The Hard Crackers STORE has a new item for sale—“Since when has working been a crime”–a new version of a pamphlet produced and distributed by the Sojourner Truth Organization in 1977 during an earlier wave of the persecution of “workers without papers.” The pamphlet is available for free downloading as a PDF document and for sale in a full-color print version on a sliding scale, depending on quantities ordered.
I was especially pleased to help edit the pamphlet for re-publication as the new Trump administration’s launch of assaults against immigrants, their families, and their communities begin.
This pamphlet was written nearly 50 years ago by a group of political activists involved in a U.S. effort to defend migrant workers who they saw as part of the international working class. At that time, global capitalism was in deep crisis. Between 1977 and 1989, anti-immigrant policies were used by both the Carter and Reagan administrations to deflect the anger of U.S. workers over a sinking economy’s impact on their standard of living. Anti-immigrant public policies were not, however, without their contradictions. Right-wingers wanted more enforcement of immigration law, stronger border controls and more deportations. Corporate agriculture and the owners of many factories wanted cheap migrant labor. Many liberals wanted legislation to put an end to mass deportations and to legalize migrant workers already in the U.S. Back and forth executive orders on the part of different Presidents and one failed immigration bill after another were manifestations of these conflicts. In 1977, the authors of this pamphlet were attempting to encourage mass action to protest and physically resist deportations and the harsh measures being used at the border against migrants without legal documents. Their thinking was and still is that if immigrants are a part of an international working class, national borders are of no concern. There were some successes in blocking raids on factories and in providing legal help to some immigrants. However, many immigrants suffered and still do.
Today, in 2025, we seem to have come full circle. Large segments of the international working class who are citizens of the U.S. have demonstrated that they are feeling the negative impacts of an underlying economic crisis by voting for Donald Trump for President of the United States. His campaign for office had a strong anti-immigrant focus. The elections also gave control of the U.S. Congress to his allies. Trump’s campaign vilified immigrants with racist language, stereotyping them as thugs, drug dealers, rapists, murderers, human traffickers and exhorted that immigrants “were poisoning the blood of our country.” Campaign promises included completing the building of a wall across the Southern border that he started during his first term in office. He further vowed he would have tougher enforcement of immigration laws at the border. Trump has also promised that he will deport one million immigrants a year using the military to conduct massive raids of workplaces and homes. His choices for cabinet and staff who would implement such a program are all clearly anti-immigrant. In short, he intends to make good on these promises.
The context for today’s anti-immigrant persecutions has some similarities to 1977. Global capitalism’s deep economic crisis continues and working class people are hit the hardest by it. Also the contradictions between the hard right wing and corporate agriculture and some factory owners still exist. Liberals are still calling for various reforms. The large mass production factories that are the focus in this pamphlet are mostly gone. Yet, the call for resistance in today’s changed economic landscape is still of vital importance.
There are also other differences from conditions in 1977. During the George W. Bush administration (2001-09), immigration moved from being a predominantly economic issue to one of national security. In the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, the immigration issue was folded into Bush’s “War on Terror,” a stance that was extended during the Obama years (2009-17) and during the first Trump administration as well as the Biden administration. Today the national security link is still the dominant political justification for the abuse of migrant labor in the U.S. But President Trump’s characterization of immigrants during his recently concluded campaign has added a racist dimension.
One further change in the context of todays U.S. immigration policies is that U.S. geo-political actions have increasingly contributed to collapsing economies and wars around the world, especially in Central and South America. Collapsed economies, climate change and wars have resulted in the displacement of millions of people and many of them have headed to the Southern border of the U.S. seeking asylum. The ramification of U.S. foreign policy and climate change on U.S. immigration politics has been profound. An example of this is Venezuela. Since 2017 U.S. sanctions on Venezuela impeded their economy from recovering. The sanctions made it impossible for Venezuela, who has vast oil resources, to reap the benefits of rising oil prices. 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled their homeland. Biden’s initial open door policy to Venezuelan refugees caused a run on the U.S. border. But Republican politicians resisted. Governor Abbot of Texas, for example, began busing Venezuelan immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to Northern cities with Democratic Party mayors. Abbot dumped an estimated 25,500 Venezuelan migrants in Chicago in an 18 month period between 2022 and 2023. (This estimate does not include those arriving in Chicago suburbs.) Most of these adult migrants would have become eligible for work permits due to a Biden Administration executive order. President Trump has reversed this order. Meanwhile, throughout Chicago, migrants are begging on the streets for money. The scramble to house these migrants in the context of Chicago’s larger, cruel, homeless crisis has provoked an angry response from many black and Mexican people and politicians who feel that the effort to accommodate the Venezuelans comes at the expense of Chicago’s poor black people and Mexicans. Further, President Trump’s cancellation of President Biden’s executive order has made Venezuelan and other recent immigrants a focal point for today’s deportation raids.
The pile up of immigrants at the Southern border was in part due to an aspect of U.S immigration law. The law requires that legitimate claims for political asylum in the U.S. must be honored. But for some time the capacity of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to evaluate asylum claims was insufficient to meet the number of claims they receive. For years immigrants seeking asylum have been allowed to stay in the U.S. until their claims could be evaluated. This often took years. This is one reason why there are so many people without documents in the country today. During the Biden Administration, efforts to encourage asylum for residents of Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Guatemala opened the floodgates to even more migration and thousands of people were piled up along the Southern border. Many of these migrants ultimately crossed the border illegally. In 1977 when this pamphlet was first written, the immigrants were nearly all Mexican. Today they are predominantly from Venezuela and Central America as well as Mexico. Also there are migrants from China and a variety of African nations at the U.S. Southern border.
The government response to these changed conditions has been chaotic. From 2001 to today (2025) we have seen a mish mash of failed immigration bills and a series of executive orders that have been reversed by each successive Presidential administration. From 2009-17, President Obama took a centrist position on immigration and focused on attempting to appease his liberal base by creating a path to U.S. citizenship for the children of undocumented workers. Later the undocumented parents of these children were included. Meanwhile he created a harsher response to illegal entry at the border. In 2016, President Trump campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform promising to build a wall across the Southern border and to deport undocumented workers already in the country. The wall was never completed and he actually deported fewer undocumented workers than his successor, Joe Biden. President Biden (2021-24) initially tried to rein in the aggressive action of the U.S. Immigration and Enforcement Agency (ICE) that separated parents from their children. He actually paused deportations for a while. He stopped the construction of the border wall and issued executive orders including the program to increase admissions of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. He also issued an executive order to allow undocumented spouses of American citizens a path to citizenship. (The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocked this program.) His administration and a group of Senators from both Republican and Democratic parties offered a bipartisan proposal for a comprehensive immigration reform bill. The bill involved major concessions to the anti-immigrant right wing, thus winning bi partisan support. But Trump urged his supporters in Congress to kill the bill because it would hurt his reelection prospects. So it didn’t pass. In June of 2024 President Biden issued an executive order that the border would be completely shut down if crossings exceeded 2,500 per day. This slowed migration to the border. But in the end President Biden’s administration deported more undocumented workers than did Trump.
As we write this, President Trump and his Republican allies have swept the elections based in part on a promise to finish the wall and to deport a million “illegals” a year. His choices of people who will handle immigration initiatives are all far right hard liners on immigration. Trump controls executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. So it appears he means business and the mood of the country seems to be with him. The executive orders issued during his first few days in office reversed many of the Biden initiatives and the raids on Democratic Party controlled U.S. cities have begun.
While the political/economic context of the immigration crises have changed greatly since 1977, the need to see attacks on immigrants in the U.S. as a part of an attack on the international working class is as urgent as ever. The discussion of a factory raid among black workers at the beginning of this pamphlet is as important today as it was in 1977. Our point in that discussion along with using the example of resistance to Fugitive Slave laws of 1850 in the second half of this pamphlet was to encourage white and black workers to join a broad working class resistance to the global attack on the international working class. That remains our task today. Capitalism is in crisis and an anti-immigrant attack on workers without documents has begun with the election of Donald Trump for a second term. We hope this pamphlet can be useful to the needed resistance.