CAESAR CHAVEZ FOUGHT AGAINST ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

From http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=3032



MARCH 30, 2006. Below you will find excerpts from an article by Thom Hartmann on the subject of illegal immigration. To read the whole piece, go to CommonDreams.org. Hartmann argues that illegal immigration, in its present scope, is destroying America's middle class. He also points out (and this is largely ignored by those currently running the "debate") that labor unions have been decimated as a result of illegal immigration.

Those unions, and the people who originally fought for the right of workers to organize---and who sometimes died in the process---were the driving force behind the rise of the middle class in this country. Once the most visible figure in the American labor movement, Caesar Chavez actually opposed illegal immigration and fought against it, states Hartmann. What we are now witnessing (and these are my words, not Hartmann's), with the national protests advocating unlimited open borders, is a collision of several agendas and blueprints for the future---not the least of which is the aim of the Roman Catholic Church to expand its congregation by millions in the US. The Church bases its power, in part, on the ability to increase its numbers in every possible nation. For others, completely throwing open the gates into the US is a war of liberation, in which the territories once taken from Mexico by the US government are returned. A variation of that is: "The US is a terminal force of evil and should be destroyed and re-constituted." Everybody's coming to this party. Agri-businesses and construction corporations want more immigrants who will work for less. Racists want to "preserve white blood" by closing the borders.

Drug cartels want easy access for their products. Facade-liberals want to remain politically correct on issues of "human rights." Globalists want to flood every nation with immigrants and reduce countries to a level of need in which the only apparent solution is world governance/management from Above. A great deal of the problem could be solved creatively by building a wide swath of producing farms across the southern border inside Mexico. Thus, many people in Mexico trying to enter the US would encounter a source of food, work, and housing. But of course this is too useful, and it contravenes the elite oligarchy to the South, which is all about control and sustaining poverty and draining every peso into its own coffers. We are currently witnessing a classic op of pitting Americans against Mexicans, with the aim, as usual, of further destabilizing the US. In this, both groups are pawns being squeezed and prodded to move to extreme positions against each other. In such a volatile atmosphere, all attempts at utilizing imagination to invent multiple and happy outcomes for everyone are swept aside. It's business as usual. It's the world as usual.

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Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 by CommonDreams.org

Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists (and Labor is Left Behind) by Thom Hartmann

...Both the corporatists and the racists are fond of the mantra, "There are some jobs Americans won't do." It's a lie. Americans will do virtually any job if they're paid a decent wage. This isn't about immigration - it's about economics. Industry and agriculture won't collapse without illegal labor, but the middle class is being crushed by it. The reason why thirty years ago United Farm Workers' Union (UFW) founder Caesar Chávez fought against illegal immigration, and the UFW turned in illegals during his tenure as president, was because Chávez, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability. As Wikipedia notes:

"In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valley to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of illegal aliens as temporary replacement workers during a strike. Joining him on the march were both the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale. Chávez and the UFW would often report suspected illegal aliens who served as temporary replacement workers as well as who refused to unionize to the INS." Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages. Progressives fought - and many lost their lives in the battle - to limit the pool of "labor hours" available to the Robber Barons from the 1870s through the 1930s and thus created the modern middle class. They limited labor-hours by pushing for the 50-hour week and the 10-hour day (and then later the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day). They limited labor-hours by pushing for laws against child labor (which competed with adult labor). They limited labor-hours by working for passage of the 1935 Wagner Act that provided for union shops. And they limited labor-hours by supporting laws that would regulate immigration into the United States to a small enough flow that it wouldn't dilute the unionized labor pool. As Wikipedia notes:

"The first laws creating a quota for immigrants were passed in the 1920s, in response to a sense that the country could no longer absorb large numbers of unskilled workers, despite pleas by big business that it wanted the new workers." Do a little math. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 7.6 million unemployed Americans right now. Another 1.5 million Americans are no longer counted because they've become "long term" or "discouraged" unemployed workers. And although various groups have different ways of measuring it, most agree that at least another five to ten million Americans are either working part-time when they want to work full-time, or are "underemployed," doing jobs below their level of training, education, or experience. That's between eight and twenty million un- and under-employed Americans, many unable to find above-poverty-level work. At the same time, there are between seven and fifteen million working illegal immigrants diluting our labor pool.

If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways. Between the Reagan years - when there were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce - and today, we've gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result - as Caesar Chávez predicted - of illegal immigrants competing directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it's most obvious in the construction trades over the past 30 years, it's hit all sectors of our economy. ...The current Directors of Wal-Mart are smiling. Meanwhile, the millions of American citizens who came to this nation as legal immigrants, who waited in line for years, who did the hard work to become citizens, are feeling insulted, humiliated, and conned. Shouldn't we be compassionate? Of course.

But there is nothing compassionate about driving down the wages of any nation's middle class. It's the most cynical, self-serving, greedy, and sociopathic behavior you'll see from our "conservatives." There is nothing compassionate about being the national enabler of a dysfunctional oligarchy like Mexico. An illegal workforce in the US sending an estimated $17 billion to Mexico every year - second only in national income to that country's oil revenues [and street-drug revenues--JR] - supports an antidemocratic, anti-worker, hyperconservative administration there that gleefully ships out of that nation the "troublesome" Mexican citizens - those lowest on the economic food-chain and thus most likely to present "labor unrest" - to the USA. Mexico (and other "sending nations") need not deal with their own social and economic problems so long as we're willing to solve them for them - at the expense of our middle class. Democracy in Central and South America be damned - there are profits to be made for Wal-Mart! Similarly, there is nothing compassionate about handing higher profits (through a larger and thus cheaper work force) to the CEOs of America's largest corporations and our now-experiencing-record-profits construction and agriculture industries... But if illegal immigrants won't pick our produce or bus our tables won't our prices go up? (The most recent mass-emailed conservative variation of this argument, targeting paranoid middle-class Americans says:

"Do you want to pay an extra $10,000 for your next house?") The answer is simple: Yes. But wages would also go up, and even faster than housing or food prices. And CEO salaries, and corporate profits, might moderate back to the levels they were during the "golden age of the American middle class" between the 1940s and Reagan's declaration of war on the middle class in the 1980s. We saw exactly this scenario played out in the US fifty years ago, when unions helped regulate entry into the workforce, 35 percent of American workers had a union job, and 70 percent of Americans could raise a family on a single, 40-hour-week paycheck. All working Americans would gladly pay a bit more for their food if their paychecks were both significantly higher and more secure. ...Every nation has an obligation to limit immigration to a number that will not dilute its workforce, but will maintain a stable middle class - if it wants to have a stable democracy. ...Without a middle class, any democracy is doomed. And without labor having - through control of labor availability - power in relative balance to capital/management, no middle class can emerge. America's early labor leaders did not die to increase the labor pool for the Robber Barons or the Walton family... end of Hartmann excerpts Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and Sirius. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books include "What Would Jefferson Do?" and "Ultimate Sacrifice" (co-authored with Lamar Waldron). His next book, due out this autumn, is "Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It." JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com