Illegal Immigration [or, How the International Workers Movement Lost its Balls and went to High Tea]

A recent article in the Socialist Labor Party 's The Militant tries to accuse those against illegal immigration as being racist and/or without conscience. They are just one in a long list of left organizations who have successfully framed immigration as a race/humanitarian issue. The Militant article sites some early Socialist Party officials who spread fears of Yellow and Black perils across the US and counters them with selected quotes by Mr Lenin. As a Socialist myself, I am a bit baffled by the continued framing of immigration as one of race or even humanitarianism. I am baffled too with how foreign government's, like Mexico's, is allowed to prattle about rights of migrants when they have none at home. This is liberalism witha RED COAT. A few generations ago, the workers movement was international. It was Socialist. It was Communist. And it was without borders. It was also bloody. But the Imperial powers struck a deal with labor, in exchange for recognition of their unions, some of its demands, the unions would stop wildcat strikes and weed out socialists and communists from their ranks. Just prior to the FDR administration, wildcats spread across the country because union bosses had lost touch with their base. Socialism, even in the US, was threateningly on the horizon. Bu to stop the bloody class war, a peace treaty was made. Irony of ironies, even the British Labour Party threw out communists! What they gained in legitimacy and invitations to Buckingham Palace, they lost in being a voice for workers, who exist beyond political borders. Consequence? Workers in Mexico, the largest source of our illegals, are framed not as abandoned, landless workers but as pathetic cogs who must be cared for in the slave labor they only qualify for in the US. Overwhelmingly - but not exclusively, Mexican illegals arrive with 3rd grade OR BELOW educations. They are unskilled, uneducated. Professional contractors - their likely employers - lament their incapacity to command basic [to us] math concepts necessary for landscaping. So, these poor workers can mow and pick, pick and mow. A traditional socialist approach to these workers would have been to organize them AT HOME to change their governments, secure labor and land rights [which they have none in Mexico, not since Mexican President Salinas signed away their land rights in 1985]. I suggest our US, Canadian, and First World Labor Unions provide seed money to the Third World to enable their activists to organize, petition, and to the extent that voting changes anything, have voting drives. Immigrants usually want to stay home and march for their rights, wave their flags, demand recognition: why must they come to the US to do that?