The fight for Guido Serio and Rade Radekovitch not to be deported to fascist countries.

‘The Foreign-Born Fight Back’ from Labor Defender. Vol. 5 No. 10. October, 1930.

WHEN Herbert Hoover recently refused to raise a hand to prevent Guido Serio and Rade Radekovitch from being deported to a certain death in Fascist Italy, and Jugoslavia, he expressed not only the brutality which is being manifested toward all militant class-conscious workers, but a particular venom against the most exploited workers of all, the foreign-born.

There was a time in America when foreign-born workers were far more welcome. When factories were being constructed in a thousand cities, and mines were being dug, and railroads were beginning to span the continent, press agents were sent to every country in Europe to describe in glowing terms the unique opportunities which American capitalism was affording its workers.

Posters in flaming colors depicted New York’s streets as being paved with gold, and pictures of millionaires’ residences were pointed to as being the homes of ordinary workers. The oppressed proletariat in Europe listened to the manicured stories with eyes aglow. It all sounded too good to be true, but millions of them were willing to take the chance, and did.

The grasping and the lucky prospered, but the vast majority found they had simply changed their exploiters–and that sanitary plumbing and the right to vote didn’t compensate for a 14 and 16-hour day. A good deal of water has passed under America’s bridges since that day. Incomparable natural resources, as well as the lives of the workers who developed them, have been exploited by the few rapacious capitalists. The rationalization of industry, made possible by amazingly intricate machinery, has cast out millions of workers from industry or speeded them up to the limit of endurance. The cry of capitalism is not only for cheaper and cheaper labor; it is for more labor displacing machinery. And the workers whose lives have been broken on these machines have been discarded with far less regard than the machines that have been thrown on the scrap heap.

Today more than eight million unemployed march the streets of America seeking the jobs that don’t exist. Inevitably the brunt of the suffering caused by the present crisis is thrown on the shoulders of the workers. Wage cuts and lay-offs have been most drastic in the mines, textile mills and factories where they are employed. And every time a demonstration of unemployed workers evokes a statement from the crooked misleader, Bill Green, his first apoplectic demand is that the immigrants be kept out…and when those that are here rebel at being enslaved…deport ’em. Deportation is the method developed by capitalism to cripple the protests of the foreign-born. A sentence of deportation is almost always equivalent to torture and death.

The latest example of this fiendish and cowardly method involves Guido Serio and Rade Radekovitch. Radekovitch has already been deported to fascist Jugoslavia. Serio will suffer the same fate unless a gigantic mass protest devel- ops immediately. The procedure used in the conviction of both workers reveals how capitalist class-justice works when the system it bolsters is in danger. Guido Serio, an Italian organizer of the Communist Party, was addressing an indoor meeting of workers in Erie, Pa. He spoke in Italian and urged his comrades to organize and fight against the wage-cuts and lay-offs imposed by the feudal rulers of Pennsylvania, Mellon and Atterbury, who between them are worth more than a billion dollars. He urged them to protest against the on-rushing imperialist war that America was plunging into.

Workers have been tortured and murdered in Pennsylvania for saying a good deal less. Serio was arrested immediately and charged with sedition. The cop who arrested him didn’t understand Italian and took the word of a stool pigeon as to Serio’s speech. The speakers who had addressed the meeting in English were also arrested. Serio was held in $25,000 bail and was ordered deported by the immigration authorities. The immigration inspector forwarded copy of Serio’s speech as it was supposedly interpreted by several Italian witnesses. At the trial the inspector’s report of the speech did not even resemble the interpretation made by the witnesses and had no relation whatsoever to anything said by Serio. All the witnesses signed affidavits to that effect. They said that the inspector had misrepresented them completely and had distorted their statements so that they couldn’t recognize them. The witnesses declared that they were willing to swear to these facts in court. The I.L.D. demanded a new trial on the basis of this evidence. It was promptly denied. Serio is now on Ellis Island awaiting deportation to Italy. His sick wife will remain here. Serio’s courageous fight against fascism before he left Italy in 1924 makes his death sentence by Mussolini doubly certain. Serio still carries seven stiletto wounds inflicted by fascists while he was national secretary of the 200,000 class-conscious members of the Seamen’s Union of Italy.

It is too late to save Radekovitch, who was deported from Galveston on September 12 to Jugoslavia, on the framed charge of illegal entry at Nogales, Arizona. He had crossed the border into Mexico, for ten minutes, when they arrested him on his return for illegal entry.

There is still some hope that a united working-class protest will save Serio from deportation and death. The Soviet Union has announced its willingness to have him deported there, where he will be welcomed, but the government has refused permission on the ground that it “finds it impractical.”

Fighting side by side with the I.L.D. on behalf of Serio is the Provisional National Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born whose first district conference was held in New York on September 21. Two hundred and thirty-three delegates representing 163 shop committees, labor and fraternal organizations with a combined membership of 30,422 worked out forms of struggle not only against the deportation schemes being pushed by the Fish Committee, but also against the proposals for job-discrimination against foreign-born workers now being sponsored by Governor Roosevelt and the corrupt A.F. of L. officialdom.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1930/v05n10-oct-1930-LD.pdf