From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Wed, 2007-12-05 11:21
A quote from the French judge, Jean de Maillard (Vice-president of the Superior Court of Orléans, and a professor at the Institute of Political Science in Paris), 28 November 2007 [here is an English translation]:
"When two schools, a library, a police station, a garage and several other buildings on a list already forgotten are set on fire, not to mention dozens of vehicles each day, we are used to it. It has become almost a routine.
"However, the second night of Villiers-le-Bel marks an escalation that the media and the government would probably prefer to hush up, but which may be the start of a new stage: the use of firearms. In truth, the surprise is not that the rioters began to use them, but first, that they hadn't done it sooner [...] and second, that they are still confining themselves to hunting rifles and lead shot. The suburbs however have been armed for a long time with caches of quality war weapons, lethal weapons, against which the bullet-proof vests will be useless.
"In other words the situation is explosive in both meanings of the word. It seems that from one riot to the next the techniques harden, the methods become more professional and the police and gendarmes will soon have to confront, if they have not already, experts in urban guerilla warfare [...]
"I am convinced that up until now we have been lucky that the thugs and future murderers in the suburbs have not yet dared to use their fire power. I hope that the public authorities will become aware of the imminence of calamity and especially that they will finally seek solutions. I would not like to be in their shoes, for the margin of maneuverability, if there is one, will be very narrow. Yes, the perpetrators must be mercilessly punished. But repression, in the long term, solves nothing.
"And people must stop dreaming, those on the Left and the others: neighborhood police are not a panacea either. You cannot graft an ethnic police force ["police communautaire"] on a society that is this sick and torn apart, in which the members are in open rebellion against society. Police are a means, not a solution. Educators will not be useful either: you cannot cure cancer with a placebo. To shower the caids [a type of governorship, originally found in North Africa and Moorish Spain] with subsidies to buy armed peace will be the chosen way: it will provide only a short respite. Is there another solution? I don't know, and I am very happy not to be in government."
French bosses fear "civil war"
UK tightens racist immigration/labor policy
BBC -- UK bans non-EU unskilled workers
Unskilled workers from non-EU countries will be banned from taking jobs in the UK for the "foreseeable future", the government has said.
Foreign nationals who want to marry a British person and come to the UK may also have to sit an English test.
The moves come as ministers unveil details of their new points-based system for migrants.
About 12,000 unskilled migrants from non-EU countries in Africa, America and Asia came to work in the UK last year.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith set out the proposals, which come into force in 100 days' time, in a speech at the London School of Economics.
She said that immigration policy should not just be about economics but should also take into account the wider impact on society.
Italian politician urges Nazi anti-immigrant policies
Italy: Local politician urges SS-style policies against immigrants
Treviso, 5 Dec. (AKI) - A local councillor in the northern city of Treviso has called for "10 immigrants to be punished for every crime against our citizens", reviving harrowing memories of a World War II Nazi atrocity in Italy.
During a council meeting earlier this week, Giorgio Bettio said: "With immigrants, we should use the same system the [Nazi] SS used, punish 10 of them for every crime committed against an Italian citizen."
Bettio was elected as a councillor for Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League, but the party says Bettio is no longer a member.
Politicians from across the political spectrum, commentators and representatives of Italy's Jewish community have condemned Bettio's remarks. The remarks evoked memories of the notorious 1944 Ardeatine Caves massacre in Rome when Adolf Hitler ordered 10 Italians to be killed for each of 33 German soldiers killed in a partisan attack.
Parliamentarians accused Betttio of fomenting racism and asked the Italian government to formally censure him. A leader of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici described Bettio's comments as "abhorrent."
Italy's social solidarity minister Paolo Ferrero attacked the Northern League saying Bettio's remarks had shown what the party "really thinks."
"Just as the Nazis used Jews as scapegoats for the social problems of the era, there are people in Italy today who are blaming immigrants for every ill, and exploiting social fears that have a thousand causes," said Ferrero.
Treviso's mayor, Gianpaolo Gobbo said Bettio's words had been an "an absurd provocation worthy of severe reproach."
Gobbo's comments followed a request from the Italian parliament's deputy speaker, centre-left MP Pierluigi Castagnetti to Northern League's leadership to condemn Bettio's comments.
Immigration is a major issue in Italy's northeastern Veneto region, where Treviso is located, and anti-foreigner sentiment has been increasing in Veneto and elsewhere, in response to growing immigration, much of it from eastern Europe.
Some 40 towns in Veneto have recently introduced measures to keep out poor, homeless or unemployed migrants. Foreigners may only apply for residency if they have a regular job, earn at least 5,000 euros per year, have "adequate" housing and are not "socially dangerous".
More widely, many Italians would like a crackdown on immigrants, which they blame for worrying increases in crime rates as well as unemployment.
The government last month issued a decree making it easier to expel immigrants deemed a threat to public safety.
DREAM Act is racist nightmare for immigrant youth
The DREAM Act is a ruling-class Trojan Horse. Immigrant rights groups say that it provides a path for immigrant youth to higher education and citizenship. This is one more valuable lesson in a key aspect of dialectical materialism (the scientific Communist understanding of the world): how essence is more important than appearance!
In appearance, the DREAM Act does indeed provide aid for undocumented immigrant youth to go to college and get their citizenship. However, in essence this worthless piece of proposed legislation is nothing but a racist back-door draft for hundreds of thousands of these working-class youth. As Fernando Suarez, whose son Jesus Suarez del Solar died in Iraq trying to gain citizenship, points out, "I see it as sort of a draft. . . . It's immoral."
The DREAM Act has been carefully constructed to ensure that out of the hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth covered by it, only about 1 in 20 would be able to use it for a college education. The rest would be funneled into the military.
This would be great news for the bosses--which is why even Bush rallied to revive the bill before its most recent defeat--because it would help relieve an enormously over-stretched army. Challenge-Desafio in July, 2007, reported:
Stalled by the rulers' bickering, Bush made a special visit to the Senate to get them to resurrect the bill. But anyone acquainted with it, and its many last-minute amendments introduced by both parties, would conclude that the chances of the bill passing in this session of the Senate are very slim, if not impossible. Then why resurrect it?
The reason is war. The Pentagon and the liberal imperialists hope that the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, one of the bill's provisions, could pass. They are counting on it to help boost badly-needed military recruitment for wider war. Even as Bush was on his way to Washington to help revive the bill, Bill Carr, Pentagon acting deputy Undersecretary of Defense, said, "Talk is already taking place to see if at least the DREAM provision of the stalled bill can proceed." (American Forces Press Service, 6/11/07) "He said the measure should become law because it would be `good for readiness' -- especially at a time when the military...is struggling to attract high-quality recruits." (Boston Globe, 6/16)
This provision from its very inception was hailed by the rulers, their politicians like Obama, Clinton, and McCain, spokesmen like Michael O'Hanlon and Max Boot from the Council on Foreign Relations, and leaders in the pro-immigrant organizations like MAPA, Lulac and the National Council of La Raza as a "humanitarian" bill enabling "non-privileged" undocumented students to go to college, who otherwise, (because of their immigration status) would be unable to. They all ignore or downplay the bill's military aspect.
There are some 350,000 undocumented minor immigrants who according to Carr, would serve in the short run, with "the bill applicable for an estimated 750,000." (Boston Globe, 6/16) "If you have been in the U.S. school system for a number of years, then you could be eligible to enlist. And at the end of that enlistment, then you would be eligible to become a citizen" (which may very well require residency first).
To earn citizenship these youth would have to serve two years in the military or complete at least two years of college. However, "amendments to the bill would render such students ineligible for some federal aid, including Pell Grants, and require colleges to enter undocumented immigrants into the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System." (Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/30/04) To entice legal residents and (if DREAM passes) undocumented youth to join the military, Bush has issued an executive order allowing non-citizens to apply for citizenship after only one day of active duty military service. But getting it takes a lot longer. Some soldiers, forced to do more than two tours in Iraq, are still waiting for their citizenship.
Challenge-Desafio reported later in October of this year,
The Migra (Immigration Customs Enforcement — ICE) and local police have been carrying out raids against immigrant workers and their families across the U.S. Under the pretext of "deporting criminals," these agents of terror break down doors of homes at 4:00 AM with guns drawn. They also search, arrest and deport workers at their jobs. In many U.S. counties, the open racists try to pass anti-immigrant laws to force immigrants to leave. This racist attack aims to divide and terrorize our class, laying the basis for sharper future attacks on citizens and immigrants.
Meanwhile, representatives of the racist liberal bosses are "defending" their wage-slaves. Recently a Federal Judge in San Francisco temporarily halted the sending of letters to bosses telling them to fire workers with non-matching social security numbers. New York’s Governor is proposing drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants. All bosses want to exploit and oppress all workers. The liberals want loyalty to U.S. rulers.
The top bosses need low-paid, patriotic workers in the U.S., especially for war production. They also need soldiers willing to kill and die in U.S. imperialist wars. The Pentagon is pushing the Dream Act. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) plans to introduce it as part of upcoming military appropriations bills. He said, "This [Hispanic immigrants] is a potentially very recruitable group….The Dream Act will help solve the recruitment crisis we face today." (Wall Street Journal, 9/21) Only one in 20 undocumented youth are able to attend college, so the Act is primarily a military recruitment bill with a "humanitarian" cover.
In other words, the US rulers need the DREAM Act to win immigrant workers and youth to their agenda of increasing war and fascism. This includes, not least of all, the need to avoid the open reinstatement of the draft by tapping into a population of immigrant youth, ostensibly eager to gain citizenship even if it means proving their "loyalty" to the US by putting their lives on the line in its imperialist war machine. And Iraq isn't their only potential destination--they could also wind up patrolling the US-Mexico border, helping the military, Minutemen, and immigration services murder thousands of nameless "illegal immigrants" just like them.
It is perfectly understandable to see why there is such temptation to find a short-term solutions like the DREAM Act, even if it has plenty of problems. Immigrant workers, especially the undocumented, are under increasingly vicious, racist attacks by the bosses and their thugs in law enforcement. When you are trapped in a jail cell, it appears easier to fight for a bigger cell and more comfortable conditions when compared to the struggle to unite and destroy the whole prison. But this is again a matter of appearances.
It may look less difficult, but even the hardest-won reforms can be taken away again by the bosses faster than you can blink. Just like revolution, they take a lot of hard work and commitment, but unlike revolution, they don't produce the same end result. And in the meantime, while we fight for these dead-end reforms, how many more working-class lives ("immigrant" or "citizen") will be wasted in the process? In reality, the faster workers are won to understand that there is only solution to the life-and-death problems of the international working class, the faster we can halt this racist terror. That solution is to crush capitalism under the heel of international workers' power with communist revolution.
All workers and youth must fight anti-immigrant racism
Smash racist deportations, working people have no nations!
Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras!
While immigration has always been a life and death struggle for the world's workers, over the past few years the US bosses have made immigration reform a major issue. Currently, it is uncertain whether any immigration legislation will see continued debate until after the 2008 presidential election circus. However, workers and youth cannot afford to have any illusions about the racist legislation being brought to the table by both conservatives and liberals. There is no "lesser evil" when it comes to these bills. All current immigration "reform" proposals represent one side or another of the same racist, capitalist coin.
Racism has always been the cutting edge of the capitalist attack on the working class all over the world, since the conquest of the Americas and black slavery to the immigration "debates" of today. It keeps wages down and workers fighting each other for breadcrumbs. And this isn't all just in the US--in France, anti-immigrant raids and violence are sky-rocketing; the economies of Germany, Spain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries rely heavily on super-exploited "guest worker" immigrants to perform everything from menial house keeping jobs to back-breaking agricultural and industrial slave-labor. The racist bills and deportations, anti-Muslim round-ups, Minuteklan thugs, and the mass murder of immigrants on the US-Mexico border are just one manifestation of increasing anti-worker fascism around the globe.
The various immigration "reform" bills don't represent the interests of any workers, "American" or "immigrant"--only the financial and military interests of different sections of the US ruling class. Republican legislation represents the openly racist capitalists whose investments are primarily national. The liberals' proposals, like the McCain-Kennedy bill, represent the liberal racist bosses who have trillions invested abroad and a worldwide empire to rule.
But this empire is in serious trouble. As shown by Iraq, US imperialists are losing their grip on Middle Eastern oil, the lifeblood that has propped up their domination of the world for the last 40 years, both economically and militarily. Also, rival imperialists in China, Europe, Russia and Japan are challenging them for greater market share and control of oil and other strategic resources.
To stem the demise of their blood-soaked empire, the US rulers are preparing for bigger and bigger wars. That's why next year's military budget is $663 billion. But they need more than money and weapons to fight their wars--they need millions of our working class youth to fight and die to keep their profits and empire afloat, and millions more to slave for low wages and no benefits in their war industries.
That's why immigration reform ahs been such a hot issue. With the McCain-Kennedy bill, the DREAM Act, and similar legislation, the liberal US imperialists want to win immigrant workers and their 3.5 million American-born children to show their "gratitude" for this country. How? By "patriotically" working under racist conditions and joining the military to kill, and be killed by, their working-class brothers and sisters in other countries to protect the profits of the rich.
We the working class--workers, students and soldiers, "immigrants" and "citizens" the world over--have no stake in the imperialists' genocidal wars, or their source: capitalist exploitation. We, and only we, who produce all value, have the power to change the world--not by voting for capitalist politicians, or supporting one racist law over another, but by organizing. Organizing workers in the factories, students in the schools and soldiers in the bosses' armies; uniting women and men, black, white, Latino, Arab, Asian and workers of all "race" to smash the racist profit system with communist revolution.
The bosses hate communism and tell us that it was a "failure" from Russia to China. But the real failure is capitalism, the murderous economic system that continues to enslave workers and youth around the world. Communism--a system that has never before existed--will eliminate these bosses, along with their racism, sexism, wages, markets, and profit wars. Then we will share the fruits of our labor, giving from each according to our commitment, to each according to our need.
Under communism, their will be no nations, borders or races to divide us. The capitalists, in their schools and media, will tell you it's only a dream. But we already know that for billions of workers everywhere, capitalism is worse than a dream--it's a nightmare! We owe it to ourselves, our forbearers and our children to fight for a world far better than this one. You're already part of the strongest army in the world: the giant red army of the international working class. Join your brothers and sisters around the world in Progressive Labor Party and fight for communist revolution! Help us make that better world a reality!
Lucha organizes "Immigration Week" on campus
11/12/07 -- Lucha, one of the groups central to taking on the Minuteklan last year on campus, kicked off its Immigration Week events tonight with a candlelight vigil at 9pm. The event, scheduled to coincide with the nightly 9pm vigils in support of the student hunger strikers, drew a sizable crowd of at least 100 people, despite the cold and rain.
Many students, faculty and others spoke, make demands ranging from reform of core curriculum to include more ethnic studies, to more radical calls to oppose conservative and liberal immigration policies alike. One young speaker identified himself as an undocumented immigrant, and told the crowd of how he learned just recently that after repeated appeals, his remaining immediate family in the US was now going to be deported.
PLP handed out leaflets about opposing anti-immigrant racism, and copies of Challenge-Desafio. One PLer also took a turn on the microphone, introduced himself as a student, member of PL and the international working class, and a proud Communist, stating that "the capitalists, conservative and liberal, want to pave the way to wider wars, bigger profits, and increasing fascism--and they're going to do it with the dead bodies of thousands of immigrant workers and their children."
He stressed that workers of all "races" need to unite to smash the whole rotten, capitalist system. "How long will we wait [until we finally get rid of the entire system] while we fight for breadcrumbs from these capitalist parasites?" After saluting Lucha for organizing the event, as well as the hunger strikers whose tents were close by, the comrade ended with the chant, "smash racist deportations, working people have no nations!"
While the politics at the event ranged from the predictably nationalist--there were several invocations of the Young Lords, as well as one former member present--to the more openly revolutionary, PLP raised sharp political points and the event energetic and moving.
Lucha will be hosting a series of events throughout the course of the week, including speakers and film showings. A particularly important event, on Wednesday from 12-4pm at Low Plaza, will be about the DREAM Act--which Lucha supports in their literature. PLP believes it is critical that all working people oppose this proposed legislation designed to stave off a real return of the draft by creating a back-door draft for undocumented immigrant youth wishing to gain US citizenship. The act offers a college education track to citizenship as well, however, only 1 in 20 youth would be eligible for the higher education option. The rest would simply be sent to fight and die in oil war after oil war. Supporting the DREAM Act is a fatal error and plays directly into the hands of reactionary forces of war and developing fascism.