As with his healthcare reform, the devil is in the detail of
Obama’s immigration reform. What Obama did was to order the implementation of a
vicious program to criminalize immigrants in order to jail or deport them at
will and to spend countless additional billions to militarize the border to keep
them out. All sections of the ruling class understand well that cheap labor
with zero benefits is a prized commodity. Obama’s supposed three-year reprieve
from government deportation is little more than existing policy, in which
immigration officials, in collusion with corporate America, selectively
determine who will be deported and who are still urgently required to service
corporate interests. This unofficial selective persecution and deportation
policy serves capitalism well. Lower wages, if wages are paid at all via
employer pre-planned deportations arranged before pay day, to immigrants always
exercise a downward pressure on the wages of all U.S. workers, including and especially
union members. The wage differential also serves capitalism’s need to divide
workers by race and legal status, with the ruling class ever placing the blame
for unemployment not on its failing system but rather on immigrants who
“illegally” take the jobs of “Americans.”
The price to be extracted by Obama’s “promise” to refrain
for three years from deporting undocumented immigrant parents of children born
in the U.S. is a requirement that all such immigrants officially register their
names, addresses, employment records, wages, salaries, and other data with the
government, thus subjecting them to immediate persecution or deportation if
they don’t pass Obama’s muster. Those with previous felony convictions or
perhaps lesser “infractions” of America’s racist system of “law and order”
remain subject to immediate deportation.
Obama’s order supposedly offers those who qualify the chance
to remain in the U.S. temporarily for three years, as long as they pass
background checks and pay back taxes—to be determined, no doubt, by tax
collectors who will have the final word. Not a single immigrant will be offered
a “path to citizenship” nor will any be eligible for federal benefits or mandated
health-care coverage.Obama failed to mention that these same immigrants have
often had state and federal taxes deducted from their salaries or wages by
merciless employers while simultaneously being denied benefits supposedly
mandated to all taxpayers! Obama’s order will demand the extortion of back
taxes but there will be no retroactive back payment to immigrants for their
exclusion from the benefits of paying these taxes. Obama’s program is worse; it
will now demand that back taxes be deducted from those who register to comply,
while all benefits will still be denied.
Government-promoted nationalism is routinely employed to
scapegoat the most oppressed and exploited. Obama’s spokespersons took great
care to stress that the new plan was both temporary and subject to cancellation
at any time by any president. “Deferred action [that is, postponing deportation
punishment] is not a pathway to citizenship. It is not legal status. It simply
says that for three years, you are not a law enforcement priority, and [we] are
not going to go after you,” said one senior official. “It is temporary and it
is revocable.”
The unity of the working class in defense of full rights for
immigrants is a prerequisite to winning real victories for all workers. Obama’s
fake decree was nothing less than a ruling-class effort to set the stage for
the next round of electoral debate, in which the “lesser evil” will be once
again counterposed to the so-called greater evil. There are no capitalist
“saviors.”
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