Students face 15 years in prison fro saving lives of undocumented immigrants

A non profit 501(c) organization can apply for a federal grant for money to help them.
Grants can always be denied,
but just try,
you might get the help you need to help them.
http://www.grants.gov
$400 BILLION available

I sent a letter today to the D.A. who is prosecuting these two humanitarians. I'm no Serial Letter Writer, but this news SO infuriated me. I might volunteer in Arizona this summer or next year. Let's do all we can in solidarity with the college kids, the immigrants, and HUMANS EVERYWHERE.

The Death of Migrants...Humanitarian Aid?---

The Death of Migrants...Humanitarian Aid?

By Justin Barker for the http://www.Abolitionist-Online.com

The US Mexico Border is nearly 2,000 miles long, but when in the 90's crossings in California and Texas were shut down with miles of fences and secured with Border Patrol guards, it left Arizona as the only unlocked door. Only wide reaching deserts and scorching heats keep the impoverished south and rich north separated. Economic forces and desperation have forced thousands of people and families to risk their lives, crossing this terrain, entering the US for work.

Last year alone 273 people were found dead in the Arizona Desert. Now Arizona locals are coming together in response to this crisis. A coalition of individuals and organisations called No More Deaths are stepping up and taking direct action to help migrants in need.

Each summer hundreds of volunteers scour the desert to help people that the Border Patrol consider moving targets, but in July 2005 No More Death volunteers Shanti Sellz and Danial Struass became targets themselves. Both 23, Sellz and Strauss were arrested by the Border Patrol for medically evacuating 3 people in critical condition from the 105 degree desert. If convicted they could both spend 15 years in jail. Is humanitarian aid now illegal in the US? We talk to Danial Strauss.

JB: There has been a lot of talk about the US/ Mexican Border of late....What is the situation like from your perspective?

DS: It's really interesting to look at the US Mexico Border in that it is really the main centre for the US migration crisis, everything comes to a front right there. In these small towns along the border which really don't have much else but immigrants crossing the desert there. Ten years ago all these areas in Arizona saw nothing in terms of immigration, but is just in the last ten years when these border policies have changed to a more militarized border that the flow of migrants has moved from safe rural areas to the heart of the desert, mostly in Arizona. It really has become like a War zone, helicopters flying everywhere, border patrol armed all over the place. It has really changed these communities. Its amazing and completely scary the kind of things that we see in the desert on a daily basis.

JB:What's are you seeing out there?

DS: Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are throughout this entire country. Any town you go to you can find immigrants from Mexico, but no one really knows how they got there and what kind of heroing type situations they had to go through just to get in this country to work and reunite with their families. Last summer temperatures were over one hundred degrees for 45 straight days and migrants are walking an upwards 40 or 50 miles, until they have crossed the border where they get picked up and that's a really long distance for people in that kind of heat.

They're crossing with large groups often with an upwards of a hundred people and they are paying up to $2,000 per person to make the trip. There is a lot of pressure on the coyotes, those are the smugglers, to get that whole group across. What we see happening is migrants will come across with a large group and they will fall or twist their ankle or they'll succumb to the heat and they won't be able to keep up with that group and the coyote will leave them behind in the desert. With no idea where they are, no food, no water - these types of situations become serious really fast. It can be just a matter of hours from once you run out of food and water, from when you become severely dehydrated and suffer severe heat exhaustion to just basically sitting down and waiting to die.

JB:The desert is a ruthless place, a lot of people have never experienced that. What is it like out there?

DS:The heat is debilitating. I think you have to drink about, while walking, a gallon of water a day. Migrants are walking an upwards of four days and they are carrying less then one gallon of water so from the onset they are dehydrated and with heat of 115 degrees, their brain is burning and their feet burn, they are not wearing proper shoes and blisters you see on peoples feet are not the average blisters - they are blisters from toe to heal, all the skin removed.

If you were are home, you could just sit on your couch and heal, but when you're in the middle of the desert where you have to walk two days in either direction to seek help--that blister is going to be deadly because if you can't walk then your not going to survive.

JB: The people who do survive the trek arrive to even more hostile conditions in the US. Would you say that we have apartheid here with the governments treatment of immigrants?

DS: The government treats people in such an inhumane fashion. There is a discrepancy between what the labor needs are in the United States and the economic ties between the US and Mexico and what our immigration policies are. It is totally dehumanizing that people are crossing the border in this fashion, coming to the US to work a job that they are being recruited for, jobs that are available here, jobs that US citizens don't want. The visa system is so messed up and the whole immigration system is so broken that people are forced to make this kind of journey. These are jobs that are here, these are jobs that are available.

If you were to go into the desert and see the kind of things people are doing to come here to work in restaurants where you eat, clean your house, do all these bottom class lower class jobs, I think people would be shocked and they would want the system to change in some way, so that people could come and stay in a legal fashion.

I think that it would not only be better for the migrants but I think it would be better for the government in the long term. They talk about national security and that is their big thing. That's their reason why they put billions of dollars into the US border security even though its proven unsuccessful over the last decade. The number of migrants hasn't gone down, the number of people making it into the country hasn't gone down, the only difference is thousands of people are dying.

JB:Clearly, current border enforcement has failed, thousands of people are dying. What is the alternative?

DS: The alternative is going to have to come from Washington through legislation that is comprehensive, that will allow for enough visas for people who want to come and work and also allows for unification of families for migrants who are here without their families and provide for mobility in the labor force.

A lot of people who work in this country are on visas that tie them to a certain company and when that happens they are treated unfairly. Their human rights are violated because they have no say, they really have no legal backing behind them because they know even through they are here with a visa all it's going to take is a call from their company - their boss to immigration - and they will be deported.

JB: It seems most Americans have completely failed to recognise the root cause of this migration and why people migrate.

DS: It's purely economic reasons. Those kinds of huge economic forces are not something that is going to be changed by putting more border patrol agents on the border. You could do anything, spend trillions of dollars tightening the borders but those economic factors are so strong that people are still going to come to this country to work, they will just have to come up with different means of getting here.

JB:Now these migrants have an ally. What is No More Deaths doing there?

DS:What we do is go out on patrol, look for people who are distressed. Everyone we find is in some sort of medical distress. They are on some part of that severity scale. Last year we came into contact with over 3,000 migrants in a three-month period. We know where migrants tend to cross and we drive the main roads through the areas and walk on the trails and everyday we find people. Last summer, 68 medical evacuations took place and everyone else received food and water. The blisters on their feet were cared to and at least given some sort of orientation of where they were and how far they had to go.

JB: So last July you are in the desert, assisting these people that have blisters, are dying, are in need of water and you became a target of the Border Patrol. What happened?

DS: I can't go into details, but I can tell you for every encounter with a migrant No More Deaths follows a strict protocol. No More Deaths is trying to work within the law to make a difference in peoples' lives. For everyone we encounter, everyone gets food and water and everyone gets whatever medical attention they can in the field.

Whether that's caring for blisters, treating headaches from heat exhaustion and things along those lines. For the severe cases people that need medical attention No More Death volunteers will access people in the field and then we will call a doctor or a nurse who will give us the medical go ahead as to whether to evacuate that person to a medical facility in Tucson or whether we need to call the Border Patrol which could possibly arrive faster. Most of the time they don't. Otherwise we dial 911 and we let the medical people make that decision.

The day Shanti and I were arrested we had found a group of migrants, three of which were extremely ill and needed rapid medical attention. We called the doctor and nurse and they told us the best course of action would be to bring people to the medical facility in Tucson and that's what we were doing when we were arrested.

JB: So essentially humanitarian aid is illegal in the US, is what they're saying?

DS: Right. The interesting thing is we are not a civil disobedience group. We are a group that tries to work within the law. For three years leaders of the organisation had had a whole series of meetings with Border Patrol agents to discuss our protocols and to tell them exactly what we are doing because everything we were doing was out in the open. We wanted them to know what we doing. The Border Patrol recognises that there's a human rights crisis that's going on and they will recognise something needs to be done because for the most part it's them who are finding the thousands of bodies every year.

The border patrol approved out protocol. For years they said as long as you only transport people for medical reasons, for purely humanitarian reasons then we will not arrest you and we will support what you are doing. In 2005 a new secretariat came into office in Tucson. He also approved our protocol but then wound up arresting Shanti and I then prosecuting us.

When you look at what the actual law states, it says, it's illegal to transport someone in the furtherance of their illegal presence in the country. Now our legal interpretation of that and what the Border Patrols was, but now it's changed, 'furtherance' is a vague statement and it's vague for a reason. There is a certain type of transportation that is right and just and necessary, for example transportation for medical purposes. The transportation to save someone's life is not the furtherance of their presence; it's only the furtherance of saving their life.

JB: What were you charged with?

DS: We were charged with transportation of an illegal immigrant and conspiracy to transport. The two of those together carry a maximum of 15 years.

JB: Where does the case stand now? What's next?

DS: There is a whole bunch of pretrial motions we need to go through before we get a trail date and go to trial. We're appealing the judge's decision not to accept our motion to dismiss and there's a bunch of other legal stuff that has to happen. We are thinking that hopefully the case will be dropped but if not we will be going to trial sometime in April.

JB: Why did you join this movement, what drives you?

DS: I studied immigration issues at college. I have a Sociology major focused on immigration and during one of my classes I took a trip to the US/Mexico Border and spent ten days there speaking with migrants, following the migrant trail northward, speaking to humanitarian organisations and just seeing the horrific things that people are going through to make it into this country. I was moved to do something to help people. No More Deaths provides a direct way to save peoples lives and make an impact on peoples lives. It's still a band-aid for the whole issue but hopefully we are making steps towards changing policies.

JB: The US Border Patrol is considered one of the most corrupt of government agencies. Rape, murder, molestation, excessive force. Obviously you have experienced being arrested by the border patrol. Have you experienced any other corruption out there?

DS: First hand no. We don't have a lot of contact with the border patrol. In terms of what I saw while I was in their detention facility is it's an extremely inhumane, unjust form of law enforcement that really does not take peoples' human rights into account whatsoever. These immigrants are from another country, they don't have documents and because they don't have documents they don't have any rights.

Border Patrol says that medical assistance's is one of their priorities but we know from what we have seen in the field that it is really not. So many migrants have been sick and dying and left on the side of the road just to be passed by the border patrol vehicles. They don't want to stop. They would rather pick up a group of ten then one sole person, but that one sole person is about to die. We've seen migrants thrown over the other side of the border with broken legs. I think it's pretty sick.



JB: Earth First! in Arizona came out in support of you and Shanti. They drew parallels to a recent case where two Earth First! activists were charged with feloniesfor attempting to save the lives of mountain lions who were being hunted by Game and Fish. What happening to this country?


DS: (Laughs) I wish I knew. I think it's shameful the government would prosecute cases like this. Putting politics over saving lives. The country is moving right, everyone's scared of terrorists and feel that our border needs to be safer and more secure but no one is looking at the big picture. It's US policies that have created this whole situation in the first place. Fifteen years ago people weren't dying in the desert and there was no major issue with immigration but things have changed and it unfortunate.

Our goal in the end is hopefully to work with the government and work together to save lives and I think that's when we will be most effective as of now. Private citizens taking action on their own is powerful because the government is clearly not doing enough and that needs to change.

JB: Good luck, our thoughts and love are with you and Shanti and all of the people working hard out there! What can people do if they want to get involved and they are not in Arizona?

DS: They can go to http://www.nomoredeaths.org and there is a bunch of actions you can take from donating money for the cause for next summer to get volunteers down there to the border looking for people in distress. Also write a letter to US Attorney, Paul Charldon. He's the head attorney in Arizona and pressure him to drop the charges against Shanti and me.

The Death of Migrants...Humanitarian Aid?

By Justin Barker for the http://www.Abolitionist-Online.com

The US Mexico Border is nearly 2,000 miles long, but when in the 90's crossings in California and Texas were shut down with miles of fences and secured with Border Patrol guards, it left Arizona as the only unlocked door. Only wide reaching deserts and scorching heats keep the impoverished south and rich north separated. Economic forces and desperation have forced thousands of people and families to risk their lives, crossing this terrain, entering the US for work.

Last year alone 273 people were found dead in the Arizona Desert. Now Arizona locals are coming together in response to this crisis. A coalition of individuals and organisations called No More Deaths are stepping up and taking direct action to help migrants in need.

Each summer hundreds of volunteers scour the desert to help people that the Border Patrol consider moving targets, but in July 2005 No More Death volunteers Shanti Sellz and Danial Struass became targets themselves. Both 23, Sellz and Strauss were arrested by the Border Patrol for medically evacuating 3 people in critical condition from the 105 degree desert. If convicted they could both spend 15 years in jail. Is humanitarian aid now illegal in the US? We talk to Danial Strauss.

JB: There has been a lot of talk about the US/ Mexican Border of late....What is the situation like from your perspective?

DS: It's really interesting to look at the US Mexico Border in that it is really the main centre for the US migration crisis, everything comes to a front right there. In these small towns along the border which really don't have much else but immigrants crossing the desert there. Ten years ago all these areas in Arizona saw nothing in terms of immigration, but is just in the last ten years when these border policies have changed to a more militarized border that the flow of migrants has moved from safe rural areas to the heart of the desert, mostly in Arizona. It really has become like a War zone, helicopters flying everywhere, border patrol armed all over the place. It has really changed these communities. Its amazing and completely scary the kind of things that we see in the desert on a daily basis.

JB:What's are you seeing out there?

DS: Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are throughout this entire country. Any town you go to you can find immigrants from Mexico, but no one really knows how they got there and what kind of heroing type situations they had to go through just to get in this country to work and reunite with their families. Last summer temperatures were over one hundred degrees for 45 straight days and migrants are walking an upwards 40 or 50 miles, until they have crossed the border where they get picked up and that's a really long distance for people in that kind of heat.

They're crossing with large groups often with an upwards of a hundred people and they are paying up to $2,000 per person to make the trip. There is a lot of pressure on the coyotes, those are the smugglers, to get that whole group across. What we see happening is migrants will come across with a large group and they will fall or twist their ankle or they'll succumb to the heat and they won't be able to keep up with that group and the coyote will leave them behind in the desert. With no idea where they are, no food, no water - these types of situations become serious really fast. It can be just a matter of hours from once you run out of food and water, from when you become severely dehydrated and suffer severe heat exhaustion to just basically sitting down and waiting to die.

JB:The desert is a ruthless place, a lot of people have never experienced that. What is it like out there?

DS:The heat is debilitating. I think you have to drink about, while walking, a gallon of water a day. Migrants are walking an upwards of four days and they are carrying less then one gallon of water so from the onset they are dehydrated and with heat of 115 degrees, their brain is burning and their feet burn, they are not wearing proper shoes and blisters you see on peoples feet are not the average blisters - they are blisters from toe to heal, all the skin removed.

If you were are home, you could just sit on your couch and heal, but when you're in the middle of the desert where you have to walk two days in either direction to seek help--that blister is going to be deadly because if you can't walk then your not going to survive.

JB: The people who do survive the trek arrive to even more hostile conditions in the US. Would you say that we have apartheid here with the governments treatment of immigrants?

DS: The government treats people in such an inhumane fashion. There is a discrepancy between what the labor needs are in the United States and the economic ties between the US and Mexico and what our immigration policies are. It is totally dehumanizing that people are crossing the border in this fashion, coming to the US to work a job that they are being recruited for, jobs that are available here, jobs that US citizens don't want. The visa system is so messed up and the whole immigration system is so broken that people are forced to make this kind of journey. These are jobs that are here, these are jobs that are available.

If you were to go into the desert and see the kind of things people are doing to come here to work in restaurants where you eat, clean your house, do all these bottom class lower class jobs, I think people would be shocked and they would want the system to change in some way, so that people could come and stay in a legal fashion.

I think that it would not only be better for the migrants but I think it would be better for the government in the long term. They talk about national security and that is their big thing. That's their reason why they put billions of dollars into the US border security even though its proven unsuccessful over the last decade. The number of migrants hasn't gone down, the number of people making it into the country hasn't gone down, the only difference is thousands of people are dying.

JB:Clearly, current border enforcement has failed, thousands of people are dying. What is the alternative?

DS: The alternative is going to have to come from Washington through legislation that is comprehensive, that will allow for enough visas for people who want to come and work and also allows for unification of families for migrants who are here without their families and provide for mobility in the labor force.

A lot of people who work in this country are on visas that tie them to a certain company and when that happens they are treated unfairly. Their human rights are violated because they have no say, they really have no legal backing behind them because they know even through they are here with a visa all it's going to take is a call from their company - their boss to immigration - and they will be deported.

JB: It seems most Americans have completely failed to recognise the root cause of this migration and why people migrate.

DS: It's purely economic reasons. Those kinds of huge economic forces are not something that is going to be changed by putting more border patrol agents on the border. You could do anything, spend trillions of dollars tightening the borders but those economic factors are so strong that people are still going to come to this country to work, they will just have to come up with different means of getting here.

JB:Now these migrants have an ally. What is No More Deaths doing there?

DS:What we do is go out on patrol, look for people who are distressed. Everyone we find is in some sort of medical distress. They are on some part of that severity scale. Last year we came into contact with over 3,000 migrants in a three-month period. We know where migrants tend to cross and we drive the main roads through the areas and walk on the trails and everyday we find people. Last summer, 68 medical evacuations took place and everyone else received food and water. The blisters on their feet were cared to and at least given some sort of orientation of where they were and how far they had to go.

JB: So last July you are in the desert, assisting these people that have blisters, are dying, are in need of water and you became a target of the Border Patrol. What happened?

DS: I can't go into details, but I can tell you for every encounter with a migrant No More Deaths follows a strict protocol. No More Deaths is trying to work within the law to make a difference in peoples' lives. For everyone we encounter, everyone gets food and water and everyone gets whatever medical attention they can in the field.

Whether that's caring for blisters, treating headaches from heat exhaustion and things along those lines. For the severe cases people that need medical attention No More Death volunteers will access people in the field and then we will call a doctor or a nurse who will give us the medical go ahead as to whether to evacuate that person to a medical facility in Tucson or whether we need to call the Border Patrol which could possibly arrive faster. Most of the time they don't. Otherwise we dial 911 and we let the medical people make that decision.

The day Shanti and I were arrested we had found a group of migrants, three of which were extremely ill and needed rapid medical attention. We called the doctor and nurse and they told us the best course of action would be to bring people to the medical facility in Tucson and that's what we were doing when we were arrested.

JB: So essentially humanitarian aid is illegal in the US, is what they're saying?

DS: Right. The interesting thing is we are not a civil disobedience group. We are a group that tries to work within the law. For three years leaders of the organisation had had a whole series of meetings with Border Patrol agents to discuss our protocols and to tell them exactly what we are doing because everything we were doing was out in the open. We wanted them to know what we doing. The Border Patrol recognises that there's a human rights crisis that's going on and they will recognise something needs to be done because for the most part it's them who are finding the thousands of bodies every year.

The border patrol approved out protocol. For years they said as long as you only transport people for medical reasons, for purely humanitarian reasons then we will not arrest you and we will support what you are doing. In 2005 a new secretariat came into office in Tucson. He also approved our protocol but then wound up arresting Shanti and I then prosecuting us.

When you look at what the actual law states, it says, it's illegal to transport someone in the furtherance of their illegal presence in the country. Now our legal interpretation of that and what the Border Patrols was, but now it's changed, 'furtherance' is a vague statement and it's vague for a reason. There is a certain type of transportation that is right and just and necessary, for example transportation for medical purposes. The transportation to save someone's life is not the furtherance of their presence; it's only the furtherance of saving their life.

JB: What were you charged with?

DS: We were charged with transportation of an illegal immigrant and conspiracy to transport. The two of those together carry a maximum of 15 years.

JB: Where does the case stand now? What's next?

DS: There is a whole bunch of pretrial motions we need to go through before we get a trail date and go to trial. We're appealing the judge's decision not to accept our motion to dismiss and there's a bunch of other legal stuff that has to happen. We are thinking that hopefully the case will be dropped but if not we will be going to trial sometime in April.

JB: Why did you join this movement, what drives you?

DS: I studied immigration issues at college. I have a Sociology major focused on immigration and during one of my classes I took a trip to the US/Mexico Border and spent ten days there speaking with migrants, following the migrant trail northward, speaking to humanitarian organisations and just seeing the horrific things that people are going through to make it into this country. I was moved to do something to help people. No More Deaths provides a direct way to save peoples lives and make an impact on peoples lives. It's still a band-aid for the whole issue but hopefully we are making steps towards changing policies.

JB: The US Border Patrol is considered one of the most corrupt of government agencies. Rape, murder, molestation, excessive force. Obviously you have experienced being arrested by the border patrol. Have you experienced any other corruption out there?

DS: First hand no. We don't have a lot of contact with the border patrol. In terms of what I saw while I was in their detention facility is it's an extremely inhumane, unjust form of law enforcement that really does not take peoples' human rights into account whatsoever. These immigrants are from another country, they don't have documents and because they don't have documents they don't have any rights.

Border Patrol says that medical assistance's is one of their priorities but we know from what we have seen in the field that it is really not. So many migrants have been sick and dying and left on the side of the road just to be passed by the border patrol vehicles. They don't want to stop. They would rather pick up a group of ten then one sole person, but that one sole person is about to die. We've seen migrants thrown over the other side of the border with broken legs. I think it's pretty sick.



JB: Earth First! in Arizona came out in support of you and Shanti. They drew parallels to a recent case where two Earth First! activists were charged with feloniesfor attempting to save the lives of mountain lions who were being hunted by Game and Fish. What happening to this country?


DS: (Laughs) I wish I knew. I think it's shameful the government would prosecute cases like this. Putting politics over saving lives. The country is moving right, everyone's scared of terrorists and feel that our border needs to be safer and more secure but no one is looking at the big picture. It's US policies that have created this whole situation in the first place. Fifteen years ago people weren't dying in the desert and there was no major issue with immigration but things have changed and it unfortunate.

Our goal in the end is hopefully to work with the government and work together to save lives and I think that's when we will be most effective as of now. Private citizens taking action on their own is powerful because the government is clearly not doing enough and that needs to change.

JB: Good luck, our thoughts and love are with you and Shanti and all of the people working hard out there! What can people do if they want to get involved and they are not in Arizona?

DS: They can go to http://www.nomoredeaths.org and there is a bunch of actions you can take from donating money for the cause for next summer to get volunteers down there to the border looking for people in distress. Also write a letter to US Attorney, Paul Charldon. He's the head attorney in Arizona and pressure him to drop the charges against Shanti and me.

Mexican workers lead united fight-back



Some of us are ’illegal’ and some are not wanted.
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on.
It’s six hundred miles to that Mexican border.
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita.
Adiós mis amigos, Jesús y Maria.
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane.
All they will call you will be
Deportee.

-- Woody Guthrie



America’s best-known and best-loved proletarian troubadour penned and sang those words in the late 1940s, chronicling the plight of Mexican workers selling their labour power for a pittance in the fruit orchards, vineyards and lettuce fields of California, all the while hounded as ‘illegals’ by the same capitalist class that was reaping superprofits from their underpaid and back-breaking toil.

In qualitative terms, little has really changed since then, despite a militant, sustained and genuinely heroic organising drive by the United Farm Workers’ union towards the end of the 1960s and into the ’70s. Scores of agricultural workers and union activists were imprisoned, beaten up or lost their lives in that epic class struggle and the farm bosses were ultimately forced to recognise the UFW, but only for those with papers.

US capital has continued to benefit from the fact that the ‘illegals’ – generally referred to in progressive American circles as ‘undocumented workers’ – can be paid well below the minimum wage under threat of expulsion from the country.

At the same time, expulsion is more than just a threat. Despite their thirst for cheap labour, the monopoly capitalists and their state have been prepared to placate the reactionary anti-immigrant prejudices of petit-bourgeois ‘middle America’ by conducting periodic round-ups and deportations of foreign labourers, in the agricultural sector and beyond, who have been found not to have work or residency permits.

After all, with an estimated 12 million undocumented workers living in the United States, there is no dearth of people to replace those slung out of the place. Hypocrisy? Yes. Cynicism? Certainly. The normal and expected behaviour of a class whose very existence depends on sucking the blood of others? Definitely.

The attentive reader will notice that we’ve begun talking of ‘foreign’, rather than just Mexican, undocumented workers here. That’s because the situation also affects Puerto Ricans in New York, the Chinese in San Francisco, Koreans in Los Angeles, Poles in Chicago … and the list goes on. The only group of undocumented workers seemingly immune from state persecution have been the gusanos [worms], the Cubans of Miami, whose treason against their socialist homeland must be seen to be rewarded by a grateful Uncle Sam.

Traditionally, most ‘illegal’ immigrants have, for obvious reasons, been reluctant to stick their heads above the parapet. Why, then, have the last weeks and months seen an unprecedented display of publicly-expressed anger and coordinated struggle involving literally millions of undocumented workers and their allies and supporters?

The answer is to be found in a draconian piece of legislation currently working its way through the US Congress – HR 4437 or, to name it after the quasi-fascist Republican congressman who introduced it, the Sensenbrenner Bill.

As Proletarian went to press it was not yet clear whether this bill, which originated in the [lower] House of Representatives, was going to be ratified by the [upper] Senate. A slightly less all-encompassing alternative was being considered by legislators from the more liberal, East Coast, “old money” sections of the ruling class, led by surviving Kennedy brother Senator Ted.

Both houses of congress, roughly equivalent to the British bourgeoisie’s Commons and Lords, have to vote in favour of any new legislation. Then the president must sign it into law, and no doubt George W Bush (who, in his former role as Texas governor, consigned 20 times more Hispanics than whites to death row – without even broaching the subject of African-Americans!) has been practising how to spell his name just for this auspicious occasion.

If brought into law, HR 4437, officially named the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Bill, will have a number of effects – all of them thoroughly reactionary.

It will make all undocumented workers ‘felons’, the highest category of criminal in the US judicial system, on a par with murderers, kidnappers and rapists -- but not the perpetrators of imperialist genocide in Iraq and elsewhere, who somehow seem to have escaped classification by the Justice Department. The bill will accord this same criminal status to any teachers, clergy, trade unionists, social workers and even family members who work with ‘illegals’. Rather than just being chucked out of the US as before, traumatic enough in itself, undocumented workers will do quite a bit of porridge before being ejected, but at least they’ll have the companionship of their friends sharing a cell with them.

The proposed law will call for a wall to be built along the entire 1,800-mile length of the US-Mexico border. There’s already a fence in most places, but wire-cutters are pretty readily available, even in a Mexico that has been kept poor and underdeveloped by the avarice of US imperialism. The US zionist lobby – who needless to say support the bill to a man -- are already wetting themselves with joy at the prospect of the Bush regime replicating Israel’s own illegal barrier in occupied Palestine. Vindication and international credibility at last? We think not!

Heavily-armed National Guard troops, roughly equivalent to the Territorial Army in Britain, will be deployed by each of the US states facing Mexico to complement the existing government-funded thugs of the US Border Patrol, with the net effect of thoroughly militarising the frontier.

And all local and state police forces in US border areas (ie, in southern parts of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas) will be empowered for the first time to arrest anyone they “have reasonable cause to believe” may be without documents. Quite obviously, this will vastly increase the ‘stop and search’ of anyone with a brown skin and scare immigrants away from reporting crimes committed against them.

The term ‘un-American’ was originally coined as part of the US monopoly bourgeoisie’s attack on progressives of all shades during the McCarthyite anti-Communist witchhunts of the 1940s and ’50s. In the context of the unprecedented and ongoing immigrant-led protests against the Sensenbrenner Bill (of which more in the paragraphs that follow), the perceived meaning of this famous expression has been turned on its head.

“Racism and imperialism are un-American”, read placards carried on a demonstration in San Francisco which was justifiably characterised by organisers as “huge, united and in no mood to back down”. And, quoting the words of poet Emma Lazarus inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, a 20-foot high banner in New York screamed: “Give me your tired, your poor, your hungry, yearning to breathe free!”

The mass protests began in the run-up to May Day 2006, with marches held in all of the main US cities plus a never-before-seen number of smaller towns throughout the country.

‘No to the Bill!’, ‘Equality for all Americans!’, ‘General Amnesty for the Undocumented!’ These were – and are – the key slogans characterising what has become a protest movement of enormous proportions.

One of the many great ironies of life in capitalist America is that 1 May is not officially celebrated there and nobody gets the day off. This despite the fact that International Workers’ Day originated in late 19th-century Chicago as part of the militant struggle for an eight-hour day.

In fact, the American bourgeoisie’s ‘Labor Day’ in September was deliberately established as a sop, as a means of distracting the attention of the US proletariat from the significance of May Day and of establishing a ‘tradition’ of eating hotdogs and corn-on-the-cob, and playing American football in the local park – rather than challenging the existing mode of production and actively organising to get rid of it.

This attempted – and hitherto largely successful – indoctrination and pacification notwithstanding, May Day 2006 in America became a non-working day, declared not by the bourgeois state but by the proletariat itself. For the first time, literally millions of working-class people took to the streets.

Irrespective of race, national background or immigration status, workers participated in genuinely mass demonstrations – the largest in Los Angeles at close to 500,000 people – and militant opposition to HR 4437 was the main focus.

Of equal, if not even greater, significance was the accompanying walkout and boycott organised nationally by a more-or-less ad hoc coalition of mainly Latin American immigrant rights groups. Under the slogan ‘A Day Without Immigrants’, foreign-born workers, their families and their supporters showed the US ruling class how much the country’s economy has come to rely on the contribution of immigrant labour and immigrant purchasing power. (“Somos productores; somos consumidores” – We’re producers; we’re consumers.)

And that power, the cooperation of the wage slave without whom capitalism can no longer hope to exist, was extensively withdrawn on 1 May. Immigrant workers took an unofficial day off, ethnic minority and immigrant consumers chose not to go shopping – for anything – and students at all levels (from primary schools to post-graduate university courses) decided that expressing solidarity and building a united front on the street was more important than remaining in the classroom to learn the dates of presidents or work out how to scam their way to an ultimately meaningless master’s degree.

There has also been a symbolically and directly internationalist aspect to the campaign against this new immigration clampdown. The US-Mexican border has been physically closed down twice – once by a sit-down on the part of US protestors and twice by workers on the other side of the frontier, where the threatened use of Molotov cocktails gave pause even to the US Border Patrol.

Of all the domestic US analyses of these recent upheavals, the following is the most worthy of quotation. It comes from Voice of Revolution, journal of the US Marxist-Leninist Organisation:

“Across the United States, workers in their millions took centre stage on May Day, united as one and fighting for rights. A powerful internationalist spirit was felt in these massive actions, in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City and another 60 cities nationwide. … This cannot help but demonstrate the power of the proletariat – brown, black and white, Latino, European and African-American. Harnessed under the leadership and guidance of a Marxist-Leninist party with genuine and growing links to the masses, that power would be magnified a hundredfold. And the issue would no longer be greater or fewer rights within the framework of capitalism; it would be putting proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat firmly on the historical – and practical – agenda.”

What an article!! For anyone who has exposed the corruption that exists in the political bowels of America, it is difficult to imagine how diabolical and demon driven with their unlimited police force the elite really are. This article is a must-read for anyone with any sense of concern on what is happening within America.