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CRP en el Perú

Meeting Campaign against immigration controls
15th September 2009

I am a member of the Bolshevik Group, in France, which is part of an international gathering named CoReP (Permanent Revolution Collective).

My organization has taken part to the support of the fight of the “sans-papiers”, illegal workers in France.

What I want to talk of, and what we all are here for, is the overexploitation and harassment made upon the immigrant workers. Being less paid than average workers, they are used as a pressure on the value of the labor force, as a reserve army in that sense. They are useful to the bourgeoisie only providing that they can be used as a labor force. Here the concept of chosen immigration makes sense. This is the reason in most of the imperialist countries, including Britain and France, the pressure against the immigrants has been stronger and stronger. In France, it has been the case for at least the last 25 years, and much more in the recent period. The conditions for become a legal immigrant have been tightened more and more, whatever the government was led by the Socialist Party or by the main bourgeois party UMP.

The period for acquiring French nationality became longer and longer, restrictions were taken against the ability of families to live together, the regulation on living conditions became stronger, there has been a huge increase of daily controls (mainly on the Blacks and the Arabs), a restriction on the right of asylum…

Since 2002, the laws on immigration are more and more oppressive, including objectives for deportation (25 000 in 2008, 30 000 this year). 29 000 people were expelled in 2008. Now the immigrants have to prove their ability to speak French, they have to know the values of the Republic, which are the values of the bourgeois Republic. It has happened many times, on quite a regular basis, that immigrants have been victims of violence, in police offices, in airports, in schools…

Moreover, the economic crisis is a hard blow for capitalism, and the capitalists want the workers to pay, and especially the immigrant workers to pay more.

The role of overexploiting and deporting immigrants is taken by the government, with a great help of the unions’ leadership. This is what happened recently in Paris. Illegal migrants were occupying the Bourse du travail, since May 2008, against Sarkozy’s anti-labor and anti-immigrants laws. Their claim was: Papers for all! End of all the laws against immigration!

The occupation knew some tensions, but it lasted, until last 24^th of June, when the leadership of the CGT, who was refusing all the catchwords, expelled the workers from the Bourse du travail. Against the resistance of the workers, they called the police of Sarkozy in order to help them, under the complicity of Socialist Mayor of Paris.

Many people were injured, some had to go to the hospital, and they even were accused of violence by the CGT leadership.

Now, they are camping night and day in front of the Bourse du travail.

The GB is pointing and denouncing the responsibility of the union bureaucracies, that are fully controlled by the capitalist class.

In order to fight against all the governments, we demand all the workers’ unions and the workers’ parties to defend these catchwords in a united front: Papers for all! Open the boarders!

The only way to achieve that is to fight for building a world revolutionary party for all workers in all countries, in order to end capitalism.