Three comrades in Progressive Labor Party attended the first meeting of our union’s Immigrant Solidarity Working Group, along with 50 other members from many CUNY campuses. A Law School professor spoke to us about how Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents have different restrictions depending on whether it’s a public or a private space. For ICE to come onto campus (a private space), their agents are required to have a judicial warrant, which needs to be signed by a judge. However, ICE often barges into private spaces without a legitimate warrant, so their agents need to be confronted and asked to see a warrant. One of the projects of our group is a Rapid Response Team that will gather quickly at sites where ICE has come to arrest people.
Organizing antiracist fightback
The group is just beginning, but two things impressed me at the meeting. First, many were excited about starting committees on campus to reach out to students and other faculty members with tabling, teach-ins, film-showings, and putting pressure on the administration to keep ICE off-campus at a time when Mayor Adams is welcoming ICE’s presence. Second, there is a qualitative difference when a union throws its resources into a campaign. Our union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), has "Immigrants Are Welcome Here!" flyers that professors are putting on their office doors. It has printed thousands of small Know Your Rights cards to hand out on campus. The union website has a wealth of information about immigrant rights. The union has members from many countries, and the PSC is part of the NYC Immigration Coalition with other unions and community groups.
One of the films we plan to show on campuses is the 2024 film, Borderland: The Line Within, which graphically depicts how ICE detention centers are not only on the southern border but are spread throughout the country. The border is everywhere! Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the border was increasingly militarized and the massive ICE infrastructure grew. Dozens of companies, including Amazon, make huge profits from contracts as part of the Border Industrial Complex, which last year under Biden received $25 billion in contracts.
The film centers on undocumented immigrants who have refused to be cowed or be silent, and who are fighting for the right of those without papers to live where they want. For most of human history, there were no borders and no nations. Borderland also shows us the admirable work of organizations like The Border Network for Human Rights and No More Deaths, groups with volunteers who leave gallons of water and set up tents with food and medicine for thirsty and hungry migrants crossing the desert.
Communists are vitally important in bringing a class analysis to the fight against deportations. We understand that borders benefit capitalists in two ways:
(1) They produce a class of undocumented workers who are exploited on farms, meatpacking and poultry plants, construction sites, and restaurants, but who are afraid to protest or organize for fear their bosses will turn them over to ICE. These vulnerable workers are a source of super profits for their employers, but they also benefit U.S. capitalism as a whole because their low pay keeps wages low for all workers, and
(2) The big capitalists like Elon Musk (worth over $400 billion) and the politicians that serve them work overtime trying to convince native-born workers that their problems are the results of foreign workers being here, splitting the working class. As though the anxiety workers feel over high prices, insufficient wages, high levels of debt, and inadequate medical care are because of other workers with the same problems, and not because of the billionaires whose greed knows no limits!
When we chant “Stop Racist Deportations, Working People Have No Nation!” or “No ICE, No Fear, Immigrants Are Welcome Here!”, we’re motivated by a vision of a future world without borders, without nations, without the current system of global apartheid, and without bosses — a world run by workers. That’s communism.
