[ThirdTerm]

The AFL and Immigration Restriction

Although racism manifested in many forms throughout the Progressive Era, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) mounted perhaps one of the most organized and concerted efforts of xenophobic legislation against non-white immigration during this period. In its first years, the AFL admitted nearly every laboring group without discrimination. Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, opened the Federation to radical and socialist workers and to some semiskilled and unskilled workers. Women, African Americans, and immigrants also joined in small numbers. However in the 1890s, the Federation shifted its policy and began to organize only skilled workers in craft unions, quickly making it an organization of white men.

The AFL was at its most influential during Woodrow Wilson's administration. Particularly during World War I, both unions and the government sought cooperation between labor and capital as the best means of rationalizing and increasing American production on behalf of the war effort.

This rise in AFL prominence allowed it to not only strictly regulate its own members, but to influence the development of anti-immigration policy over the course of the early twentieth century. While the AFL preached a policy of egalitarianism in regard to African American workers, by 1912, it was actively discriminating against them. For instance, the AFL sanctioned the maintenance of segregated locals within its affiliates — particularly in the construction and railroad industries — a practice which often excluded black workers altogether from union membership and thus from employment in organized industries. Generally the AFL viewed women and black workers as competition, strikebreakers, or an unskilled labor reserve that kept wages low.

Source: Boundless. “Progressivism for Whites Only.” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 28 Jun. 2016. Retrieved 25 Jul. 2016 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/t ... -955-5258/

In the pre-war era, it was the Democratic Party that promoted racial segregation and immigration restrictions from non-white countries, aligning itself with the AFL. In the same vein, the Australian Labour Party passed the White Australia Policy to protect Aussie jobs from Asian migrants. Strangely, these former racist parties are championing multiculturalism today.

[Political Interest]

Lenin's stance on immigration makes absolutely no sense. Apparently restrictions on immigration are racist but in the USSR they had internal passports and you could not move freely one one SSR to another.

What did Lenin think of immigration in the Russian Empire? Do we have any sources on this?

[Atlantis]

This is something I don't understand at all.

In the Warsaw Pact countries, China and North Korea there was no mass-immigration. Immigration did happen but never on a massive scale.

Under the former communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, friendship between nations was an official doctrine of state; however, direct contact with foreigners was discouraged, probably because foreigners were harder to control for the regime than natives.

The result is that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, people in Eastern Europe became openly racist and even fascist, since they had been kept strictly separated from foreigners. Fascism and racism did exist under the communist dictatorship, but it was kept out off public view.

[Pants-of-dog]

I do not think any Marxists are pro-immigration.

Even I am not pro-immigration, though I understand why some people would be confused.

The leftist view of immigration is that it is caused by global economic inequality, and that this inequality is (in turn) created by global capitalism and its daughters, neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism. If we stop these root causes of immigration, the flow of migrants will dramatically be reduced because the economies of developing nations will be stronger.

[Decky]

Indeed. Post world revolution there will be loads of tourism and almost no immigration. Who actually wants to abandon their home and their own people an everything they have every known to go and live with strangers? A vanishingly small number. Christ I wouldn't even want to live outside the west midlands never mind further afield than that.

The two main driving forces behind people moving are poverty and fleeing from war/ conflict. Both will not exist when the benevolent workers party rule over the globe where they have established the dictatorship of the proletariat so I can't really see there being much immigration.

[Godstud]

Lots of people want to move to better/different places. I'm evidence of that, and yet I'm not a migrant. Go figure.

[Decky]

Of course you are an immigrant. What else would you be?

[Godstud]

I am not working. I have Canadian citizenship. I am just visiting, technically. I have to get a visa to come here and spend time, from my OWN country. That's not a migrant. That's a tourist.

[Decky]

What is it with white people being too racist to identify as immigrants? You are living in another country, you are an immigrant.

My nan was exactly the same, always complaining about immigrants coming to the UK in the broadest Irish accent you could imagine.

[Godstud]

The only way I could immigrate, is to give try to get Thai citizenship(extremely difficult to do) and then I'd have to give up my Canadian citizenship. I'm just a long-term visitor.

I am only second generation Canadian, as my grandparents came from Europe. I'm pro-immigration(under good controls).

[Political Interest]

It just does not make any sense. The entire Marxist narrative in the Anglo world is completely against the people who could actually make socialism happen, the white working classes.

It seems as though most Marxist men in countries like England or the US are beer bellied balding intellectuals who are content to sit like school girls and swoon over third world revolutionaries. They have absolutely no faith in the possibility of a socialist state in their own countries. All they want to do is say how horrible their country has been oppressing the third world and how the only solution is mass immigration. And they were always like this in the past as well. Their emphasis was never creating socialism in their own country but rather romanticising revolutionaries abroad.

One would have thought that if they wanted to have any success they might try to appeal to the patriotism of the working classes. All successful communist movements combined socialism with nationalism. They did not create narratives that held the nation or its people in contempt.

I am starting to wonder if there was an inherent problem with Anglo Marxism right from the start. It emerged in a very different context to that which emerged in actual socialist states. Part of that may have been because it was a merger of the indigenous Anglophone socialist tradition with Leninist ideas from the continent with the former prevailing over the latter. The Anglo socialists were always pursuing this ideology for reasons very different to those held by continental Marxist-Leninists. This is why so many in the British CP could not tow the Moscow line very easily. Even Lenin distinguished the conditions under which socialism in the West would be defined by creating a distinction between oppressor nations and oppressed nations.

I suppose what it comes down to is that immigration in the Warsaw Pact states was simply not an issue and these regimes did not particularly want it either. In the West it was an issue and has become the core issue of the Western left.

[Decky]

Nice strawman there PI. Maybe When you are talking about middle class liberals you should refer to them as such rather than using the word Marxist to describe something totally different?

[Political Interest]

Nice strawman there PI. Maybe When you are talking about middle class liberals you should refer to them as such rather than using the word Marxist to describe something totally different?

All of the British left were like this Decky. I am sorry but it is true.

Can you think of a British leftist party that was not this way?

[Decky]

That is nice PI, so you admit that you were not talking about Marxism then? Good I appreciate the retraction. The "left" can mean anything. There are even lunatics who think the Liberal Democrats are left wing or that Labour under Blair were left wing.

As I said, when you are referring to middle class wankers refer to them as such rather than using the word Marxist. Only use that when talking about Marxists.

[ThirdTerm]

Sec. 51 of the Australian constitution empowers the Parliament to make laws with respect to: "The people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws". This section is commonly called 'the race power' and it was the constitutional basis for racist immigration laws in the past. Australia ratified the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination in September 1975, which was why it had to enact the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 grudgingly without popular support to show the world that Australia accepted the ICERD. But there is no consensus among ordinary Aussies that racism is bad and they can always cite the constitution that condones racism to legitimise their bad behaviour. Probably Australia is the only country in the world with this kind of the constitution that enables the government to make racist laws. Just last week, the Western Australian branch of the Liberal party voted in favour of removing the words “insult” and “offend” from the provision of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 to make racial slurs legal and Liberals are all for scrapping the Act altogether.