TIME FOR A MORE RADICAL IMMIGRANT RIGHTS MOVEMENT 

By David Bacon 

The American Prospect, web edition, 7/24/07 

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=time_for_a_more_radical_immigrantrights_movement 

In Worthington, Iowa, a federal prosecutor gets a grand 
jury indictment against Braulio Pereyra-Gabino, union 
vice-president at the local Swift meatpacking plant. 
He's accused of not turning his undocumented members in 
to Homeland Security. In Arizona, Gov. Janet 
Napolitano signs a draconian immigration enforcement 
bill, criminalizing work for those without papers and 
ordering state agents to enforce the prohibition with a 
vengeance. Since Congress wouldn't pass the recent 
Senate bill with the same sanctions, she says Arizona 
has no choice. 

The Senate's failure is used as well in Prince William 
County, Virginia, to justify a local ordinance ordering 
all public officials to check immigration papers, even 
teachers, nurses and librarians. They're forbidden to 
help anyone lacking them. Meanwhile, immigration 
agents continue detaining and deporting people by the 
hundreds in workplace and community raids around the 
country. 

Some DC supporters of the recent Senate bill are still 
floundering about what to do in the wake of its 
failure. Outside the beltway, though, the immediate 
need is obvious. Organize and fight back. 

Outside Washington a movement capable of doing that is 
growing. You can see it, not just in the million 
people who marched in Los Angeles twice in one day. 
Last May Day in tiny Bridgeton, NJ, and Kennett Square, 
PA, unions and progressive activists walked alongside 
immigrant mothers wheeling children in strollers, 
fighting down the fear that deportation might separate 
their families. 

Everywhere in this country immigrant communities are 
growing, defying the raids intended to terrorize them - 
organizing and speaking out. This movement is a 
powerful response to Congress' inability to pass a pro- 
immigrant reform bill. It can and will resist and stop 
the raids, but its potential power is far greater. 
Like the civil rights movement four decades ago, the 
political upsurge in immigrant communities makes a 
profound demand - not simply for visas, but for freedom 
and equality. 

It questions our values. 

Will local communities share political power with 
newcomers? Will workers be able to organize to turn 
low-paying labor into real jobs? Will children go to 
school knowing their teachers value their ability to 
speak two or three languages as a mark of their 
intelligence, not their inferiority? 

Those who fear change are right about one thing. Once 
we answer these questions, we will not be the same 
country. 

Social change requires a social movement. Rights are 
only extended in the United States when people demand 
it. Congress will pass laws guaranteeing rights for 
immigrants as it did for workers in 1934, or African 
Americans in 1966 - when it has no choice but to 
recognize that movement's strength. 

In the south of the 1960s, courageous civil rights 
activists stopped lynching and defied bombings, while 
registering people to vote and going to jail to 
overturn unjust Jim Crow laws. They won allies, from 
unions to students to artists, who helped give the 
civil rights movement its radical, transformative 
character. They led our country out of McCarthyism. 

Today the movement for immigrant rights and equality 
confronts choices in strategy and alliances that recall 
those of the civil rights era. As SNCC and CORE had to 
move past the accommodations of Booker T. Washington, 
the immigrant rights movement has to move past the 
failed strategy of the last three years. 

Washington lobbyists have treated local communities as 
troops to back up conservative beltway legislation. 
They've promoted a strategic alliance with 
corporations, whose main interest was converting the 
flow of migrants into a regulated source of cheap 
labor, and with an administration using raids to 
pressure immigrant communities and bust unions. DC 
strategists tried to appease the right by agreeing to 
anti-immigrant provisions that robbed their bill of the 
support of those communities they claimed it was 
supposed to benefit. 

Pointing in a different direction, many community-based 
coalitions and grassroots groups outside the beltway 
have made proposals that start from a human and labor 
rights perspective. They would give the undocumented 
real residence rights, as the Immigration Reform and 
Control Act did in 1986. New migrants would be able to 
live as normal community members, rather than as 
exploited guest workers. A demilitarized Mexican 
border would look like the one with Canada. Immigrants 
would regain due process rights, which after eight 
years of George Bush, everyone else needs too. Work 
would be decriminalized, and labor rights enforced for 
all workers, immigrants included. Families could 
reunite in the U.S. without waiting years. U.S. policy 
would stop reinforcing poverty abroad as an inducement 
for corporate investment, especially in those countries 
sending migrants here. 

The mainstream press amplifies the voices of a small 
anti-immigrant minority, and a conservative Congress 
kowtows to them. But most polls show that immigrants 
and non-immigrants alike believe in basic fairness and 
equality, and are willing to consider these and similar 
ideas. The problem is that without a powerful movement 
they remain just that - ideas. 

Building that movement in communities, churches and 
unions requires a change in alliances as well as 
program. Its natural allies include African Americans, 
whose experience of racism and economic desperation is 
similar to that of immigrants. Unions are already 
important allies, and most opposed the Senate bill. 
Immigrant workers are already more active in union 
drives than most sections of the workforce. 

Displaced and unemployed workers can also be allies of 
immigrants, instead of competitors in the job market. 
Today many are manipulated by the anti-immigrant 
hysteria of right wing talk show hosts like Lou Dobbs, 
because Washington lobbyists won't antagonize their 
corporate sponsors by criticizing the free market 
agenda. Yet hundreds of thousands of unemployed 
workers are victims of the same free trade agreements 
that cause migration. NAFTA and CAFTA create poverty 
in Mexico and Central America to benefit corporate 
investors. That poverty drives people to migrate 
north. Opposing the offshoring of jobs goes hand in 
hand with defending the rights of the migrants free 
trade produces. 

The DC strategy pitted immigrants against unemployed 
workers through guest worker schemes, raids and 
criminalizing work. Coalition building brings people 
together in an anti-corporate alliance based, not in 
Washington where lobbyists dominate the agenda, but in 
communities with a different set of interests. 

Rights for immigrants at work and in neighborhoods can 
be paired with the right to jobs and federal employment 
programs. Since 2004 Houston Congresswoman Sheila 
Jackson Lee has proposed this kind of tradeoff - real 
legal status for 12 million undocumented people 
together with federal support for job creation and 
training in Black and Chicano communities with high 
unemployment. She's rejected guest worker programs as 
a corporate giveaway, hurting both immigrants, who are 
denied normal rights, and low-wage workers forced into 
competition with them. Some unions, like UNITE HERE 
Local 2 in San Francisco, are building alliances by 
demanding that employers hire more African Americans, 
while defending the rights of immigrants already in the 
workforce. 

Similarly, workers in unions, immigrants included, need 
labor law reform and enforcement. Many May Day 
marchers demanded not just legal immigration status, 
but the right to organize to raise their poverty-level 
wages. Immigrant janitors sitting in the streets of 
Houston, hotel housekeepers enforcing living wage laws 
in Emeryville, CA, and meatpacking workers organizing 
against company terror tactics at Smithfield Foods in 
Tarheel, NC, are as much a part of the immigrant rights 
movement as those marching for visas. 

A coalition that can fight for these demands has its 
roots in immigrant rights groups, local unions, church 
congregations and college campuses. The Essential 
Worker Immigration Coalition, representing Wal-Mart, 
Marriott and other corporate giants, will not fight for 
these demands. Nor will the rightwing Manhattan 
Institute. But many national organizations will. The 
AFL-CIO and most unions in the Change to Win Federation 
will support these demands. So will the National 
Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the Mexican 
American Political Association and the American Friends 
Service Committee. 

National groups can provide resources, but to build a 
movement on the ground, we might study the experience 
of the young activists in the south in the 1960s, and 
the radicals in the industrial workplaces of the 1930s. 
Could students be organized to go to Hazelton, Tucson 
and Prince William County, to provide support for 
communities challenging raids and local anti-immigrant 
laws? Could civil disobedience be as important to 
their tactics as it was to those who sat in at lunch 
counters or organized illegal unions at the Ford Rouge 
plant? 

Immigrant communities don't need another bad 
Congressional compromise. They need a freedom agenda. 
It can be a program like the Freedom Charter of South 
Africa's anti-apartheid movement - a vision to fight 
for. It can be a bill in Congress, like Sheila Jackson 
Lee's, forcing politicians to consider an alternative 
to guest workers and more raids. And it can be a 
mobilizer, drawing people to picket lines in front of 
the ICE detention centers holding their family members. 
There people can sing new Spanish or Arabic words to 
the old anti-slavery anthem: "Let my people go." 

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For more articles and images on immigration, see 
http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm 

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration 
to the US, Communities Without Borders (Cornell 
University/ILR Press, 2006) 
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 

See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the 
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) 
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html 

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