and debates on this
medium regarding the nature of various states. Owing to the poverty of
intellectual debate and the ideological poverty of most participants
it is illuminating to note that past marxists engaged in thought
provoking discussions, not obssessed solely by lifestyle issues, such
as race.

The creation of states, their peculiarities may provide insight into
their subsequent downfall. Not all nations are the same, indeed not
all peoples constitute a nation and this is important in trying to
ascertain the current period we are in. The following extracts from
Luxembourg have as the aim to provoke debate on what makes the USA
different from Europe and hence what particular modes of development
will we see in its eventual break-up.

"The railways and speculation in land made for mass emigration from
Europe to the US and more than 4.5million people immigrated in the 23
years from 1869 to 1892. In this way the Union gradually became
emancipated from European and in particular from British industry:
factories were set up in the States and home industries developed for
the production of textiles, iron, steel and machinery. The process of
revolutionary transformation was most rapid in agriculture. The
emancipation of the slaves had compelled the Southern planters to
introduce steam plough shortly after the Civil War and new farms had
sprung up in the West in the wake of the railways which from the very
beginning employed the most modern machinery and
technique (p.378-9 Accumulation of Capital)

In the American Union as we have seen, the 'Great War' inaugurated an
era of large scale seizure of public lands by monopolist capitalist
companies and individual speculators. Feverish railroad building and
ever more speculation in railway shares led to and gamble in land,
where individual soldiers of fortune and companies netted immense
fortunes and even entire counties. In addition a veritable swarm of
agents lured the vast flow of emigrants from Europe to the USA., by
blatant and unscrupulous advertising deceptions and pretenses of every
deception. These immigrants first settled in the Eastern States along
the Atlantic Seaboard and with the growth of industry in these states
agriculture was driven westwardp.382-3

In Canada, public lands were lavished upon private capitalist
companies on an even more monstrous scale than in the United
States Thus the Canadian farmer was practically everywhere
ensnared by capital and capitalist speculation. And still mass
immigration continued - not only from Europe, but also from the United
States.

These are the characteristics of capitalist domination on an
international scale. Having evicted the peasant from his soil it
drives him from England to the East of the US and from there  to the
West and on the ruins of the Red Indian economy it transforms him back
into a small commmodity producer. Then when he is ruined once more he
is driven from the West to the North. With the railways in the van and
ruin in his rear - capital leads the way, its passage is marked with
universal destruction. The great fall in prices of the nineties is
again suceeded by higher prices for agricultural products but this is
of no more avail to the small American farmer than to the European
peasantp390-1

In quite different historical setting in South Africa the process
shows up even more clearly the peaceful methods by which capital
competes with the small commodity producer.

In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy
prevailed until the end of the sixties of the last century. For a long
time the Boers had led the life of animal tending nomads; they had
killed off or driven the Hottentos and Kaffirs with a will in order to
deprive them of their most valuable pastures. In the 18thcentury they
were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported by ships from
the East India Company, which frequently did away with entire
Hottentos tribes whose lands fell to the Dutch immigrants. When the
Boers spread further East, they came into conflict with the Bantu
tribes and initiated the long period of the terrible Kaffir wars.
These god fearing Dutchmen regarded themselves as the chosen people
and took no small pride in their old fashioned Puritan morals and
intimate knowledge of the Old Testament; yet not content with robbing
the natives of their land, they built their peasant economy like
parasites on the backs of the Negroes, compelling them to do slave
labour for them and corrupting and enervating them and deliberately
and systematically. Liquor played such an important part in this
process, that the prohibition of spirits in the Cape Colony, could not
be carried through by the English government because of Puritan
opposition. There were no railways until 1859 and Boer economy in
general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on natural
economy until the sixties. But  their patriarchal attitude did not
deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well
known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about
the Kaffirs. The Boers considered the Negroes an object destined by
God and nature to slave for them and as such an indispensable
foundation of their peasant economy. So much so that their answer to
the abolition of slavery in the English colonies in 1836 was the
'Great Trek' although there the owners had been compensated with
3,000,000sterling. By the way of the Orange River and the Vaal, the
Boers emigrated from the Cape Colony and in the process they drove the
Matabele to the North, across Limpopo setting them against the
Makalakas. Just as the American farmer had driven the Red Indian West
before him under the impact of the capitalist economy so the Boer
drove the Negro to the North. The 'Free Republics between the Orange
River and the Limpopo thus were created as a protest against the
designs of the English bourgeoisie on the sacred right of slavery. The
tiny peasant republics were in constant guerilla warfare against the
Bantu negroes. And it was on the backs of the negroes that the battle
between the Boers and the English government which went on for decades
was fought. The Negro question ie the emancipation of the Negroes
ostensibly aimed at by the English bourgeoisie served as a pretext for
the conflict between England and the republics. In fact peasant
economy and great capitalist colonial policy were here competing for
the Hottentos and Kaffirs that is to say for their land and their
labour power. Both competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject,
expel or destroy the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and
press them into service by the abolition of their social
organisations. Only their methods of exploitation were fundamentally
different. While the Boers stood for out dated slavery on a petty
scale on which the patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the
British bourgeoisie represented modern scale capitalist exploitation
of the land and the natives.

The ultimate purpose of the British government was clear: long in
advance it was preparing for land roberry on a grand scale, using the
native chieftains themselves as tools

South Africa was suddenly flooded with immigrants (whites) who had
hithertho only appeared in small numbers -immigration  having been
deflected to the United States. But with the discovery of the diamond
and gold fields, the numbers of white people in the South African
colonies grew by leaps and bounds: between 1885 and 1895, 100,000
British had immigrated into Witwatersrand alone p394

The British South Africa company built railroads put down the Kaffirs,
organised revolts of the utlanders and finally provoked the Boer
war.

The domination of capital was a foregone conclusion and it was just as
hopeless for the Boer Republics to resist as it had been for the
American farmer.

Immigration therefore paid a progressive role in the 19th century from
the point of view of the overthrow of the old peasant based economies
the world over. Does  immigration turn into its opposite once economies
reach saturation point. In other words does the fate of the industrial
worker in  Europe start to resemble the fate of the African farmer in
the 19th century or the blacks in Africa? Is there room for growth for
a new period of mass immigration or are we witnessing imperialism in
its reverse? Ie introducing those measures once secured for its
colonies in its home territory with the aim of destroying all
resistance? For a period of mass immigration was technically
inaugurated by Hitler who shipped millions of people to his home
territory slave labour camps as well as turning every country he
dominated into one giant slave labour camp? Is anything else reserved
for the Iraqui population today?

I will return to Luxembourg's central point that once the peasant
economy is broken up, capital becomes ascendant, the rate of profit
tends to fall and accumulation turns into its opposite.

But the issues raised by here, that virgin areas in Africa and the USA
which served to bolster essentially European imperialism in its
domination of the planet highlight the dillemma's of today. Can Europe
be collectively turned into the security guards of the USA. This is
certainly the will of the US elites as has been evidenced by the
assumption of the occupation in Afghanistan by German led NATO. But
for this policy to dominate for a whole historical period, over all
continents one has to have significant change in the balance of power.
Just like British imperialism in the 19th century provoked aggressive
intervention, so US imperialism is attempting to break apart the
capitalist nation states of the world for the creation of
supranational bodies for the sole use by the large transnational
corporations which dominate economic life there. Just like the nation
states of Europe had outgrown the productive forces and the world
market had been divided by the European powers - ie reached saturation
point - war became the only means of breaking apart saturation.
vngelis

LA NUEVA CARA DE CONSTRUCCION...how mass immigration has changed the
American building trades

By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter

For some strange reason, a lot of union carpenters belive that
residential construction will always be non union.

Although that side of our industry was largely union as recently as
the 1960's, in the view of many folks in the business, new construction
and home improvement work on single family homes is now, and always will
be, a 100% non union sector of the industry...

Apparently, somebody forgot to tell this "fact" to the < Journaleros >
in the suburbs of New York City.

Journaleros ["day laborers"], of course, are the folks who hang out on
corners or Home Depot parking lots to shape up for construction jobs
in the home improvement and light commercial renovation sectors.

They are predominantly illegal immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador or
Guatemala - although in Philadelphia, Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard
they have Brazilians in the mix as well - and here in New York City we
have Poles - and even US citizen Latinos, White Americans and Amercan
Blacks  - in that side of the industry as well.

Just a couple of years ago, the day rates these self employed workers
charged were as low as $ 40 bucks and a sandwich for a day's
work...with "day" often extending into 10 or 12 hours.

Apparently, that's changed....drastically.

According to reports from homeowners in Long Island and Orange County,
the day laborers in those areas have organized, and set a wage floor.
Now, nobody works for less than $ 10 an hour, or $ 80 bucks for an 8
hour day.

That pay scale, while far below union wages, and less than half of
what non union tradespeople are normally paid, still amounts to a 100% wage
increase.

Apparently, these workers have managed to do this on their own..with
absolutely no assistance from the construction unions.

There are a number of Catholic Church-linked social service
organizations and state-subsidized day laborer hiring halls that
operate among these workers, but it's not at all clear how much they
had to do with these workers managing to establish - and enforce - the
$ 10/hr wage floor.

Also, one of the problems that these workers face is the fact that
these "workers centers" that serve them are 1) not run by workers
themselves and 2) tend to maintain their segregation from the
mainstream of the American workforce, rather than fighting to
integrate them.

Beyond that, to put that $ 80 bucks a day in context, we need to look
at the standard of living these folks left behind when they came
here....

For instance, while union carpenters in the New York District Council
of Carpenters make $ 38.78/hr...and most non union carpenters in the
New York City suburbs make $ 150 a day...union carpenters in the
Sindicato de Trabajadores de Construccion ["Union of Construction
Workers"] back in Mexico only make $ 74/day... and Peons ["laborers"]
only get $ 55. The Mexican Ministry of Labor's minimum wage for non
union carpenters is only $ 59.30/day, and for laborers, it's $
43.65..in pratice, wages can be, and often are, considerably less.

By that standard, the Journaleros are actually ahead of the game....

You see, that's the new reality of the building trades in this
country...Third World-level pay rates now establish the wage floor in
our industry. You see it especially in major cities like New York,
where mass immigration, and employer superexploitation of those new
immigrants, has led to a drastic decline in non union construction
worker wages.

Although the building trades has long had a largely immigrant
workforce, the 1990's saw a massive increase in the number of
immigrant workers in the trades. The industry's workforce greatly
expanded....which, just to be very clear, did NOT mean that there were
more jobs..just more people chasing after the same number of jobs.

Most of those immigrant workers were undocumented..and most of them
come from the United States of Mexico. Tradespeople from that country
now make up 10% of the entire American construction workforce.. (about
600,000 workers out of a total building trades workforce of around 6
million).

Most of America's new construction workers were Mexican, but by no
means all....as I mentioned above, there are large numbers of
Guatemalans and Salvadorans among the Spanish speaking immigrants, as
well as large pockets of Brazilian workers in and around Philadelphia
and on the Massachussets resort islands of Nantucket and Martha's
Vinyard.

And, of course, here in New York City, there are still large numbers
of illegal immigrants from Ireland, Poland and other European countries
in the business, as well as small but significant numbers of immigrants
from Fujian Province, China and the largely Sikh Punjab/Khalistan
region of India and Pakistan.

Sikh workers here in New York are largely concentrated in the masonry
trades.

In particular, most of the city's non union brick pointers
[bricklayers who specialize in waterproofing and repairing existing brick walls on
apartment buildings] come from that background, but there are also
large numbers of Sikhs doing bricklaying and concrete work also.

Needless to say, almost all of these Sikh masons are non union..and
the non union contractors they work for dominate the brick pointing
industry here. Also, a lot of the brick and concrete work on public
schools, in particular the new federally financed "Field of Dreams"
program to install Astroturf on school playgrounds, is done by non
union Sikh contractors.

The massive HUD financed luxury housing construction program in Harlem
also has a large number of illegal immigrants among their workforce.

Of course, many of the carpenters, masons, painters and laborers on
these jobs are U.S. Citizen minority workers; African Americans, West
Indians, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Many of those workers come from
the neighborhood..and, many of them are actually union members, who
got tired of waiting on the union out of work list for a job and had to go
get a scab job to survive.

But, alongside the Blacks and US Citizen Latinos, there are large
numbers of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Indian, Sikh and even
Polish workers on those jobs..

But, irregardless of race, everybody on these jobs gets paid
"immigrant level" wages...generally, the skilled workers get $ 80 a day, with
laborers and helpers often getting as little as $ 40. By contrast, non
union contractors working on luxury housing in Downtown Manhattan and
other Davis Bacon jobs for the NYC Housing Authority, Dormatory
Authority, State of New York and the NYC School Construction Authority
usually pay between $ 100 and $ 150 a day for their skilled labor.

I've written about these non union Davis Bacon housing jobs on GANGBOX
before, at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4096

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7378

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7408

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583

In the South, the change has been most dramatic, with Mexican
tradespeople rapidly displacing Black workers from an industry that
had been largely African American since slavery times.

Case in point, Washington DC, where the construction sector was
predominantly Black from the days when African American engineer
Benjamin Bannacker and a force of slave carpenters, stonemasons,
bricklayers and laborers built the city in back in 1800 right up until
just about a decade ago.

As recently as 1990, Blacks were 75% of the Washington building trades
workforce, with Whites making up 20%. Latinos and workers of other
nationalities combined were less than 5% of the Washington DC
construction workforce.

Today, by contrast, Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and other
Latinos are 70% of the industry. Whites still make up 20%...but Blacks
are down to less than 10% of the building trades workforce in DC.

In DC's overwhelmingly non union residential construction sector,
which was all Black just a decade ago, today the workforce is virtually 100%
Latino. Contractors routinely (and illegally) refuse to hire Black
workers who shape up these jobs, and then turn around and hire
Latinos.

And the same thing happened in every other major city in the
South...Memphis, Atlanta, Houston (where the construction workforce is
now 80% Mexican) ect.

It basically amounted to "ethnic cleansing" aimed at Black workers in
the industry..and, along with the exile of the industry's traditional
workforce, wages sharply declined.

And, of course, the door slammed shut on the best paying private
sector job available to the average non college-educated Southern Black male.

The Southwest didn't experience the same harsh ethnic cleansing that
the South did, but the construction workforce's ethnic composition
changed just as dramatically in places like Phoenix, Denver and Las
Vegas.

Now, as I pointed out above, there have been attempts to organize
these workers.

I've written about some of these construction organizing efforts, and
other issues relating to building trades unionization, on GANGBOX
before, at :

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7966

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583

A few of these organizng drives have been by mainstream construction
unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of
America, the Laborers International Union or the United Union of
Roofers and Waterproofers.

Unfortunately, unlike the sucessful effort by Mexican immigrant
residential sheetrockers to organized themselves into the Carpenters
Union in Los Angeles in 1991, these have NOT been sectorwide
organizing campaigns, have not, for the most part, been led by immigrant workers
themselves and have mainly focused on signing up one particular
contractor.

A good example of this would be the Roofers Union's campaign to sign
up a residential roofing contractor in Phoenix, Arizona..while leaving
the rest of that industry unorganized.

In an industry like construction, one contractor at a time organizing
means that that particular company, if organized, ends up not being
able to compete with it's competitors who've remained non union. So,
they either continue paying non union wages under the table to stay in
business..or, they pay union wages, get underbid by their competitors
who remain non union and go bankrupt.

Of course, in Los Angeles 12 years ago, the workers led a sector-wide
organizing drive..they struck all the contractors for 6 months, and
turned them union at the same time, which is the only logical way to
organize non union tradespeople.

The Laborers International Union did just that in the asbestos
abatement industry in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey.

Of course..in that case, it helped that the contractors needed union
cards for their laborers, so they could do work on all union Davis
Bacon school jobs...

And, the Laborers Union agreed to substandard wages for these largely
Latino and Polish laborers, many of whom are women, only $
23.85/hr.....as opposed to the $ 26.55 that American born laborers in
building construction earn..even though they work in a far more
dangerous sector of the business.

The same thing happened when the Laborers Union organized demolition
workers in New York City, most of whom are illegal immigrants from
Poland, Mexico and Ecuador. They got signed to a substandard wage
deal, where most of them were paid "B Man" scale of $ 16.25/hr rather than
the $ 26.55/hr that other laborers are paid.

Worse yet, according to some accounts, some of these newly unionized
asbestos abatement contractors continue to pay non union wages under
the table..

But, at least these immigrant workers ended up integrated into
mainstream unions. In some cases, they were able to get jobs in other,
higher paying, sectors of the unions.

More often, the immigrants have been segregated within the unions. In
the Carpenters Union, newly organized resdiential carpenters (who tend
to be largely Mexican) are frequently segregated into special locals
with lower pay scales, such as local 1506 in Los Angeles.

In Las Vegas, the newly organized Mexican residential carpenters are
in local 1977, the same local as the largely White commerical carpenters
who work on the Las Vegas Strip..but, they get a lower pay scale, and,
according to some reports, they even attend seperate union meetings in
a different building than the regular union hall.

Here in New York, when the Laborers Union organized many non union
laborers, demolition workers and asbestos abatement workers a few
years ago, the asbestos workers, who were all Polish or Latino immigrants,
were set up in a seperate local, LU # 78. Demolition workers and
building laborers were allowed into the regular laborers local, LU #
79..but, the union has three seperate out of work lists - brick work,
demolition and building laborers.

The newly organized laborers, almost all of whom are Poles, Mexicans
or Ecuadorians, are overwhelmingly concentrated on the demolition work
list. Many of these workers are sent out as "B Men" on demolition
jobs.. As I pointed out above, those laborers only get paid $ 16.25,
instead of the regular $ 26.55 laborer scale.

The mason tender (bricklayer and plasterer helper work) list tends to
be largely Black, Puerto Rican and Dominican, with some Irish and
Italian American workers as well.

Bricklayer and plasterer tender work is paid full laborer scale, but
is far more demanding than building laborer (cleaning) work...which is
also paid at full laborer scale. Building laborers also get a hell of
a lot of OT, with some laborers on hirise jobs bringing home over 

$100,000/yr.

As it happens, most building laborers are White Americans or
immigrants from Ireland or Italy.

It amounts to a racial heirarchy, with the easiest and highest paying
jobs (building laborers) mostly going to American born  and Western
European immigrant White laborers,  with the harder and more dangerous
brick tender jobs going largely to Blacks and US Citizen Latinos, and
with the hardest, most dangerous and lowest paying jobs in the
business, the demolition jobs, going to immigrants from Eastern Europe
and Latin America.

Also, generally speaking, these campaigns, while TARGETING immigrant
workers, have not been LED by immigrants. In may cases, the organizers
on the ground are immigrants, (this may be due to the crudely simple
fact that the American born union officials don't speak Spanish or
Polish)..but, the union heirarchy remans predominantly American born
or Western European Whites. This has proved to be the case even where
workers have ended up in what amount to segregated locals.

Of, course, unions making special "deals" with contractors...deals
which result in members getting screwed out of pay and benefits they
deserve, are nothing new..nor are immigrant workers the only ones who
get hurt. I've written about that on GANGBOX, at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2920

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2987

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/3024

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7582

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8985

Nor are construction unions the only labor organizations that hurt
immigrant workers :

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/pocodinero1.html

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/pocodinero2.html

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4949

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5271

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5327

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11507

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11795

Most immigrant worker organizing done outside the mainstream unions
has been even worse, even more racially segregated than the unions
efforts. And, immigrant workers are even less likely to be in leadership
positions.

In the last decade, there have been a number of day laborer workers
centers that have emerged, functioning as non union "hiring halls" for
the industry.

Or, actually, "labor exchanges" or "labor bazaars" might be a more
accurate term.

Typically, homeonwners and contractors come into the centers, and
offer jobs to the workers waiting inside. The consumers and bosses can offer
any wages they want, as they are not bound by any kind of collective
agreement.

And, since this is a totally "underground economy" oriented setup, it
goes without saying that these employment transactions are totally off
the books, with no withholding taxes, social security or workers comp
paid.

The only thing that keeps wages from falling to rock bottom levels is
the efforts of the workers to persuade and/or coerce each other to
refuse to work for less than a certain minimum pay level..in the New
York area, that floor is at the $ 10/hr level.

That's one thing that you can say for these day labor centers..they
have enabled the workers to at least set some kind of minimum wage.

Unfortunately, at $ 80/day, that wage floor is, as I pointed out
above, about $ 70/day below what non union tradespeople usually earn around
here..and far far lower than union scale.

Many of these hiring halls have been organized by local dioceses,
charitible organizations and/or religious orders of the Catholic
Church, and many of them have been financed by subsidies from local
and state governments.

Now, it's kind of odd that governmental agencies finance these
centers...considering the fact that, to this author's knowledge, none
of these centers have tried to do anything to stop the tax evasion,
minimum wage law violations and other illegal pratices that are an
integral part of day labor employment.

Usually, most of the counties and cities that have gotten into the day
labor business are very explicit that they are doing so to help local
merchants, homeowners and contractors get cheap labor..and, to keep
Latino workers from creating a so-called "quality of life problem" by
standing around on the street looking for work on their own

Generally, these workers centers are run like social service agencies,
controlled by professional staffers, with the actual workers allowed
little to no input in agency policy.

These day laborer also tend to be monoethnic...that is, the workers
are
from one particular racial background, usually Mexican.

Now, there's nothing wrong with workers of color organizing their own
caucuses and organizations... In fact, if it wasn't for minority
workers organizing independently, America's unions would probably
still be racially segregated.

Here in New York City, the 60 or so minority construction workers
groups (collectively known as "The Coalition") are what forced the
unions to let Black, Latin and Chinese workers join back in the
1960's, 70's and 80's...and, to this day, the coalitions keep the business
from becoming resegregated.

I've written about the coalition experience on GANGBOX, at :

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954

But, there's one big difference between the coalition and the
immigrant workers centers.

Despite the fact that the coalitions were minority-only organizations,
their main goal was racially integrating the industry, and forcing the
predominantly White unions to allow Black, Latin and Chinese workers
to join, and work on the same sites with the White workers, for the same
pay.

On the other hand, the immigrant workers centers, generally speaking,
do not at all challenge the racial heirarchy that emerged in the
industry during the 1990s, where residential construction became
overwhelmingly the preserve of low wage immigrants, while higher
paying commercial jobs remained largely White.

Nor have the immigrant workers centers struggled to achieve wage
pairity with commercial construction...or even to maintain the wage
levels that prevailed in non union residential construction just a few
years ago.

In other words, while the coalitions fought to integrate tradespeople
of color into the American construction mainstream, the immigrant
workers centers basically function as what used to be called "Jim Crow
unions"...seperate, and unequal, segregated labor organizations, who's
members are isolated from the mainstream building trades and earn
substandard wages.

Now, why is that?

Well, one possiblity might be the fact that the immigrant workers
centers and the coalitions had different kinds of leadership.

Generally speaking, most of the coalitions were run by ACTUAL
CONSTRUCTION WORKERS. The earliest coalitions back in the 1960's were
run by Black communists. The more recently set up coalitions wern't
quite so radical, but, at the very least, the workers who ran them
were militant Black, Latino or Chinese nationalists.

That's probably why these groups focused on the goal of waging a
militant struggle for integration on the job, to force both
contractors and unions to let Black, Latin and Chinese tradespeople have the same
wages, working conditions and union member status as the White
workers.

The coalitions militantly fought for integration (and, to a lesser
extent, continue to struggle to keep the building trades desegregated
to this very day). Their tactics often involved sending busloads of
out of work Black, Latin or Chinese tradespeople (often armed with
baseball bats and chains) driving around the city, stopping at non integrated
jobsites and forcing the contractors to hire workers of color.

By contrast, as I pointed out above, most immigrant workers centers
are run like not for profit social service agencies, often adminstered by
white collar professionals who've never actually worked in the trades
in their lives. Occasionally, the centers are staffed by Whites, even
though almost all day laborers are Latin. And, as I pointed out above,
typically, the entities that manage these day labor hiring halls are
affiliates of the Catholic Church, with the financing provided by
local or state governments.

Due to their financial dependence on government funding and patronage,
the day laborer centers are politically allied, for the most part, to
the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and are far to the right of
the radical nationalism of the coalitions..

Typically, as I pointed out above, the groups that operate these
centers are inclined towards social service paternalism towards the
workers, who are viewed as "clients" who passivly recieve "services"
from the centers.

This is very different than the coalition's view of their members as
active participants a militant struggle-based mass organization.

Tactically speaking, the day labor centers shy away from any kind of
militant struggle that might alienate the archbishops and state
senators who pay their bills. Certainly you will never see a day
laborer center sending a busload of workers to try and integrate an
all White commercial jobsite..

To this writer's knowledge, no day laborer center in the entire
country has even rasied the issue of fighting to integrate immigrant day
laborers into commercial construction.. Apparently, that radical idea
just is not on the workers center's radar scope.

Nor would you likely see a day laborer center organizing any kind of
collective resistance, non violent or othewise, to raids by agents of
the US Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

For the most part, the day laborer centers rely on lobbying and..let's
be blunt..begging. Hat in hand, meekly and non violently, they plead
with the politicians and the princes of the church for more funding
and an end to deportations, and beg the homeowners and contractors to be
nice and pay "living wages".

Just about the only struggle that happens in these centers is the
efforts organized by the workers themselves to keep wages at above the
starvation levels, by persuading each other to not work for less than
$10/hr.

This failure to struggle against segregation is why the day laborer
centers are actively supported by much of the business
community..unlike the coalitions, who've faced years of repression.

The day laborer centers are praised by the corporate media, tolerated
by union bosses, financed by the government and generally get the full
support of Corporate America.

Just about the only folks who condemn the day laborer centers are a
handfull of workers and, unfortunately, some White Supremicist
elements.

The racists, despite their claims to be defenders of "American
workers" (by which they mean WHITE American workers, of course),  have their
own bigoted reasons for opposing the workers centers..they want to
preserve America as a White majority country, and wish to keep Latino workers
out of largely White suburbs and small towns. The White Power folks
honestly don't give a damn about the wage issue..they'd be happy to
see WHITE workers subsisting on poverty level wages.

Of course, not all opposition to day laborer centers comes from the
fascists of the White nationalist movement...in one case, in College
Park, Maryland, the opposition to day laborer centers came from Latino
workers themselves.

The coporate media have their own reasons to be sympathetic to the
agencies that run the day labor centers.

And I don't think it's anti racism....

More likely, the positive media image of these day laborer centers is
due to the fact that the media have strong ties with the real estate
and banking interests, and, of course, those folks want to have
construction wages as low as possible. The existance of a large pool
of day labor helps the financiers push down skilled trades wages.

By contrast with the high profile support for the day labor centers,
the coalitions have been harassed by the police and the FBI for the
last 38 years, condemned by the press and the leadership of the
construction unions and are, generally speaking, viewed as a threat to
institutional racism in the building trades.

Despite their stated anti racism, objectively, the day laborer centers
serve as an obstacle to resistance developing against racial
segregation in construction...and help push wages down for
construction workers of all colors.

They fit right in with Corporate America's plan to import unlimited
numbers of workers from Third World countries (in particular Mexico)
to force down service sector wages in the same way that runaway shops and
maquiladoras have been used to push down industrial pay scales.

The AFL-CIO..and, in particular the New Unity Partnership unions (the
Service Employees International Union, Union of Needletrades,
Industrial and Textile Employees, Hotel Employees and Restaurant
Employees Union, Laborers Union and Carpenters Union)..actively
support this corporate effort to deflate the wages and living standards of all
American workers..and to keep Mexican and other immigrant workers at a
stavation-level standard of living, by allowing unlimited immigration.

Sadly, these efforts are presented as "progressive" and "anti racist".

Which is really strange, considering the fact that the AFL-CIO, in
it's entire history, has never gone out of it's way to fight racism...

Think about it, have American unions ever staged any kind of civil
rights demonstration? (other than all Black unions like the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters or all Latin unions like the United Farm
Workers)

Hell, some unions, like the Plumbers, openly barred Blacks from
joining as late as 1968...

Even today, have the unions done anything to fight around
discrimination against the Black community? Has the AFL-CIO said even
one word about the government's racist prison policies that have
locked up over 1 million African Americans? Have the unions lifted a finger
to fight against racial profiling, or the housing discrimination that
locks Blacks out of most suburban communities in this country? For
that matter, when have the unions called a demonstration to defend
affirmative action?

When it comes to Latinos, have the unions ever called a demonstration
to fight for bilingual education? And, of course, mass incarceration
affects Latinos almost as badly as it hurts Blacks..not to mention
Latinos are also subject to racial profiling and housing
discrimination, and also need affirmative action...and, as I just
pointed out, the unions have not lifted a finger to struggle around
those issues.

The only Latin civil rights issue that the unions have mobilzed around
is amnesty for illegal immigrants. Now, of course, this will benefit
the nation's 11 million illegal aliens, most of whom are from Mexico
or other Latin American countries. These workers will also benefit from
things like state governments recognizing the Matricula Consular
[Mexican consulate issued ID cards] as legitimate identification and
issuing drivers licenses to illegal immigrants.

However, the unions has also been quietly supporting the Craig Kennedy
Bill through Congress. That law would allow American employers to
legally employ illegal immigrants, and even directly import foreign
workers..and deport them when they don't need them anymore.

To qualify for this "Guest Worker" status, the workers would have to
have been employed as a farm laborer for 100 days out of the last 3
years. As a condition of legal status they'd be compelled to work for
360 days out of the next 6 years as a farm laborer. Failing to work
the required number of days, or taking a job in another industry, would be
punished by deportation.

It's an extension of the already existing H-1B and H2A visa programs
used by computer companies, agribusiness and construction contractors
to import low wage indentured workers from other countries.

Currently, almost 3 million indentured workers are employed through
these programs...and, they have no right to strike, quit or look for
another job, can be fired and deported on a whim by their bosses, are
allowed to be paid substandard wages and, incredibly enough, can even
be "sold" to another employer without their consent.

The Craig Kennedy Bill extention to the H-1B and H-2A visa programs
would hurt ALL American workers..immigrant and citizen alike..by
increasing competition for jobs and flooding already overcrowded labor
markets with rightless low wage workers.

And, ultimately, that's why the government, and the corporate
cheiftans who they work for, are pushing for amnesty for illegal immigrants..to
let American businesspeople have an unlimited supply of low wage
workers.

These same corporate elements are behind the newfound interest the
unions have in immigrant rights...remember, the leaders of the AFL-CIO
routinely let Corporate America do their thinking for them, and this
case is no exception..

Wall Street and the real estate developers of America want cheap
labor..and the union bosses are going to help them get it...by
cynically hiding their complicity with Corporate America's desire to
import cheap labor behind the legitimate civil rights demands of
immigrant workers

This is why the AFL-CIO found itself, along with the Catholic Church,
sponsoring the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.

The church and the labor body wern't the only sponsors, of
course..buried almost at the end of the 30 page list of local and
international unions, immigrant organizations, civil rights groups,
religious leaders and politicians was a short list of "business
endorsers" of the event.

And, on that list, carefully buried among the minority newspapers,
immigration law firms, ethnic restaurants and inner city furniture
stores were two of the largest corporations in America...SBC and MCI.

We all know MCI..or, as it was known until recently, MCI WorldCom..the
scandal scarred Mississippi-based agressively anti union long distance
telephone carrier. Besides keeping it's workers unorganized and
scamming investors, MCI is also notorious for brutally overcharging
the families of incarcerated people who need to recieve calls from their
relatives in prison.

SBC isn't quite as horrible as MCI (hell, who could be?). They're not
100% non union...yet. But, they are slowly but surely making as many
parts of the company open shop as they can. They also don't price
gouge as many Black and Latin families as MCI..because MCI has something of
a monopoly over the extortianately priced prison phone systems in many
states as well as in the federal prisons operated by the Bureau of
Prisons and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

However, it's not at all clear why these two telecommunications giants
suddently care so much about immigrants rights. Perhaps it's a
marketing ploy (immigrants, naturally, make a LOT of long distance
phone calls)..or maybe they just desire cheap labor for their call
centers.

On Saturday October 4, the closing rally of the freedom ride, attended
by 100,000 workers was held at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, just
south of Shea Stadium.

The event had begun 15 days earlier, with a 900 person bus caravan
taking off from Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las
Vegas, Houston, Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami and Boston.

The 10 arms of this bus motorcade joined in Washington for a Capitol
Hill rally and lobbying event on the 1st.

Then, the columns linked up and went to Liberty State Park (the park
across New York Harbor from the Statue of Liberty) in Jersey City, New
Jersey on the 3rd. That same day, smaller local marches were held in
largely immigrant populated neighborhoods in New York City (including
West Harlem, the neighborhood where this writer lives..that rally was
actually right across the street from this writer's apartment)

The grand finale for this nationwide event was the huge rally in
Queens.

And, from the opening rally in Los Angeles to the closing event in
Flushing, the union bosses and the princes of the church kept a tight
political lid on the immigrant workers.

The Los Angeles rally that started the event was practically a pro war
rally, with a heavy military presence, lots of bombastic flag waving
nationalism and a major emphasis on encouraging immigrants to enlist
in the military and fight in Mr Bush's oil war in Iraq.

In fact, considering the continuing heavy US Army and Marine Corps
losses in the "Sunni Triangle", and the almost mutinously low morale
in many National Guard and Reserve units bogged down in counterinsurgency
warfare on the Iraqi front...it's entirely possible that the
government's sudden interest in immigrant's rights might be due to
dire need of young immigrant men and women to serve as cannon fodder in the
endless "War On Terrorism"...

In this case, the carrot to get these folks to enlist would the
promise of citizenship...

If they come back alive.

That might explain the heavily militaristic tone of the Los Angeles
rally.

On the tail end of the bus motorcade, in Jersey City's Liberty State
Park, socialists and other militant anti racists were actually
physically barred from attending the rally by AFL-CIO staffers, so
only folks politically acceptable to the Democratic Party could speak.

Left wing anti racists were barred from the rally..but, fascists,
nazis and skinheads were allowed to have a racist "counter demonstration"
near the rally site.

The concluding event, in Flushing Meadows Park, was similarly
ideologically controlled.

The politically mainstream tone was set by the event's main speakers,
the NYC Central Labor Council's president, State Assemblyman Brian
McLaughlin (D. Queens) and "His Eminence" (yes, that's actually what
they called him on the official AFL-CIO leaflets) Edward Cardinal
Egan, the head of the New York Archdiocese.

Just to make sure that none of the 100,000 workers in attendance might
get any militant ideas about making the protest more effective (by,
for instance, blocking the streets or doing other radical acts) the rally
was held on a Saturday afternoon in a park that's in a very remote and
isolated part of the city.

Flushing Meadows Park, site of the 1964 Word's Fair, is deep in the
Borough of Queens, far from Manhattan, the city's center.

It's completely cut off from the surrounding neighborhoods by 4
highways, two sets of train tracks, a New York City Transit subway
yard and repair shop, a large complex of steel scrap yards and Shea
Stadium.


The rally site itself was only accessable from one subway station,
Willets Point/Shea Stadium on the # 7 line.

This meant that the New York Police Department had total control over
access to the site, and could, if necessary, confine any breakaway
demonstrators to the site. The cops were aware of this, and, within
the isolated rally site, further divided up the ralliers with lots and
lots of steel crowd control barricades...just to keep everybody in line.

Militant breakaways from boring official labor rallies have been a
problem for labor rallies here before...

Back on Tuesday, June 30, 1998, a 40,000 worker Building Trades
Council rally against the MTA's use of non union contractor Roy Kay to build a
subway command center was taken over by the workers, who proceded to
take over Midtown Manhattan, totally disrupting business and traffic
for almost 5 hours in the middle of the workweek..

That militant act (which has since come to be known as the "40,000 man
march") was very embarassing to NYC union bosses, who spent days
issuing whimpering public apologies to the real estate developers on
TV for their failure to keep the workers in line.

I posted an eyewitness account of the 40,000 man march on GANGBOX, at
:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22

Apparently, the union bureaucracy didn't want a repeat of that..so,
they had the rally out in the middle of nowhere, carefully isolated
from the rest of the city, on a weekend.

This isolation led to another problem...price gouging by the handfull
of vendors permitted to sell on the site.

Since the park is cut off from the nearby neighborhoods by highways,
the stadium and a subway yard, workers couldn't get food or water from
local stores..and had to buy overpriced meals and drinks from the
limited number of vendors who were allowed on the site by the NYC
Parks Department and the rally organizers... This was a major hardship for
many of the poorer workers attending this event.

Beyond that, the union bosses were not able to physically bar leftists
from attending the rally here, as they did in Jersey City, but the
sure as hell could keep them off the speakers platform, with only
Democratic Party politicians, union officials and Catholic Church officials
permitted to address the crowd.

The speakers at all of these events were long on praise for the
immigrant work ethic and sympathy for the plight of the undocument
worker..and damned short on specifics.

This is probably because the Catholic Church and the AFL-CIO, as I
mentioned above, are quietly supporting the Craig Kennedy bill, a
racist "Guest Worker" proposal that's making it's way through the
Senate.

This bill, sponsored by big corporate agribusiness interests in
California, Arizona, Texas and other Western states would do little to
help illegal immigrants gain citizenship status.

It would, however, guarantee corporate ranchers the right to import a
minumum of 500,000 cheap laborers..and DEPORT THOSE WORKERS AT WILL if
they dare to get other jobs..

Even if the immigrants work in farm labor, if they get less than 360
days work in a 3 year period, even if that's due to no fault of their
own, they can get deported too.

Similar guest worker programs are planned for the hotel and restaurant
industry if this law is introduced, and we may see a similar law in
construction.

To get an idea of just what a "Guest Worker" program really means,
just ask the several million Turkish workers who live and work in Germany,
Switzerland and Sweden

Those liberal "social democratic" countries all have long had deeply
racist  < Gastarbeiter > ["Guest Worker"] programs, similar to the
Craig Kennedy bill.

The Gastarbeiter programs have guaranteed 50 years of second class
citizenship for immigrant workers. Many of those workers have lived in
places like West Berlin, Stokholm or Geneva for decades, and had
children and grandchildren there, but they are still considered
transient aliens, and are treated as deportable aliens by the cops.

These workers have no civil rights, cannot vote, and the elaborate
social welfare programs that those European states are so famous for
do not apply to gastarbeiters..or, their European-born children, no
matter how long they've lived in the country.

Middle Eastern countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates have similar guest worker programs for their oil,
construction, hotel, restaurant, sea freight and domestic service
industries...basically, they get a disposable workforce, who can be
used, abused, fired, deported and even arrested on an employer's whim.

Needless to say, a racist law like that wouldn't sell well to the
workers at these rallies..so the union bosses and the princes of the
church kept quiet about that.

Bottom line, "freedom ride" or no, the union bureaucracy really
doesn't have that much to offer the immigrant worker..except the same second
class status, low substandard wages and racism that Corporate America
has been serving up.

Unlike the REAL Freedom Rides of the 1960's, the questions of
integration and equality aren't even on the table.... All that's on
the agenda is the Craig Kennedy Bill's permanent second class citizenship,
and indentured servitude to the lowest paying employers in the nation.

Now, the question is, why is the AFL-CIO doing this?

Why have they supported institutional racism for so long?

How come they have nothing to offer Latino immigrant workers but a
future of poverty, discrimination and second class status?

Why do they support racist "Guest Worker" programs?

Is it because union leaders are bad people?

Is it due to the fact that very few unions, even those with heavily
Hispanic memberships, have leaders who are actually Latino?

I belive the racism of the unions, and their failure to really address
the burning issues of the Latin workers, is due to something called
"Business Unionism".

What's that?

Basically, it's a philosophy that says that businesspeople and workers
have common interests, and that it's the job of unions to promote
"harmony" and "cooperation" between labor and management.

Of course, since workers and bosses have fundamental conflicts,
business unions end up having to sell out the interests of the workers
in order to cooperate with management.

In this case, the only way the AFL-CIO leadership can even imagine
achieving civil rights for Latino immigrant workers is through forcing
those brothers and sisters to work for below subsistance wages, in a
state of intentured second class citizenship.

It's totally beyond the imagination of the union bureaucracy to
envision leading a struggle of these workers, so they can fight for
their rights, and get the same rights, priviliges, immunities, and
most importantly THE SAME WAGES, HOURS AND WORKING CONDITIONS, as White
American, Black and US Citizen Latino workers.

You see, to achieve that, there would need to be a long, hard, bitter,
agressive and militant struggle against the employers... and that's
just the kind of thing that business unionists avoid like the plague.

Is there an alternative?

I think there is..and, in my opinion, the path to Latino immigrant
worker equality lies through something called "Revolutionary
Unionism".

What's that?

I've talked about revolutionary unionism on the GANGBOX website
before,
at :

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/csu1.html

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/downbylaw.html

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/contract2001.html

and on the GANGBOX listserv, at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2466

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2659

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4655

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4738

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5059

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7966

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8649

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/9027

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11281

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/12328

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/12482

Basically, revolutionary unionism means labor organizations that
recognize the fact that workers and bosses have a basic conflict... We
do the work, and they pay us less than the full value of the goods or
services they produce. That difference ("surplus value", to use a
really fancy name for it), is the source of all corporate profits...
Bottom line, the less they pay us, the more money goes in their
pockets..and, the more money we make, the less the bosses have to take
for themselves. Same thing with shorter hours, and better working
conditions...if we're better off, it means less money for the rich
folks.

That's why we have to fight so hard for every little benefit we get..

And it's always going to be like that, as long as we live in a
capitalistic society, where the businesspeople and corporate rulers
are in total control.

So, until we're ready, willing and able to establish a
worker-controlled society, we'll need revolutionary unions, to make
our lives as bearable as possible under this system.

Alright...how would revolutionary unionism deal with the persecution
and poverty imposed on the immigrant workers..and the effect that mass
immigration has on wages and unemployment levels in this country?

That's a tough question..but I have some ideas of what we might want
to try and do.

First thing, specifically in the construction industry, we need to re
unionize residential construction, and we really need to do that now.

Of course, when the construction industry was originally unionized by
the socialists, communists and anarchists who founded the building
trades unions, the main tactic they used was areawide strikes, or, to
use the terminology they used at the time, "trade movements".

They would organize a citiwide strike, and march from jobsite to
jobsite, persuading and/or coercing every worker in that particular
craft in that area to participate.

That tactic can still work today..that's what the residential
sheetrockers in Los Angeles did back in 1991 when they were striking
to get into the Carpenters Union.

Now, of course, those carpenters were self-organized, the Carpenters
Union only came in once they'd done all the work and gone out on the
streets and battled scabs, cops and the INS.

There's absolutely no reason in the world why other Latino immigrant
tradespeople can't follow in their footsteps..and, get themselves
organized, and integrated into the mainstream construction unions..

This would benefit everybody in the business...if that sector was
reorganized, and the wage standard was brought up to union levels, it
would help the entire construction workforce, immigrant and
American-born alike.

In fact, it's entirely possible that the day labor centers might be
the nucleus of just such a movement..if the workers in them were able to
capture their leadership from the clergy and the social services
folks.

Now, organizing these workers would be kind of tricky.

For one thing, there's the whole self employment question - when these
workers go to private homes, to work directly for the homeowner, they
are basically acting as independent contractors.

One way that issue could be dealt with would be adding a minimum price
list for self employment to the unions bylaws..with that price list
being equal or close to union scale, and having some mechanism for
verifying that every union member doing side work actually charged
those prices.

For the day laborers that are employed by contractors, there would be
the whole issue of making sure that the newly organized workers are
integrated into the same locals as American workers, and that the
residential contractors are signatory to an agreement with the same
pay, benefits and working conditions as the commercial agreement...

Beyond that, there's the language issue. That is, for these workers to
effectively participate in the unions, they would need to have the
contract, bylaws, working rules, constitution and union newsletters
translated into Spanish, or whatever other languages that day laborers
in that area speak (Portuguese, Polish, Punjabi, Chinese ect).

And, the workers would also need to be provided with the opportunity
to take English classes as well.  Also, there would also have to be
translation services provided at union meetings and at the
apprenticeship school, and, of course, organizers, BAs and union staff
who speak the languages the workers speak.

Beyond that, the employers have to be forced to pay back all the
superprofits they've gained in the last decade of mass immigration.

I would propose that employers be required to sponsor any illegal
immigrant worker they presently employ for Permanent Resident status
(that is, the famous "Green Card"). The contractors should also have
to pay the full cost of immigration attorneys, fingerprinting,
application fees and any and all other costs of legalization. Also, illegal
immigrant workers should get time off with pay for appointments with
the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services that happen during
working hours.

In the event a worker gets detained, the employer should have to pay
them the equivilant of what they would recieve from unemployment
insurance (that is, 50% of their wages up to a maximum of $ 405/wk)
for the time they are in detention. In the event a worker is actually
deported, once they have arrived in their country of origin, the
contractor should send them a check for one week's wages for every
year they've been employed by that contractor, plus $ 405/wk for 26 weeks.

Hey..it's only fair..for all these years that bosses have profited by
paying substandard wages to immigrant workers, it's about damned time
that they pay some of that money back to the people who made that
money for them!!!

Representatives of these workers would also need the opportunity to
take part in the leadership of the locals they were organized into....
That's very important..and, actually that's been one of the most
persistant problems for Black and US Citizen Latino workers in the
building trades..once we were able to "kick in the door" and get in
the union, we've never really had the opportunity to hold office in the
unions in proportion with our numbers among the membership.

Unfortunately, as I pointed out above, Latino immigrant workers have
had the same problem..many unions want to organize immigrant
workers..but exclude them from having any meaningful say in how the
unions are run.

Now, of course, none of this stuff is going to happen by itself...

Far from it..if the immigrant workers centers keep going the way they
are going, the best they can expect is 'seperate but equal' tokenism,
and continued status as second class low wage workers.

In other words, for these workers to achieve equality, it's going to
take a struggle...a struggle that will need to be led by the Latino
immigrant workers themselves.

The day labor centers COULD be a means of leading that struggle..

But, for that to happen, the workers themselves would have to take the
centers over from the social service professionals, politicians and
priests who currently dominate them..and, the centers would have to be
controlled by actual construction workers.

Now, of course, if this were to happen, the immigrants would suddenly
find that all the so called "friends of the immigrants" in the
Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO heirarchy and the leadership of the
Catholic Church will turn their backs on these workers with a truly
astonishing speed.

Remember, at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a
corporate-controlled entity, and it's going to deliver what Corporate
America and the real estate developer community want...a plentiful and
disposable supply of rightless cheap labor.

As for the Catholic Church...they are an employer themselves, running
many school systems, universities, hospitals, cemetaries, social
service agencies, foster homes all over the country..and they are a
major landowner as well. So, the Church wants cheap labor for it's
businesses too. And, of course, since most of these immigrants are
Catholic, the clergy get the added bonus of more parisioners in their
churches as well, and more nickles and dimes in the collection plate.

As for the union bosses...they are accustomed to giving management
what they want, and the business community of this country, from Wall
Street to Main Street, wants a surplus of cheap labor.

None of these groups are "friends" of the Latino immigrants..they are
actually deadly enemies...and the only hope that the day laborers have
is to fight to integrate themselves into the mainstream of the
American workforce, and the mainstream of the American union movement, so they
can fight for their rights.

That $ 80 dollars a day is just the beginning..now it's time for these
workers to fight for the whole ball of wax.....

That's it for now.

Be union, work safe.

Zero Immigration
According to government figures every year 200,000
thousand work permits are issued alongside 100,000
claims for asylum.
Alongside the globalisation of work forces in
teaching, doctors, nurses Blairism is destroying
unionisation in workplaces at a rapid
pace, just as the Tories did on the railways, in terms
of railway maintenance.

On top of the above over 500,000 student visas are
issued and many economic migrants make it to Britain
the number of which is undisclosed. The 'left'
continues to argue we have zero immigration
when on the above figures alone in the space of ten
years this means a 3 million increase. Those on this
site who live outside London cannot
comprehend that a large majority of workers now in the
public services in London are globalised employees
many with and many without any
qualifications do the job they are doing. This
obviously doesn't affect the ruling class as they
don't use public services instead
using only private ones. Blairism's main politically
strategy is to destroy the public sector by
globalising the work force and making
unionisation impossible. So far he is winning with the
union tops agreeing to this as can be evidenced in the
three areas he has done
this in already.

But so far it is London centred and it is slowly
starting to expand in the periphery. The recent local
elections show that Labour supporters
aren't happy with this situation and the Labourites
are losing electoral support in the regions. this
isn't so much as the Baghdad backlash but the
anti-globalist backlash as blairism pretends
immigration is nearly ...zero. The globalist left go
one step further and argue for open borders as if
Blairism has closed them. The recent all party report
is an attempt to recover lost ground by explaining
that globalisation is having a backlash, but in
reality we will only have more of the same with
foundation hospitals which will choose
local pay and conditions just like in schools and the
fire brigade.

The attempt at repeating the London model on every
British city WITHOUT conflict and severe social
distress is Blairite Alice in Wonderland politics. The
leftists openly exposed as liars on the
immigration issue now have to try to regain lost
ground, which cannot be regained.



Imperialist Immigration
During the previous but one century (19th) British
imperialism became famous for shipping people from one
part of the Empire to another to
work in its companies. Indian labourers known as
coolies were shipped to Africa to build
railways. African slaves were shipped to America to
make cotton and tobacco.Irish labourers were shipped
to Britain to make the roads and houses.

Global immigration led by and directed by the
interests of British capitalism had no qualms about
the national sensitivities of native
populations. After all immigrants were products to be
shipped, used, abused and decimated as various
companies saw fit. Then we had the
creation of monstrous societies like the USA, South
Africa, Palestine.

Who has forgotten the 1930's when the British Empire
in connivance with Hitler shipped Jews from Germany
into Palestine to stop resistance to its rule and used
them as a local police force to crush
the Arabs? Who has forgotten the use of Indians to
fight other Indians in the 1860's in India? Who has
forgotten the mass drugging of the Chinas population
so British companies could loot pillage and steal?

Everyone knows the name of this policy as divide and
rule. But what they forget to add in this equation is
that imperialism used immigrants for its own purposes.
Where do the Protestants in Northern
Ireland originate from? Where do the Zimbabwean white
farmers? Or the WASP Americans?

Ascendant capitalism did not touch most of its own
zones of influence. Britain, France and Germany
remained homogenous for most of their 19th
century existence. But after WWII they started to
import most of their supporters in their ex-colonies
after the situation became difficult for their
existence eg Indians from India, Algerians from North
Africa etc.

What is the situation today? The 'left' asserts
globalise labour as the solution to the situation. One
knows they have no knowledge of the
past or they conveniently forget it to serve current
interests. But the issue remains open. Internal divide
and rule for imperialist countries is a policy of
death agony, the final saga of a policy which
leads directly and indirectly to civil war type
conditions in most cities with policed areas, ghettoes
and urban war zones...

Globalist Left Vs Revolutionary Left

One of the main arguments that resurfaces time and again is that
immigration is a non-class issue and that workers like capitalists
have the right to move anywhere and seek work anywhere. The right of
the capitalist to shut a factory down and re-locate it elsewhere
suddenly equates with the right of the worker to move continent and
work elsewhere. One right would apply if one was contingent on the
other, in other words if workers rights where not eroded by
capitalisms right to re-locate wherever they see fit. In other words
if capitalisms ability to globalise was beneficial to workers the
world over then the right of re-location of labour forces over
continents and countries would be progressive.

The right of capital flight and re-location
Since the early 1970's when labour unrest hit the USA a whole series
of companies saw fit to re-locate in tax free export processing zones
and zones of cheap labour. Whole swathes of manufacturing industry
where closed down in the US. Side by side we had the gradual
disenfrachisement of 5 million blacks and the creation of two
Americas, one white in suburbia and one black or latino in collapsing
inner cities.

Deregulation of labour - ending of the union shop
Side by side with capital flight came another miracle of modern
capitalism. The deregulation of labour. Union control of hire and fire
became non-existent as union representation in newly formed
deregulated sub-contractors of previously unionised labour forces
dissapeared. Wages conditions were slashed by up to 40%. For instance
the meatpacking industry heavily unionised in the 1960'-70's
by the 1990's had moved to non-unionised illegal labour in the
Southern USA, from Chicago.

Has Globalisation Benefited the Working Masses?
If one looks at the planet one sees that in the 1990's it is estimated
that 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Global unemployment
is currently at around 35-45% of the world labour force. If capital
allows the deregulation of borders to proceed apace the excess
capacity of an oversupply of labour will decimate existing labour
conditions. It has been estimated that at least 20million people have
moved into the USA in the last decade and a similar number in the EU.
Have the deregulated labour markets of the USA and the EU led to
benefits for the working masses?

Globalist 'left' vs revolutionary left
The globalist left argues that the key to the current situation is
more globalisation of labour not less. More cross border movement,
more economic/ refugee migration not less. Progress is to be analysed
to the extent that border controls are deregulated. The current
expansion of the EU eastwards encompassing low wage economies of the
former Russian block and the expansion of NAFTA into central and
southern America are seen as progress towards a globa vision of the
free movement of labour. But just as capital flight and re-location
favours big business so labour migration and an oversupply favour big
capital, the globalist vision is in reality an Orwellian nightmare of
short-term work contracts whose aim it to keep offering the same
level of work with diminishing returns (wages).

Can anti-capitalism be pro-globalisation?
To the extent that capitalism continues to extend the deregulation of
border controls (inter-EU), USA (immigrant amnesties) the 'left' will
have its programme adopted and stolen. Can capitalism become
anti-corporate? To the extent that it appears multi-ethnic,
cosmopolitan, modern it will steal the clothes of the globalist
'left'. We already see a section of this happening in France. Le
Monde, Attac, LCR have argued one must vote for Chirac to block le
Pen. In other words vote for further deregulation to ...stop the
advance of corporate globalisation.

How the SWP Supports New Labour and Imperialist Immigration Policies.
A Marxist Critique of Home Office 'Socialists'

In a pamphlet entitled "Refugees are Not To Blame" with subtiltes 'No
to Scapegoating and No To Immigration Controls" written by a Hassan
Mahmadallie theS WP declares itself with New Labour's immigration
policies and the NATO programme of counterrevolution in Eastern
Europe. In order to understand the full depth of their policies and
how related they are to the ruling government we will use some
paragraphs from their pamphlet.

"Answering the myths

Are we overcrowded?
No. The population of Britain is around 59 million. Its hardly growing
at all. It is hardly growing at all. Migration of people out of this
country since the Second World War has consistently been higher than
those coming to settle. For example, 54,000 people permanently left
the country in 1995, 10,000 more than claimed asylum. 10,000 more than
claimed asylum. But no one talks of a 'flood' of people leaving
Britain.
Since 1971 ther has been a sharp fall in the number of births in
Britain. In common with the rest of Western Europe, we have an ageing
population. By 2050 the population of Britain is set to drop to 56
million. This means that in the next century Britain will need to find
new sources of labour to keep up the workforce.
Asylum seekers could provide part of that labour supply"

In order to prove that asylum seekers are welcome here and that their
arrival doesn't actually affect anyone, even the British working
class, one has to create a reality to fit the purpose of the argument.
All well and good if the argument was actually tailored to represent
the reality of capitalist Britain in decline. But if the argument is
tailored to defend capitalism in decline then reality has to be
inverted. Has the author asked the millions who live in council flats
in overcrowded estates whether Britain is overcrowded? Or are we
dealing with a theoretical concept of overcrowding which takes no
account of present day reality and just argues that another 10 or 20
million people could fit into Britain? Russia which has approximately
260 million people in 1/6 of the worlds earth surface is definitely
underpopulated in relation to its land mass, but that doesn't stop the
government having 20 odd people in a cell where prisoners take it in
turns to lie on the floor spending at least 20 hours a day standing
up. Is this overcrowding? Is this what we mean when we say we aren't
overcrowded? When we wait for buses or go to the dole queue or the
local library are we on are own? Is the UK a country which can easily
cope with an influx of millions as the author of the SWP argues?
When it is stated more people left England than actually came in are
we supposed to take this literally or assert in relation to the number
of asylum seekers? Are they the only ones coming into the UK? Or are
we playing with words to create a diversion? New York over a twenty
five year period has had at least 2 million new arrivals. Has London
had any less? Only in the decade of the 1990's at least 70, 000 Kurds
have arrived? Were they asylum seekers or not? Irrelevant question.
The issue are the numbers. Has Britain seen its population decrease
over a twenty five year period or increase. If it has increased then
the SWP is inverting reality to serve its purpose…
As a result of the ageing population which the government always talks
about and wants to raise the age of retirement so you work till you
drop dead, the SWP now argues labour shortages will be created in the
distant future and these labour shortages can be filled by asylum
seekers. Is capitalism actually creating jobs which cannot be filled
in the UK and labour from abroad needs to be brought in? Full
employment is once more on the agenda!!! This obviously happened in
the 1950's during the post-capitalist boom. Are we in the same period?
Has Labour actually ever reversed the 19 or so changes in calculating
the rate of unemployment which the Tories introduced which actually
led to pretending there are no longer any unemployed in the UK? Can
British workers actually find jobs? Aren't there at least 5 million
unemployed? Where will the asulym seekers now find jobs, if they
aren't asked to work on slave labour wages in scab outfits? Or should
they be asked to take over jobs done by British workers at starvation
wages? Here the SWP reveals its class hatred of British workers and
sides with the government which wants to use immigrant labour to
undercut hard won rights, as has happened in sub-contracted council
cleaning companies. A stroll in London will actually show that shops
are now open 24 hours a day and workers in these shops primarily from
the immigrant communities work without any rights whatsoever. That is
why it has appointed Barbara Roche MP as a new Minister for
Immigration to handle the largest influx of immigrants in post-war
Britain. This isn't mentioned in the SWP pamphlet as they are
concerned in telling the British working class it has to move to the
side to allow immigrants in.

"Are We Flooded with Asylum Seekers Compared to Other Countries?
NO. There are an estimated 13 million refugees today, fleeing war and
brutal regimes. Britain provides for just 0.5% of them in 1997
In 1997 Germany received the most applications for asylum - 100.000.
Britain received just 30,000 application. Britain takes less refugees
per head of the population than the following countries: Germany,
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, Norway, Sweden,
Ireland, Denmark and Canada."

Its an irony that Greece is actually missed out. It has according to
government statistics accepted 1.5 million in the 1990's alone. That
is equivalent to 35% of the working population. Has Greece been
flooded? Technically no. If you apply the Russian principle of 20 to a
cell and now picture Greece where people sleep 10 to a room it still
has a long way to go. The issue is what is a flood? What percentage
are we dealing with which turns a puddle into a flood? The author of
the SWP doesn't answer this question as again reality needs to be
inverted to fit the argument. We can help him. If we cram 30 to a room
 and calculate that there are so many rooms in a country and then we
get to figure out what a possible flood may actually mean. But what
does a flood mean in the labour supply? What does an oversupply of
labour mean? Does it exist or is it a concept which doesn't exist in
the SWP school of defenders of capitalism in decline? Are wages
actually going up which would imply there was an undersupply of labour
or unions were achieving rights or is the opposite occurring?

WON'T ASYLUM SEEKERS TAKE OUR JOBS?
"NO. Asulym seekers are not to blame for unemployment.
In the 1930's there were virtually no asylum seekers allowed into
Britain, yet we had mass unemployment. In the 1950's and 1960's we had
immigration from the Commonwealth and full employment. It is not
asylum seekers who are putting workers in Britain onto the dole. They
do no sit on the boards of companies that are sacking thousands of
workers every week.
Take the case of Dover. It is true there is a lack of jobs. But who is
to blame? For years the Tory council stopped factories being built so
that locals would be forced into low paid work in the tourist
industry.
It was the Tory government which closed down the Kent pits after the
1985 miners strike. And it was the bosses of P&O who sacked 2,000
local seafarers who went on strike to defend their jobs. All this
happened before one refugee set foot in Dover. As Malcolm Pitt, leader
of the Kent miners during the 1985, says "It is total hypocrisy of Ann
Widdecombe and the Tories who created the situation to blame the
victims rather than the perpetrators.
The Thatcher government wanted to destroy jobs and let rip free market
economics that tears peoples lives up everywhere. They smacked workers
in the head and now want to divide and rule. The only answer is for
workers in the head and now want to divide and rule. The only way is
for workers of all races to unite in opposition to the common enemy".
One would assume the SWP could take into account different historical
periods. One of capitalist boom and one of capitalist decline. Is the
British imperialist state going to make the ruling class pay for the
extra cost in housing and schooling for the refugees or will it make
the working class pay? As for the attacks on the working class in the
18 years of Tory rule it was helped along by the union bureaucracy
which is bound hand and foot to the Labour Party which we must never
forget did everything in its power to undermine the miners strike and
essentially wipe out the mining industry from the UK. The SWP argument
implies the only ones to blame are the Tories as they are to the right
of New Labour and that asserting that the extra burdens which the
state is undertaking is no cost at all, just "a penny on income tax at
today's levels"(p.7) In other words nothing is really happening one
doesn't understand what all the fuss is about and no jobs have been
taken despite asserting East Europeans are working on the farms in
Kent. ("Yet who harvests the fruit and vegetable crops in this "garden
of England" for poverty pay? British seasonal workers and migrant
labour from Eastern Europe." P.9) The SWP asserts most British people
work in the tourist industry around Dover and the fact that many
hotels are being turned into refugee centres doesn't obviously affect
the London based SWP but it might actually affect the Dover tourist
industry and this might actually be a cause of local resentment that
people in the area may not even be able to have these low paying jobs
at all. To argue as the SWP has been doing, since Labour got into
power that there is no crisis and that hundreds of thousands of people
who get mobilised for instance in the countryside, against the
collapse of agricultural prices and the devastation of rural
communities, that somehow because there are leaders who are Tories or
because the BNP has appeared in Dover is an indication of a turn away
from the class, away from popular protest, into being the 'left'
lawyers for Labour. As if we create the conditions of resistance, as
if we are in control of the form this resistance takes and as if the
1905 Russian Revolution wasn't led by Father Gapon, a priest. Does
that imply that because Tories and fox  hunters for their own ends to
ensure the left doesn't take roots so they can diffuse the situation,
appear on protests that the whole protest is reactionary through and
through? The movement against the poll tax also had many local Tories,
priests etc. but somehow that was progressive whilst the hundreds of
thousands from the rural areas are all reactionary? If more scenarios
like Dover develop and they probably will, the SWP will be campaigning
for the police to intervene and stamp out racism as after all they
debate Home Office Reports on racism and claim this is the main threat
in Britain today, not capitalism itself.

4."Arent Asylum Seekers A Drain on Society?
NO. Britain is a very rich country compared to most - the problem is
that the wealth produced is not shared equally.
This government should tax the rich to make funds available to look
after everyone in society - whether it be asylum seekers, the elderly,
people with disabilities or anyone else who needs help.
It is not true that there is a housing shortage. There are 800,000
empty homes across Britain many owned by property speculators. They
should be opened up to meet peoples needs. Politicians always talk of
asylum seekers in a negative way. But Home Office studies show that
many are highly qualified. However, this government will not allow
asylum seekers to get a job, even in voluntary work, for the first six
months.
Many asylum seekers who are granted refugee status work long hours for
low pay in sweatshops or jobs in the service sector such as cleaning
and catering."
Suddenly we have no housing shortage in the SWP's worldview, there are
enough to go around. It is a shame people dont realise that and
they need the SWP to re-educate them with regards to the non-existent
housing shortage that everyone has been speaking about for years
including the SWP one may add, before the Labour Party got into power.
There are also many asylum seekers who are well educated and no one
doubts that, but what is the implication behind this? Under a
sub-contracted government system for education for instance, the SWP
will be campaigning for asylum seekers to get jobs whilst British
people dont have them. Unemployment in the UK isn't mentioned
at all in their pamphlet as if it doesn't exist. Figures are used to
conceal the depths of the social crisis. And to add insult to injury,
the SWP always uses Home Office reports to justify its political line:
one which is direct and unequivocal support to British imperialism
abroad and at home. Many "asylum seekers work for long hours for low
pay in sweatshops or jobs in the service sector such as cleaning and
catering" they assert. Is it not the case that throughout the
deregulation of council services in the 1980's, many by the Labour
Party the SWP votes for, British workers have been replaced by
immigrants. Every new wave of immigrants replaces another, and each
new wave undercuts the previous one. This in the SWP view of Labour
Britain isn't mentioned or even notified as to them the issue isn't
what is happening, but the 'right' of immigrants to work. In other
words the right of the bosses to use anyone from any corner of the
planet to undercut another group of workers from another part of the
world and everything is fine. This policy of divide and rule the SWP
support under the guise of 'anti-racism' and anyone who criticises the
right of the bosses to use immigrant labour in such a manner is deemed
a racist. One obviously only needs to take a stroll in various London
boroughs to notice that people today are working longer hours, for
less and this continues unabated. The SWP answer is capitalism has
problems but if we fight we can solve them. Modern immigration which
is another form of slavery cannot fight to improve its lot much in the
same way as the slaves of the past couldn't fight to improve their
'slavery'. Only a revolutionary struggle which aims to block
capitalisms ability to permanently use labour to undercut labour can
lead to the overthrow of this new form of medieval serfdom, not a
reformist approach which embellishes the system and asserts 'everyone
is welcome here'. Slavery couldn't be reformed, it had to be
abolished.

In the chapter entitled "Why People Are Forced to Move Across the
Globe" the SWP argues in not too uncertain terms that because
countries collapse people move from the poor countries to the rich
ones. "They may be asylum seekers, they may be "economic migrants",
they may be fleeing the "violence" of famine or drought, yet they are
all branded as "bogus", "illegal" or "scroungers" p.11. One would like
to know is there a class definition of immigration or is immigration a
non-class concept which implies an immigrant is an immigrant is an
immigrant under all conditions and under all circumstances is welcome
in the UK? This liberal, non-class approach doesn't  take into account
imperialisms involvement in its neo-colonial adventures. But as the
SWP pretends they don't exist in the hope that they will go away we
will just remind them.
In London in the 1990's decade there has been a large influx of Kurds
and Somalians. By a strange coincidence the British army alongside its
US masters has been involved in neo-colonial adventures. How does
US-NATOist imperialism manage to coerce the local leaders to cede
territory in its wars against the Somalian 'warlords' and the evil
dictator, the rapist of poor little Kuwait, Saddam Hussein? Is it by
any chance agreeing to ship thousands of pro-western Somalians and
Kurds? Or is it out of 'humanitarian' concern for the damage caused by
 US missiles on poor defenceless civilians? Which we then have the
obligation as workers to house, feed and clothe? We are morally
responsible for the crimes committed by the gangsters in charge of us
and we have the moral duty to pay. So not only are we criticised if we
campaign for the victory of our governments enemies, not only are we
branded Saddam's stooges, we are also now being branded as racists if
we oppose imperialist immigration policies. The SWP want to have its
cake and eat it. It wants to pretend one can have a liberal sit-on the
fence position, of No War but Peace, without siding with one of the
two sides and then if people side with one side it brands them puppets
of one side. This policy or pettybourgeois capitulation to
imperialisms new world order is now taking on a totally reactionary
turn, whereby the terms "ethnic cleansing" and "fascism" has to be
applied to all opponents domestically. We have been through this
process once before in history and it was when the stalinists branded
the trotskyists as appendages of fascism. In that fact alone the  SWP
aren't original or even unique. Just a final attempt at holding on to
reactionary policies before the final degeneration into the new world
order  of liberalism.
 

Zero Unemployment and Zero Immigration Ad Nauseum.

www.statistics.gov.uk

According to this UK government agency there are 28 million people of working age of which only 74.6% are employed. That leaves around 25% of this figure not working. Which is a figure of 7 million. Taking into account housewives etc it still is a pretty large figure.

Now according to the government agency the claimant count ie how the government counts unemployment  is 926,000 around 3% and there were 652,000 job vacancies in that period as well (October 2003). In theory then if all job vacancies were taken by those on the claimant count we would have less than 500,000 unemployed which is a figure of zero unemployment.

According to the same office there are 7.7 million people on benefits. Around 40% of young people are students. If one works a certain number of hours part-time then one is considered employed not unemployed or partly employed. According to the ILO the unemployment count in Britain is 1.5 million, if one subtracts the 650,000 available jobs then we are left again with a figure just over 800,000 nearer the 500,000 figure which is considered to be zero immigration for the UK.

But if 7 million people aren’t working from those able to work, either millions have available sources to not work, or they are housewives. Ie 25% of those not working are housewives. That would be a massive figure taking into account around 40% of people live alone.

There isn’t a single coal mine left. Steelworkers are down to their last few thousand so a re car workers. Manufacturing from around 11 million in 1989 has dropped to less than 5 million workers today. Everyday thousands of jobs move overseas, yet unemployment goes down not up. Somewhere along the line, the lies and inaccuracies of the government of national statistics show the full contradictions. Even if the figures crisscrossed and matched the extent of fraudulent figures is so immense that millions disappear from the statistics for the purpose of bolstering the governments lies regarding mass unemployment.

According to Evening Standard 2^nd December population of London is 7.2 million whilst ethnic minorities are 40 million. It also states white British have dropped from 79% to 71% in the ten year census. Now anyone with a pocket calculator can work out that 70% of 7 million is equivalent to 5 million. But if there are 4 million ethnic minority that leaves only around 3 million white British, which is equivalent to around 40%.

On the government website www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASEExpodataSpreadsheets/D6888xls

There is a figure of net immigration into the UK in the ten years from 1191 to 2001 of around 3.5 million. There is apparently a similar figure of net emigration so the figures look like nothing much is happening on the immigration front. Ie new figures are replacing old ones. But the issue as stake is whether immigration is occurring into Britain or not.? Who is it that is leaving and who is it that is coming?

The government as with unemployment has argued that immigration into Britain is at near zero or probably a couple of hundred thousand a year, not more than 500,000 per annum. Everybody knows many have left the UK when they retire or are forced into early retirement and they go abroad to sunnier climates. Whole swathes of coastal resorts in Spain have been invaded by British people. There are also at least 300,000 students from abroad who come into the UK every year to study either in language schools or universities. Many of them are allowed to work and they never return once their studying expires, they evaporate into Londons unofficial labour market. So if we take the government figure of on average 350,000 new migrants arriving each year and add to that a say 150,000 illegal immigrants then we have a more realistic figure of new arrivals of around 500,000 per annum.

Hence in one London Borough alone the government has announced the building of 17,000 new dwellings. If on average they can house 2 people per flat that is 35,000 people. If one multiplies that on average with the 32 London boroughs that is equivalent to 500,000 new dwellings which can house on average 1.1 million people. This is only from the government supported housing sector. The private sector is still another entity when dealing with housing. Yet according once more to official government data the population of Britain has increased in the ten years of the last sector by a marginal rate. So either home ownership is increasing ie many people are owning more than one property to justify this expansion programme or the expansion programme is linked to mass immigration. Either which way on the government web site home ownership in London remains around 57% in the seven years of 1991 to 1998. A whole host of councils are now advertising that councils seek properties to rent and manage from the private sector for a minimum of five years, London. But if the population of London has remained static at around 7 million for decades how can the above be squared with reality?

Either the figures of the national statistics office don’t match reality or the figures are presented with the view that they will not be analysed across sectors. Either which way we are facing government figures of zero unemployment and zero immigration.