"Many years have passed and I haven't been able to see my biological family. I didn't see my father or my grandfather die, and now I don't know if I will see my mother in her last days. This same thing and more happens to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. Many haven't seen their children grow up, or their grandchildren. This is the result of these bosses' inhumane borders," said an undocumented worker furiously. Borders and immigration laws are relatively new phenomena in human history. For thousands of years, humanity traveled over the whole world, and populated it without encountering any barrier other than natural ones.
With the rise of capitalism, there also came great waves of immigrants looking for work. For example, for more than three centuries, tens of millions of workers from the whole world immigrated to the US.
During all that time, they encountered no immigration restrictions. All this changed when the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Afterwards, they passed the Immigration Law of 1924, restricting the entry of all immigrants from outside the North American continent. Later they passed even more restrictive laws for everyone.
Other countries did the same. That's why borders and racist immigration laws are today the biggest barriers to human movement and are used by the capitalists-imperialists of the world to divide and super-exploit the international working class.
The immigration reform that the uS rulers have been debating for years will also not benefit the working class. With it, one sector of the US bosses want patriotic superexploitable labor for their industries and patriotic soldiers for their imperialist wars. The law, however, is stuck because another sector of bosses, with little vested interest in these military adventures, is preventing the bill's passage.
Trying to break this stalemate, Obama is sending a clear message about which side of this bosses' fight he is on. His presidential decision to give renewable permission for a temporary, one-year, stay in the US to the children, spouses or parents of members of the armed forces, whether they are active, reservists, or veterans, is a sign that he supports the sector of US bosses who are planning for bigger wars.
These permits have already been given selectively since August of 2010. So this is not new. What is new is that Obama is making this a public and widespread policy of his administration. It is a cynical ploy. What he wants with this is to lure hundreds of thousands of the 4 to 5 million children born here to undocumented parents into joining the armed forces to "legalize" their parents.
The influx of these youth into the armed forces will help Obama's imperialist masters maintain their "volunteer" army--for now. Otherwise, the economic cost of attracting and keeping citizen youth would be prohibitive.
Their masters, however, are not entirely happy with Obama. In his speech in San Francisco on Nov. 25, Obama suggested that "immigration reform on a large scale can be done incrementally." They disagree; they say that the reform requires passing three things at the same time: "more strict control, improving the flow of new immigrants, and legalization for the 11 million living here outside the law" (New York Times, 11/26).
Immigration reform is a big extortion scheme by the bosses. They tell us, "We will give you driver's licenses, allow you to live without being persecuted like criminals, and permission to travel to see your relatives in exchange for superexploiting you and using your children born here, and the undocumented who are still young, as cannon fodder for our imperialist wars."
We workers have another option, to organize our party, ICWP, to build a communist society and put an end to the bosses and their borders that divide us and ultimately destroy us. In a communist society, there won't be exploiting bosses, borders, or immigration agents or their lackeys and henchmen who decide about our lives. The workers themselves will decide what is best for each and every member of society. We need to win the minds of millions of workers to make this a reality.
Read and distribute Red Flag and join ICWP.

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