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TOTAL AND UNCONDITIONAL SOLIDARITY WITH IMMIGRANTS OF WHATEVER STATUS
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Total and unconditional solidarity with immigrants of whatever status
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Total and unconditional solidarity with immigrants of whatever status
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The situation everywhere, in Europe and America, in which immigrants of whatever status, legal or illegal, more and more find themselves raises in sharp relief the contradictions and lacerations of the capitalist mode of production and social life and imposes on the entire exploited class a firm and unequivocable response. Let's examine the issue.

The United States reached the level of the leading world power at the birth of the twentieth century, in part thanks to the flood of cheap labour - largely, but not exclusively, from Europe - of immigrants, some temporary, but mostly disposed or compelled to Americanise themselves, and nearly all admitted without having to overcome serious obstacles. Cheap labour was needed, and correspondingly restrictions were few. Today, particularly in the states of California and New Mexico, there is a brutal xenophobic campaign which seeks to limit and even to shut down the inflow of «aliens» into the American paradise, notwithstanding their being «clandestine» or not.

France owes much of its political and economic prestige to having known how to attract to the needs of its industry a considerable mass of foreign workers, a large percentage of whom ended remaining and adopting citizenship. Although largely European, they also arrived from the ex-colonies and other lands. In France, today, there is «open season» on immigrants, particularly if they have not been able to legalise their presence in the limited period allotted; they remain sans pa pier even only because there was no possible way of procuring these documents in time. Hence, the immigrant becomes an «illegal» a designation that the famous and ferocious «Pasqua laws» have popularised and loaded with menacing consequences. The «eternal principles» and the sacred tables of «The Rights of Man» that are part of the liberal-democratic rhetoric don't count in this instance. A real police-state atmosphere surrounds these immigrants, who are buffeted by snarls of racism, and these conditions are not limited to those who barricaded themselves in a Parisian church in the summer of 1996.

Italy is a classical nation of emigrants. During the periods before and after the two World Wars, remittances from abroad contributed heavily to the Italian fiscal stability and within limits, helped maintain internal stability. Today, a series of

legislative acts, beginning with the Socialist-sponsored Martelli Law, has thrown a thorny police menace over immigrants seeking work.

We are in the era of the global economy: goods move to all the markets of the world; capital circulates freely seeking the highest returns; entire industries emigrate to Southeast Asia, or to some other paradise of high returns on capital. At the same time, however, the masses of proletarians who flee the catastrophic consequences of the upsetting of their country-old (even millennia-old) traditional economy, under the iron heel of colonialism first and of imperialism and «free world market» afterwards -these waves of desperate humans labour looking for a job are denied entry.

But the portals of the «free world» with all their adornments of «eternal principles» and «inalienable rights of man» open only to be closed again with the police lock. Are we communists the ones to be amazed by what the free market may bring?

Only the proletarians of the nations toward which these streams of humanity are directed are able to objectively see in the immigrants, with or without documents, other class brothers, victims of the same social and political system, even if the official propaganda labours to stress that thousand of domestic jobs will be lost to them. They face the same enemy, are potentially the soldiers of one worldwide army, joined together by a shared exploitation. It is the duty of active revolutionary Communists to revive this awareness, at times when it may be blurred by a brutal mode of production. They know that a real emancipation of the working class is not possible without the unity of all the exploited, both the natives and the arrivals from across the borders; nor without the militant internationalisation of this struggle, and an internationalist tactical and political program by the revolutionary party. Only the establishment of communism on a worldwide scale can put an end to the imbalances created by the uncontested expansion of the capitalist mode of production, and open to all men the full enjoyment of the planet; only a struggle for communism can bring together in a united front both the «native» and the «alien,»sharing a common exploitation by a common enemy.

Hence, there can be no meaningful and efficacious revival of the class struggle without growing solidarity with immigrants, regardless of documentation. There is no solution to their conditions outside of communism; inversely, without their support, the fight for communism will be without a basic pillar. The labouring army of the exploited extends beyond divisions of nationality or race; on the contrary, the elimination of these divisions will strengthen our daily struggles even before final victory.

Total and unconditional solidarity with all immigrants of whatever status; battle to the end against all legal and police-applied discrimination wherever they are victims! This is the pass word of the class party.

Source: »Internationalist Papers«, n. 6, may 1997

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