The Coming Immigration Wars: How can communities resist Trump's Immigration Actions ?

Maria Elena Durazo knows about immigrant workers, labor and civil rights. She has been the hospitality union UNITE HERE’s General Vice President for Immigration, Civil Rights and Diversity since 2014. Before that she was the first woman executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which represents 600,000 workers, many of whom are immigrants and Latinos. She became a force for labor and living standards in the nation’s second-largest city—and a thought-leader for the rest of the nation.

When she was growing up, Durazo’s farm-worker family picked crops up and down the West Coast. Recalling that time, she told film maker Jesús Treviño, “As migrant farm workers, my dad would load us up on a flatbed truck and we would go from town to town and pick whatever crop was coming up. I think of my dad when he had to negotiate with contratistas [contractors]. I knew we worked so hard and the contratistas were chiseling us down to pennies. What was pennies to them meant food on the table for us.”

Durazo spoke with Capital & Main about the threats to working people and immigrants from a new Trump administration—and how to fight back.

About This Series

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Capital & Main: Let’s begin with the Big Question: What do you see as the next battle fronts for labor and immigration — what needs defending?

Maria Elena Durazo: There is a great degree of worry about Trump giving permission to do harm in our communities, to immigrant families and immigrant neighborhoods–permission for people to attack, to harass kids, adults.

Our job in the labor movement is to create safe-work places. Here in Los Angeles, and in a number of cities, officials are standing up and saying we’re not going to allow our local police to cooperate with ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.] Our schools are saying we’re not going to allow ICE to come in.

Families have an earthquake plan. Who do you call? How do you react? How do we protect ourselves? That’s the very first level, and we have to give confidence to our communities. We know how to be safe. Let’s remember that and do that stuff right away.

Deportations present an opportunity for Trump to say, “See? I told you I was going to do something.”

CLICK TO TWEET

The president-elect has said he intends to cut federal funds to cities that don’t collaborate with federal authorities on immigration policies. Local municipalities are saying no—Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has staked out his position–but what happens? Los Angeles could lose $500 million this fiscal year.

Remember the threats around apartheid? There were threats that pension funds in cities that divested from South Africa would be breaking the law…threats of lawsuits. Then divestment happened across the board. But it took a few to start it, to have the courage to say we’re not going to be threatened that way.

Some people called President Obama the “deporter-in-chief”—news reports cite 2.4 million “removals” during his administration. Is that title fair? 

He certainly dramatically increased the number of border patrol agents. We in the labor and immigrant rights movement had big clashes with President Obama. He did try to do a version of [having] local law enforcement cooperate with ICE. We fought that.

At first he didn’t agree with giving deferred action to young people. [DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — the Dreamers.] We pushed back, and he eventually agreed with it. He tried very hard to get a complete overhaul of the immigration laws and immigration system. He tried in his way. We certainly pushed in our way. We got as far as bipartisan Senate approval of a piece of legislation.

Other Republicans were adamant about blocking him at every single step. He only got as far as the enforcement part of it, which is why he was given the title. But other than DACA, he was never able to get the other pieces of legislative immigration reform.

A danger is to use the term “criminals” as a pretext to deport millions. People could fall for that.

CLICK TO TWEET

What lies ahead for the DACA students? There are some 750,000 young people completing their educations and working under a temporary protected status — it seems that makes them a very vulnerable population for deportation.

Unless we fight back harder they present an opportunity for Trump to be able to say, “See? I’m doing things. I told you I was going to do something.”

How real is President-elect Trump’s immigration rhetoric–“round them all up”? Should people be as afraid as they feel?

We should be worried about that. Not just worried, we should be acting on what he pledged to do, and what he continues to say he’s going to do.

The people that he’s considering for these different [government] positions are very serious. It’s not a threat. It’s a very explicit promise.

The other danger is to use the term “criminals” as a pretext to deport millions. [Trump] never said the majority of immigrants are hard-working men and women. There are at maximum a few hundred thousand immigrants [and] some that have had a run-in with law enforcement. That’s the pretext for going after millions. That’s the scary part because he knows people in this country could fall for that.

How many civil rights laws in our history have been violated–as recently as George W. Bush, as far back as what was done to Japanese Americans? In the 1950s we had the deportations of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. It wasn’t in the millions, but it certainly was at least in the hundreds of thousands. We’ve been through this. Are we in a position to fight back and refuse?

How do we refuse?

There’s no doubt in my mind we have all the makings across this country to push back and show him. We won marriage equality, we’ve pushed and we’ve won a number of things on the environmental front.

A million people march in the streets. We’ll disobey and we’ll have solidarity. We’re showing that in Los Angeles. We’re showing that in other cities. We have police chiefs saying they will not cooperate. That’s a very powerful thing that we have on our side. Community-based organizations saying we’re going to set up family safety procedures. The school districts saying, “We’re not going to allow that.”

I spoke with Reverend James Lawson, the other day– when I talked to him he said, “We know how to win. We’ve got these victories. Feel proud and great about them. This guy, there’s no way we’re going to let him destroy our country.”

Major industries in this country benefit from the immigration system being broken. Are they going to go along with mass deportations– an enormous disruption in the economic system?

It’s a new opportunity to exploit immigrant workers even more. Wage theft will just go through the roof because there will be such a dramatic increase in this atmosphere of fear. There are sectors of our economy where employers will love it because they’ll be more in control. They know that 12 million people are not going to be deported overnight. But they’re going to take advantage of that fear.

A chicken-processing plant in a Southern right-to-work state wouldn’t be happy if all its undocumented workers were deported.

No, they wouldn’t be happy, but let’s say Trump says, “You’re not going to like that. But how about if I give you unfettered guest workers?” They’ll be provided an alternative on that level. That’s one way that they could look at it.

Look at these high-tech industry leaders that pretend to be so liberal. What do they want? Guest worker status for “highly skilled” workers—to be able to have them here, to work them. They don’t care about them being permanently allowed to live in this country.

There are industries like hospitality, where I expect those employers to defend their work force. In the past they’ve shown courage by publicly being on the side of [immigration] legislation. But they haven’t really taken much risk. Now it’s going to take more risk to defend their work force. Courage. Leadership. They’re going to have to do more than just sign off on legislation.
Reposted from Capital & Main

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The Dignity Campaign's Alternative for Immigration Reform

THE DIGNITY CAMPAIGN'S ALTERNATIVE VISION FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM

By David Bacon

OAKLAND, CA  (2/6/13)

The Nation - web edition

http://www.thenation.com/article/172711/dignity-campaigns-alternative-vision-immigration-reform

        For some immigrant rights organizations, President Obama's principles for comprehensive immigration reform sound very familiar.  "The idea of the three-part tradeoff, that is, that we get some legalization in trade for guest worker programs and increased immigration enforcement, has been around for a long time," says Lillian Galedo, executive director of Filipino Advocates for Justice in the San Francisco Bay Area.  "We need a new alternative, based on much more progressive ideas.  I don't think the Dignity Campaign is the only alternative, but it's an effort to get us to talk about what we actually want, not just what politicians in Washington DC tell us is politically possible or necessary."
  The Dignity Campaign is a loose network of over 40 immigrant rights and community organizations, unions and churches that has crafted an immigration reform proposal "based on human and labor rights."    (Full disclosure: I am an active supporter of the Dignity Campaign.)   But it is more than a network and a particular proposal.  It is an alternative to the political strategy behind the tradeoff.  And the campaign's member organizations support it because of what they call the bitter impact of earlier tradeoffs over the last 30 years.
    In Tucson, Arizona, the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos calls comprehensive immigration reform, the shorthand name for the tradeoff strategy, "primarily a vague promise used to attract immigrant and Latino voters, [while] border communities have suffered the costs of irresponsible and brutal enforcement-only policies, resulting in death and violence."  A recent study found the federal government spends more today on border and immigration enforcement than on all other law enforcement agencies combined. 

Immigrants and Labor

MARCHING AWAY FROM THE COLD WAR
By David Bacon
Chapter 11 in "Wisconsin Uprising - Labor Fights Back"
Monthly Review Press, 2012

http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb2808/


One sign carried in almost every May Day march of the last few years in the United States says it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they'd just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.

The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they've found here.

In the largest U.S. May Day event this year, marchers were joined by the public workers who protested in the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, who have become symbols of the fight for labor rights in the U.S.  Their message was the same: we all work, we all contribute to our communities and we all have the right to a job, a union and a decent life.

Free Trade Agreements - Killing Jobs and Labor Rights

By David Bacon

http://www.truth-out.org/new-free-trade-agreements-threaten-kill-jobs-and-labor-rights/1318363783

        Last week President Obama broke his campaign commitment and put three free trade agreements up for a vote in Congress.  Business interests, ecstatic at the prospect, promise they'll bring us jobs.  Experience tells us, however, their promises are worthless.

       Nineteen years ago, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was in Congress, supporters said it too would create jobs and protect labor rights.  Before agreeing to new free trade treaties with Colombia, South Korea and Panama, Congress should look at the dismal record.

      Promise #1. A typical pro-business study predicted in 1992 that NAFTA would create 130,000 U.S. jobs in two years, double U.S. exports to Mexico, and create 609,000 jobs there.  Today Tom Donahue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, repeats the promise, saying the three new treaties also "are about creating jobs."

    According to the Economic Policy Institute, however, between 1993 and 2004 the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico ballooned by $107 billion, which cost 1,015,290 U.S. jobs, 123,000 in California.  But although those jobs went south, Mexico lost far more jobs because of the treaty than those relocated from the U.S. 

        Mexico lost a million jobs just in the first year the treaty took effect.  Because the treaty allowed U.S. grain companies to dump corn in Mexico, 1.3 million farmers lost their livelihood as well.  Pork dumping cost another 120,000 jobs.  Eliminating its domestic content laws cost the jobs of thousands of auto parts workers.

Six million people from Mexico came to live and work in the U.S. as a result of this displacement.  The Colombian FTA has a provision identical to that in NAFTA, which led to the corn dumping, so those farmers will be uprooted too.

Oppose the " Free Trade" Agreements

Most of you know that the Americas Program has been analyzing and monitoring the impact of Free Trade Agreements since the inception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early nineties. The conclusion of this work is that FTAs hurt workers, the poor, indigenous peoples, farmers, women and others in every country involved, and they deliver huge advantages to corporations. The result is increased inequality and environmental destruction.

We celebrated the demise of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) when Latin American countries rejected its coercive terms. We have called for renegotiation of NAFTA and written against the Panama and Colombia Free Trade Agreements. We hoped for a new fair trade policy under the Obama administration and we saw those hopes crumble.
Tomorrow the next batch of anti-worker Free Trade Agreements comes before Congress, in the midst of an on-going unemployment crisis. The Panama, Colombia and South Korean FTAs are more of the same unfair terms to favor transnational business as workers and the environment continue to suffer.

Today is the day to act on all we've learned about the negative effects of FTAs. Contact your legislatorsTODAY to let them know we will not accept increasing corporate privileges at the expense of jobs and our environment. Our partners at Witness for Peace have set up an easy way to phone in or to send an email. 

But we have to do it now! This is our last chance to stand up for decent jobs, labor rights and environmental protections, threatened by the FTAs.

Phone in or send an email to Congress today. Together we can make a difference. Please act now!

Meet The New American Sweatshop

Puerto Rico reinstates collective bargaining

Members of the UAW and Puerto Rico’s Servidores Públicos Unidos (SPU)/AFSCME Council 95 and other public employees celebrated May 17 when Gov. Luis Fortuño signed into law a bill reinstating collective bargaining for public employees.

Unlike legislatures in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, which are trying to take away workers’ rights, Puerto Rico’s House and the Senate passed this bill unanimously.

Says SPU President Annette González:

This law is very important for workers since in essence it includes two clauses that allow us to attain two fundamental goals: Restore the acquired rights through the restitution of collective bargaining contracts [and] negotiate the economic aspects that will do justice to workers and their families.  

The law ends a policy imposed in March 2009 when the administration enacted a fiscal emergency law that mandated a two-year freeze on the economic clauses of all collective bargaining agreements. The new law extends the non-economic clauses of the contracts until 2013 and allows workers to negotiate for salaries, benefits, bonuses and other economic aspects.

May Day : Born in the U.S.A,

May Day.  Born in the U.S.A.  by Michael Hirsch

For generations, May Day, the International Workers Day celebrated by working people in more than 200 countries, was ignored in the United States, the country of its origin. In fact, the annual holiday is as American as cherry pie, commemorating as it does the 1886 nationwide general strike in which U.S. trade unionists — largely foreign-born — walked off the job in support of an eight-hour workday.

This year’s observance marks the 125th anniversary of that campaign to humanize the workday — and of the tragedy at Chicago’s Haymarket Square that followed three days later. New Yorkers will mark the day in a rally in support of labor and immigrant rights in lower Manhattan’s Foley Square.

Back in 1886, when the typical work day was 10, 12 or even 14 hours long and joblessness was rife, the demand for a work day limited to eight hours at decent wages was viewed as dangerously radical. The eight-hour-day movement was spearheaded by two organizations, the craft-dominated Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (the forerunner of the American Federation of Labor) and the Knights of Labor.

Will public workers and immigrants march together on May Day?

David Bacon

One sign carried in almost every May Day march of the last few years says it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they'd just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.

The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they've found here.

 This year, those marchers will be joined by the public workers we saw in the state capitol in Madison, whose message was the same: we all work, we all contribute to our communities and we all have the right to a job, a union and a decent life. Past May Day protests have responded to a wave of draconian proposals to criminalize immigration status, and work itself, for undocumented people. The defenders of these proposals have used a brutal logic: if people cannot legally work, they will leave.

But undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They cannot simply go, nor should they. They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that working people in the United States have historically fought to achieve.  In addition, for most immigrants, there are no jobs to return to in the countries from which they've come. The North American Free Trade Agreement alone deepened poverty in Mexico so greatly that, since it took effect, 6 million people came to the United States to work because they had no alternative. 

Instead of recognizing this reality, the U.S. government has attempted to make holding a job a criminal act. Thousands of workers have already been fired, with many more to come. We have seen workers sent to prison for inventing a Social Security number just to get a job. Yet they stole nothing and the money they've paid into Social Security funds now subsidizes every Social Security pension or disability payment. 

Undocumented workers deserve legal status because of that labor—their inherent contribution to society. Past years' marches have supported legalization for the 12 million undocumented people in the United States. In addition, immigrants, unions and community groups have called for repealing the law making work a crime, ending guest worker programs, and guaranteeing human rights in communities along the U.S./Mexico border.

The truth is that undocumented workers and public workers in Wisconsin have a lot in common. In this year's May Day marches, they could all hold the same signs. With unemployment at almost 9%, all working families need the Federal government to set up jobs programs, like those Roosevelt pushed through Congress in the 1930s. If General Electric alone paid its fair share of taxes, and if the troops came home from Iraq and Afghanistan, we could put to work every person wanting a job. Our roads, schools, hospitals and communities would all benefit.

At the same time, immigrants and public workers need strong unions that can push wages up, and guarantee pensions for seniors and healthcare for the sick and disabled. A street cleaner whose job is outsourced, and an undocumented worker fired from a fast food restaurant both need protection for their right to work and support their families.

Instead, some states like Arizona, and now Georgia, have passed measures allowing police to stop any "foreign looking" person on the street, and question their immigration status. Arizona passed a law requiring employers to fire workers whose names are flagged by Social Security. In Mississippi an undocumented worker accused of holding a job can get jail time of 1-5 years, and fines of up to $10,000.

The states and politicians that go after immigrants are the same ones calling for firing public workers and eliminating their union rights. Now a teacher educating our children has no more secure future in her job than an immigrant cleaning an office building at night. The difference between their problems is just one of degree.

 But going after workers has produced a huge popular response. We saw it in Madison in the capitol building. We saw it in the May Day marches when millions of immigrants walked peacefully through the streets. Working people are not asleep. Helped by networks like May Day United, they remember that this holiday itself was born in the fight for the 8-hour day in Chicago more than a century ago.

See post below.

King: All Labor Has Dignity

In light of the clash of wills in Wisconsin, we should remember the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of King’s slogans that we rarely hear is this one: “all labor has dignity.”

King spoke these words in Memphis on March 18, 1968, in the midst of a strike of 1,200 black sanitation workers that had lasted over a month. After rousing them to a fever pitch, King called for a general strike by all workers to shut the city down on behalf of the sanitation workers.

What was the demand of these workers? Improved wages and benefits, yes, but their key demand was that the City of Memphis grant collective bargaining rights and the collection of union dues, without which they knew they could not maintain their union.

These are the very two items that Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker wants to take away from public employees. He knows, as did Mayor Henry Loeb in Memphis, that if you can kill union bargaining rights and dues collection, you can kill the union.

Also like Loeb, Walker is a fiscal conservative. As he cuts taxes for business he raises costs for workers and says ending union power will benefit the fiscal health of the state. Walker wants to end the right of public employees to bargain collectively, even though the workers have accepted a tripling of their health-care costs and a wage cut to help offset the state’s fiscal crisis.

In nearby Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to take away the right to join a union for 14,000 state-financed child-care and home-care workers, among the most overworked and underpaid of public servants. In other states, Republicans want to adopt “right to work” (for less) laws that would take away the requirement that workers in unionized jobs pay union dues. This would undermine the unions while, in King’s words, providing “no rights and no work.”

Even in Midwest states that have been union strongholds, Republicans now have public-employee unions in their cross-hairs. This is the latest and potentially most deadly phase of government assault on unions. Ever since the Reagan counterrevolution, government policies joined with private sector profiteers have vastly worsened racial-economic inequalities, created a gambling casino on Wall Street and paved the way for the current economic crisis.

Conservatives rationalize their attacks on unions by saying unionized public workers are unfairly privileged. But they only look privileged by comparison to the rest of the working class, which is suffering economic catastrophe and has almost entirely lost the benefits of unionization. Yet class envy is an easy means to divide and rule.

Racism is another part of the Republican arsenal of divide and rule. Thanks to the destruction of manufacturing jobs and unions, black and Latino workers in manual occupations have disproportionately suffered high rates of poverty and incarceration as many of their families disintegrate. The one toe-hold many black and minority workers (and especially women among them) still have in the economy is in unionized public employment. Now, the Republicans want to take that away.

Thousands rally for Wisconsin- in Sacramento

Over 6000 union members and supporters rallied at the State Capitol in Sacramento in a candle light vigil to support the working people in Wisconsin in their struggle to defend their  union rights. The financial crisis that began  2007  is an assault on organized  labor, working people, and our democracy.  To date the corporate class is winning. 

While Wall Street has recovered and returned to profitability, working people continue to suffer  15 million unemployed with at least 10 million more under employed.   It is more than a crisis - the reality is that the financial class has looted the U.S. economy.  They took 13 trillion dollars  out of the economy and caused 4 million people to lose their homes and  another 4.5 million to fall into foreclosure.   Now they want you and I to pay for their greed by forcing budget cuts on the states. 

        

David Bacon on Labor Solidarity

EQUALITY AND RIGHTS FOR ALL WORKERS -

The Key to Organizing Unions

By David Bacon
Monthly Review, October 2010
http://www.monthlyreview.org/


        When I was a union organizer, I had an experience that dramatized for me the importance of the cultural and historical traditions that immigrants from Mexico bring with them when they come to the United States, and how they affect the way people organize.
I was working for the United Electrical Workers, one of the most progressive U.S. unions. We were contacted by workers at a huge sweatshop, Cal Spas. Unhappy with low wages and abusive conditions, they began to organize a union. Then the head of the workers' organizing committee was beaten up in the middle of the street in front of the plant. It was an obvious effort to scare the workers and make them stop organizing.
   That night, the workers' committee met and discussed what should be done. Many had no legal immigration status. They had no resources, or even food at home in some cases, because their wages were so low. Yet most people wanted to strike.
   But they did have one big question. They wanted to know if a strike was legal. I told them that strikes under those circumstances in the United States were legal, and they decided that this would be their course of action. The next day, they held a big rally at lunchtime in front of the plant. The committee got up on the back of a flatbed truck and made speeches about the beating and intimidation. At the end of the rally, the committee asked the workers not to go back to work. Hundreds of workers set up picket lines, and the strike was on.
       The next morning, however, there were dozens of people at the plant office, applying for jobs. The company spent a day signing them up. The following morning, the police arrived in a massive show of force. Escorted by the cops, these new workers crossed the picket lines and went to work.
        The strike committee turned to me. One worker, in a tone that indicated he thought I had lied to them, said that I had promised the strike would be legal. I said it was, and they pointed to the strikebreakers. How can it be legal, they asked, if there are people going in to work?

Different Concepts of Rights

    The difference in understanding is crucial. They meant one thing when they said legal, and I meant another. In Mexico, during a legal strike, workers can put red and black flags across the doors into the plant, and the company must remain closed until the strike is over. No one can legally go in to work. The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult for most workers to get legal status for independent unions and strikes.
In the United States, unions do not have to be registered with the government, and anyone can form one. But there is little real legal protection for unions, and they have few rights. A company can legally break a strike, just as Cal Spas did.

Mexico labor solidarity

Mexico was the focus of the Saturday July 10 luncheon session at the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference. The two speakers were uniquely qualified to address the growing repression of union under the government of Felipe Calderón.

Mexican Unions Fight Repression with International Solidarity from Talking Union on Vimeo.

Benedicto Martinez Orozco is a Co-president of the Frente Auténtico del Trabajois Translating is Robin Alexander, International Affairs Director of the UE. (We will post Alexander’s remarks later in the week.)

The Authentic Workers’ Front or Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT) is an independent federation of labor unions, worker owned cooperatives, and farmworker and community organizations. A women’s network operates within all of the FAT’s sectors and as part of the leadership.

For more on the FAT, read this from the UE.

For the latest on labor in Mexico, Talking Union recommends Dan Labotz’s Mexican Labor News & Analysis