Struggle of immigrants in 2008
The year 2008 will provide great opportunities for immigrant workers to
carry out their tasks and struggles for the poor and marginalized people of the
United States and the world, and with the understanding this is a development
involving great projects carried out on a universal scale, we will have to
change things.
In spite of contradictions weighing on the class struggle in this country, I
would like to present some optimistic proposals for how I see that we can meet
the challenges of 2008.
We count upon the existence of a social, union and political rearmament far
greater than that which existed ten years ago. We rearmed at a high level in
2006 to carry out protests, mobilizations and strikes throughout the entire
country involving thousands of people, and on May 1, 2006, our struggle for
unconditional amnesty reached its highest level, with a protest movement of a
million people in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York,
Washington and many other cities. It was a movement that made the
country’s Democratic-Republican bureaucracy tremble with fear.
Until 2005 we were invisible. In 2006 we became visible in the press media
of those in power. And in 2007 we again became invisible. We have to change
history. We advanced in one year more than we could in the half century before
it. The victories won at local and regional levels will not change.
The main demands and those that mobilized the most people were the struggle
for a general amnesty and the struggles against the war in Iraq and the Middle
East. Parallel to this situation and its social and popular skirmishes, there
were developing crises, that of the monstrous costs of the imperialist war, the
one of the war deaths of the U.S. Armed Forces members and the reactions of
their relatives, the case of those tortured in Iraq and Guantánamo, the
continual scandals involving the Bush gang and its allies, the sub-prime
mortgage crisis, the rapid increase in repressive violence and racism, whose
greatest expression came with the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, the
anti-terrorism and anti-immigration campaigns, the instability of Wall St.,
also the threat of an economic recession, global warming and the overweening
responsibility of the Bush administration for it, the construction of a wall on
the U.S.-Mexican border. ...
Toro goes on to call for going forward to organize from the bottom up a
national protest to stop all work on May 1, 2008, to fight for an unconditional
amnesty now!
