Migrant Regularization: Moving Beyond Administrative Wins to Class Struggle

• While migrant regularization restores basic rights, it is only a starting point rather than a solution to capitalist exploitation.
• Capitalism utilizes migrant vulnerability to suppress wages and discipline labor, maintaining an "industrial reserve army."
• Revolutionary organizations must stop acting paternalistically and build genuine, collective power alongside migrant workers.

The Roots of Migration and Capitalist Utility

• Contemporary migration is largely the result of historical colonialism, debt, and economic dispossession in the Global South.
• The system does not fear migration itself; it fears workers with rights. Vulnerability is a tool for keeping labor cheap and compliant.
• Administrative irregularity is not a system failure but a feature, preventing workers from joining unions or demanding better conditions.

Shifting the Strategy for Modern Labor

• The 21st-century working class is more diverse, feminized, and racialized; organizing must reflect this reality to avoid targeting a non-existent version of the past.
• Paternalistic approaches—viewing migrants only as "useful for care or harvesting"—must be replaced by horizontal solidarity.
• Historical and contemporary successes in organizing precarious migrant labor:
  • 1930s USA: The Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union.
  • Justice for Janitors (SEIU): Mobilizing cleaners through direct action.
  • Recent UK examples: United Voices of the World and the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain.
  • Spain: Organizing efforts by domestic and care workers.

The True Border

• The real divider is not geography or nationality, but the class boundary between those who sell their labor and those who profit from it.
• Organizing transforms isolated individuals into a collective force, shifting the balance of power from mere legal status to structural economic influence.