¡AMNISTÍA GENERAL YA! or, the necessity of making a better America, for our immigrant fellow workers and ourselves

 ¡AMNISTÍA GENERAL YA! or, the necessity of making a better America, for our immigrant fellow workers and ourselves

 

Early in the morning of Tuesday January 7, 2026 in Minneapolis, MN, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37 year old poet and mom of 3 was shot and killed in her family car in her own neighborhood, while trying to avoid a confrontation with a band of armed men.

This foul murder was allegedly committed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement and Removal Officer Jonathan Ross (who, of course, is constitutionally presumed innocent until proven guilty in a federal or state court of law, for the record).

The video instantly went viral, what happened is quite clear in the court of public opinion, and to any person with functional eyes not willfully blinded by bias and propaganda.

 

Be that as it may,  according to statements in the media by officers specially trained as firearms instructors, standing in front of a moving car and firing upon that vehicle and its occupants is contrary to standard procedures of most US law enforcement agencies, including ICE and its parent agency the US Department of Homeland Security – in some agencies, this is a fireable offense.

As Officer Ross was, according to published reports, himself a firearms instructor and a SWAT officer with 10 years on the job, he knew this policy – well enough to have trained other officers and agents in it

 

Further, contrary to standard US law enforcement agency practice, Officer Ross’ chain of command allowed him to leave the scene of the incident, did not confiscate his weapon, did not collect evidence, did not immediately take him to a hospital to be medically cleared, have not disciplined him in any way, have been actively been impeding any federal or state investigation of Mrs. Good’s murder and may be actively assisting Officer Ross in fleeing jurisdiction to evade state prosecution

 

The backdrop for this atrocity is a politically motivated reign of terror being inflicted on Minneapolis and Hennepin County, Minnesota by over 2,000 DHS Agents – for perspective, Minneapolis is a city of 450,000 with only 600 police officers.

 

The city is under siege by a brigade sized force of assault rifle clutching federal agents, many poorly trained new hires and all clad in Army combat infantry gear, including Kevlar helmets and “plate carrier” combat bullet proof vests

 

This is a rare sight in America, where seeing troops on the street is unusual and the armed forces are barred by the constitution and federal statute from any involvement in law enforcement.

 

The constitution, specifically article 7 and the 10^th amendment, greatly restrict federal involvement in law enforcement, which is reserved for state, county, city, town and tribal officers under local supervision

 

The original intent was to attack the Twin Cities Somali-American population. Upon discovering that almost all Somali-Americans in Minnesota are US citizens, they shifted to harassing the city’s large Mexican-American population

 

Minneapolis and its twin city St Paul are dark blue Democratic communities and the local wing of the Democratic Party (known as the Democratic Farmer Labor Party) is on the left end of the spectrum in that center right party.  So, the ICE occupation was immediately met by large scale peaceful resistance by local White liberals

 

The foul murder of Mrs. Good has been extensively covered by US media – after all, she is a native born White American and a US citizen, unlike the other person ICE officers allegedly killed this year, the 32 people they allegedly killed last year and the many people who have died in the privatized detention facilities run by DHS that imprison over 400,000 of our fellow workers, detained like criminals for what are essentially civil code violations of US visa regulations.

 

The whole point of immigration enforcement is not to deport America’s 11 million undocumented residents or the 24 million foreign born persons with visas or naturalized citizenship.

The goal is to arrest and brutalize a few immigrants, to terrorize the rest.

 

The reason for that is to force immigrant workers to be employed under substandard wages, hours, benefits and working conditions, to enable American corporations and business owners to extract superprofits from underpaid labor, in particular employers in agriculture, forestry, commercial fishing, manufacturing, trucking, warehousing, building maintenance, hotels and restaurants

 

Meatpacking and food processing are two of Minnesota’s main industries, and the workforces in those factories are overwhelmingly immigrants from Somalia and Mexico. Those industries became heavily immigrant when they were deunionized during the Carter and Reagan administrations and labor standards collapsed. The previous workforce, mostly White American, quit and found less worse jobs elsewhere, the employers relied on immigrants who had few other employment options to fill those jobs.

 

The current wave of deportations began after the 9-11 terrorists attacks – they actually reached their peak under the Obama Administration.

 

Terrorizing immigrant workers into obedience is a bipartisan policy – arguably the Democrats are more effective at this (5.5 million immigrants were deported from 2009 to 2017) – in large part because ICE was more professional in that era with a small force of well trained agents (Officer Ross began his DHS career in El Paso as a unionized Border Patrol agent during those years, in 2015 – he later switched over to the non union ICE as a SWAT team tactical officer in the Twin Cities), supervised by managers who were career civil servants

 

In many ways, the wholesale attack on the standard of living of America’s 161 million workers over the past 48 years would not have been possible without the persecution of America’s immigrants

 

The union busting that reduced manufacturing from 50% union to 10% union, trucking from 90% union to 7% union and construction from 80% union to 10% union would not have been possible without the persecution of immigrants

 

After all, when the previous largely US citizen majority White workforces fled those now sweatshopized industries, other workers had to be found to take their places – workers from countries with a standard of living artificially kept low by American imperialism, workers who once arrived in this country could be systematically bullied to tolerate the intolerable and bear the unbearable from their employers.

 

It's telling that in some areas of the country – New York, for example – the immigrant workforce are supplemented with recently paroled ex convicts, forced by court mandate to take any job they can find, no matter how bad it is, lest they be called in by their parole officer and “violated” (yes, that is actually the legal term used in my state when they send you back to prison)

 

This is the industrial terrorism faced by the 3.6 million parolees in the American workforce. The 800,000 actual prison inmates who are employed as forced laborers in this country face an even harsher regime of workplace repression (disobey your boss and you might get put in “administrative segregation” – that is, locked in solitary confinement – as well as a writeup)

 

The only country with more imprisoned convict  laborers than the US is China – 1.6 million.

 

In a better America, one with a real opposition party and a strong, militant, anti capitalist, non corrupt labor movement that fought for all workers not just 9% of them, this kind of systematic abuse would be met with general strikes.

 

American employers can attack American workers with impunity, in the confidence that they will face no resistance.

This is true even among the small fraction of workers who are unionized – American labor leaders are terrified of leading strikes and on the rare occasions when they are forced to do so they sabotage those struggles from within.

 

Among the 94% of American private sector workers who are non union, the employees are latter-day Dread Scotts, with no right that Master is bound to respect

 

Ironically enough, Officer Ross and his fellow workers have also been taking it on the chin from their employer, the Federal Government, with no real resistance from the five major federal unions, the International Association of Machinists, National Treasury Employees Union, American Postal Workers Union, National Association of Letter Carriers and Officer Ross’ former union, the American Federation of Government Employees

 

One of the Trump Administration’s earliest actions was the mass deunionization of 700,000 federal employees (that’s 5% of total US union membership) and mass layoffs of federal employees in blatant violation of federal law and union contracts

In a better America that attack would have been met with an immediate and open ended strike of all federal employees, union and non union alike

 

In the America we live in the IAM, NTEU, APWU, NALC and AFGE just called the lawyers and filed court cases, rather than take any kind of industrial action.

 

In a better America, the labor movement would be actively educating workers that being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, Antisemitic and Islamophobic is not in the interest of our class

In the America we live in, there are some unions who’s leaders openly hope that we go to war with Russia, China and even Denmark, in the vain hope that this will somehow lead to a few union jobs.

 

In a better America, public employee unions representing law enforcement officers would educate their members to understand that their job is to protect and serve the public (ALL of the public, not just some of them of a certain race) and that the oath they took to uphold the constitution and laws trumps any unlawful order they may receive, and that in a democratic federal republic law officers should not be cosplaying as soldiers in an occupation army.

 

In the America we live in, one of the main functions of law enforcement unions is providing legal representation for officers who obey unlawful orders but then get prosecuted for the crimes their chain of command ordered them to commit but abandoned them once those unlawful acts got exposed.

 

In a better America, the response to immigration raids on workplaces (often based on tips called in by the very employers of those workers, seeking to get rid of them without the bother of paying unemployment benefits) would be strike action

 

In the America we live in,  empty rhetoric in press releases is the best our unions can do

 

In a better America, there would be mass organizing among the 93% of truck drivers, 90% of factory workers and 80% of construction workers who are non unionized.

 

In the America we live in, unions beg the Democrats to change the laws and every Democratic president from Carter to Biden refused to do so

 

In a better America, we would be demanding a general amnesty for all immigrant workers.

 

Every person residing in the US as of January 1, 2026 should automatically become a citizen, with no strings attached.

 

Every one of the 400,000 men, women and kids in immigrant detention should be released forthwith and given immediate US citizenship and be made whole financially for any losses incurred while in detention

 

Every living person who was deported from the US for any reason should be immediately given US citizenship and invited to return to this country

 

Going forward, deportation should be abolished – once you’re naturalized as a citizen, that should be forever. This should apply even if you committed a crime here – you should do your time here for that crime just like any other American and be paroled to walk the streets in freedom upon completing your sentence just like any other American.

 

Further, any person wishing to immigrate to America should just report to a US consulate,  border patrol station or immigration checkpoint, be inspected and upon passing inspection be admitted to this country as a citizen

 

That was how immigration worked for all immigrants from 1781 to 1893, and for all White immigrants from 1893 to 1924

 

In a better America, labor would be demanding this and enforcing that demand with lots of strikes

 

In a better America with an actual opposition party, this would be the first item on the agenda in congress every session.

 

Hell, even in Ronald Reagan’s America, we got a general amnesty for immigrants, back in 1983!

 

Why isn’t anybody demanding this?

 

The answer is pretty damned simple – in this most democratic of nations, 80% of the population have no voice in public affairs

 

The American working class does not have a party of its own – the American working class over the last century is defined by just how unorganized it is – most workers are not in unions, few are in any sort of community organization, in a country where religious belief is widespread actual membership in religious organizations is rare – the social inertness of the bottom 80% of the American population enables the billionaires, corporations and the top 20% to inflict their will on the rest of us with little fear of resistance

 

America is also a starkly racially divided nation – the tragic legacy of the genocide and mass land theft of indigenous Americans by first the British Army and later the US Army and the Transatlantic slave trade and 247 years of Black Americans being used as slaves, followed by 98 years of legalized racial discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities, that only ended in 1964

 

Members of America’s main racial groups – White Americans, Jews, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans (“American Indians”) and Pacific Islanders   - often identify primarily as members of their race first, rather than as Americans or as members of  their social class (capitalists, middle class, workers, poor)

 

Among workers in particular, far too many American workers will see a billionaire or millionaire of their own race as an ally and a worker of a different race as their mortal enemy

 

Americans born in this country are taught to view Americans born under other flags as enemies rather than as fellow workers who just happen to have grown up under the warmth of other suns

 

This stark racial divide is the main reason the working class movement is so weak in America – it is why we don’t have a workers party here, and why we’ve never had more than one third of American workers unionized – it is also why we have such a weak social safety net here 

 

This original  sin of the American body politic is the number one political issue in this country and the main barrier to social progress here – as has been the case since the first slave ship docked and the first Indigenous village was burned down by soldiers way back in the early 1600s, before we were even a country

 

As for America’s labor movement, the country has one national labor federation, the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations – it was born of a merger between the rival American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 and is almost universally known by its acronym, AFL-CIO (nobody ever says the whole name and most people probably don’t even know what the acronym stands for)

 

There are a few notable independent unions – the National Education Association and the Fraternal Order of Police are two prominent examples – but most unions are AFL-CIO affiliates

 

The AFL-CIO, its leadership, and its subordinate bodies and affiliated national and international unions, the latter being American based unions with members in Canada) are utterly subordinated to and dominated by the Democratic Party

 

American labor unions also have a longstanding relationship with America’s organized crime syndicates, especially the syndicate known as Cosa Nostra (Sicilian Italian for “this thing of ours” – commonly referred to as “the mafia”)

 

Almost all American labor unions have extensive benefit funds and pension funds, a private welfare state for union  members and their families only – the vast pools of capital and the poor regulation of those funds has been a magnet for racketeers and gangsters since the late 19^th century

 

Arguably American unions are among the most corrupt in the world – the widespread labor racketeering here is only matched by the Canadian labor unions (many of which are affiliates  of US based unions) and the labor movement in Australia

 

Only 14.3 million of America’s 161 million workers are unionized – 9.9% of the workforce - 7 million of these workers are public sector employees and 7.3 million are private sector workers

 

Union membership  is disproportionately concentrated among public sector workers – in particular employees of the federal government, and of states, counties, cities and Indian tribes run by politicians of the Democratic Party – 32% of the nation’s public sector workers are unionized – but only 5.9% of private sector workers

 

The two most heavily unionized occupations in the United States are public school teacher and police officer.

 

Despite having a labor movement that’s overwhelmingly public sector, government employee unions rarely show solidarity with other unions – even other public sector unions.

 

Also public sector unions rarely show solidarity with the working class public they serve – in the case of unions in the public safety field, their leaders are often openly hostile to the general public (especially the general  public who happen to be members of minority groups) – this hostility naturally leads members of the public – especially minority members of the public – to look upon unions of workers in the public safety field with hostility.

 

Union membership is distributed unevenly geographically – states in the Northeast, the Great Lakes area and the Pacific Coast are among the most heavily unionized – Hawaii with 26% unionization and New York with 20% are the highest – and states in the Southeast and the Intermountain West are among the most heavily unorganized – with South Dakota at 2.7% and South Carolina with 2.4% the least organized states

 

Membership is also distributed unevenly by branch of industry – most private sector union members are in manufacturing, construction, transportation and utilities – farm workers, white collar workers and service workers are almost completely unorganized

 

There has been a stark decline in union  membership since the neoliberal attacks on the labor movement that  began during the Carter Administration in the late 1970s – during those years, the trucking industry was deregulated and largely deunionized, railroad workers and miners strikes were broken by presidential orders under the Taft Hartley Act and there was a coordinated national attack on unions in construction and heavy industry

 

As a result, private sector unionization declined from 20% to the current 5.9% - construction went from 80% union to 10%, trucking from 90% union to 7%, manufacturing from 50% union to 10% - the total number of union  members also fell from 17.7 million to the present 14.3 million

 

As I stated above, these attacks on American industrial workers would not have been possible without the widespread persecution of immigrant workers

 

America’s corrupt Democratic Party dominated AFL-CIO leadership made no attempt to resist these attacks – they basically retreated and surrendered without a fight

 

As a result, many younger workers who have entered the workforce this century have a well founded feeling that they have been abandoned by the older generation of workers (“The Boomers”)  the fact that only 2% of workers under 30 are unionized is mute testimony to the correctness of this perception

 

In the last 50 years, strikes have become very rare in America – the US labor leadership has largely abandoned the strike weapon – on the rare occasions when unions carry out strikes, they are notable for their ineffectiveness – it is common at workplaces with multiple unions for members of other unions to keep working while other trades on strike (in the US this is called “scabbing”)

 

American unions rarely strike even over the worst sort of employer abuses – including bosses literally stealing the wages of their workers and armed plainclothes federal officers raiding workplaces and dragging workers away in handcuffs – political strikes are all but unknown here

In a time of political crisis, when the federal government is unleashing  open repression on the most vulnerable sections of the working class, the time for political  strikes has come, but the labor leadership is both unwilling and unable to carry those out

 

 So what’s the way forward?

 

We need to build a mass, interracial, explicitly anti capitalist mass workers party that's both electoral and activist focused - that party needs to focus on the bread and butter dollars and cents demands of the working class (and all the inequalities that make some of us, of certain races, and those born under other flags, in need of more bread and butter and dollars and cents) in the short term and in the long term for the end of capitalism and our class coming to power for the first time in the history of the world

 

We need to build new labor unions for the 95% non union private sector and recapture the public sector legacy unions - these new jack labor unions need to also be explicitly anti capitalist, radically democratic, anti corrupt and strike oriented, and they need to be built by grassroots organization, not the NLRB process that requires that you ask permission from the employer to organize your coworkers

 

We need to demand full citizenship for all persons residing in America, regardless of place of birth – we need to demand this NOW

 

We need to demand the abolition of deportation – no person living in America should be banished from their  home, regardless of how they came to be here or when they came here – if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower or a slave ship 400 years ago, or in steerage in an ocean liner 100 years ago, or on an Airbus A 320 last Tuesday, this is your home and you should not be driven from it

 

We live in a country with the most expansive civil liberties and right of free association on the planet - there is nothing external stopping us from recruiting our fellow workers into a workers party and into militant labor unions and using our right to protest to carry out peaceful, non violent mass struggle for our ideas, at work and on the streets

 

When we’re at the point where people are literally being murdered on the streets for exercising their first amendment right to petition their government for redress of grievances, the time for action is upon us

 

That's what we need to be organizing right now