Labor Day: Remembering Cesar Chavez

By Joe Guzzardi
September 2, 2013
GOPUSA

More than 50 years ago, Cesar Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta. Today, the UFW and Huerta remain active in their ongoing effort to win citizenship for illegal immigrants. At a recent Bakersfield rally, UFW president Arturo Rodriguez and Huerta joined others outside U.S. Representative Kevin McCarthy's office to demand immigration reform. But if Chavez, who died in 1994, were still alive he may not have been part of the demonstration.

Since his death, the Arizona-born Chavez has become a cultural icon. Chavez's birthday is a state holiday in California, Arizona and Texas. City streets and high schools bear Chavez's name. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Chavez's image. Chavez had a unique ability to form multiracial coalitions that included Mexicans, Filipinos and Americans to work toward a collective good.

Yet, time has erased the irony that for most of his storied career as a labor organizer, Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration. Chavez knew that when the labor pool expands—illegal immigration's primary effect—workers suffer either through lower wages or lost jobs.

In May 1974, Chavez proposed his "Campaign against Illegals." In a memo he sent to all UFW offices, Chavez informed his staff that the UFW was about to embark on a "massive campaign to get the recent flood of illegals out of California." Chavez distributed forms to staff to use to report illegal immigrants to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He also urged his members to call Congress to protest illegal immigration and to campaign for their deportation. Eventually, Chavez twice testified before Congress about illegal immigration's detrimental effects on American workers.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in 1979, Chavez demanded that the federal government take seriously its constitutional duty to keep illegal immigrants out of the fields and out of the country. He boldly stated that if "my mother was breaking the strike and if she were illegal, I'd ask the same thing." The reason, Chavez explained, is that picket lines and unions are about wage levels and employment opportunities. Combating illegal immigration is about economic issues: "it's not a political game." Chavez added that: "People are being hurt and being destroyed with the complicity of the federal government."

When Congress returns from its August recess to debate a possible immigration bill, Chavez provides an example for legislators. America's immigration laws are not, as Chavez put it, a "political game" played to placate the self-interests of racial, ethnic, and religious groups or to be used as a political wedge issue to pacify or to divide specific voting blocs or to become a rallying cry for demagogic street activists to push their private agendas.

Ridding the labor market of illegal immigrant workers is about the economic well-being of the United States' most needy: low-skilled native-born and legal immigrant workers.

In June, the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act that would authorize 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S to work legally. The bill would also add 20 million overseas workers during the next two decades. Despite the unarguable math, the UFW supports the legislation. Chavez would not. And by opposing the bill, Chavez would likely be called a racist.

©2013 Joe Guzzardi and Capsweb.org – Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1986.