Labor Awakes to Immigration Reform At Last

 

 

 

You remember Illegal Immigrants, don’t you?

 

Before the 2008 election, the 12 million or so mostly Mexican souls who live and work in the United States illegally were a hot-button issue. The Bush Administration addressed the issue on multiple fronts:

 

·        They tried to pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform with all the political grace and skill of a dog trying to pass a swallowed peachpit – and got about the same result.

·        They built walls on the border, ignoring the irony that the laborers building the walls were often illegal immigrants. The net effect of the walls was to boost ladder sales in Mexico.

·        They raided homes and factories in the dead of night or in mid-shift, spreading the kind of terror in the name of the law that Hitler and Stalin would have approved.  The net effect of that was to produce a groundswell of folks reminding the Bush Administration that this was America, where that kind of crap wasn’t supposed to happen.

·        They encouraged the far-right fringe to howl “Deport ‘Em All!” to the entertainment of the Republican party faithful, whose idea of informed discussion is hearing whatever idea they’ve managed to hold repeated.

 

And then the economy went to Hell and the administration had to console itself with torturing the occasional captive at Gitmo while The Decider made excuses for not noticing that an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” meant the Constitution, not his rich cronies. No time for immigration reform.

 

Now the Obama Administration has found time to raise the issue again, and this time there’s a chance that something sensible might result. And no, that’s not because President Obama thought of it on his daily jog on the waters of the Potomac. It’s because Organized Labor, which went into a coma during the Reagan administration, has come awake at last.

 

This month, the Service Employees International Union and the Laborers International Union of North America called for a plan to bring the illegals out of the shadows, help them organize and fight for the rights of working men and women – in short, common sense immigration reform.

 

So did folks from the AFL-CIO, the United Farm Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers International.

 

But wait a minute – aren’t these the very folks whose jobs the illegal immigrants are supposed to be taking? Shouldn’t they be joining the moon-howl of the “Deport ‘Em All!” righties?

 

No, they say.

 

Hell no!

 

Labor has correctly figured out that allowing a permanent underclass to be exploited without protection of the law or hope for the future is a tool that hurts all workers and benefits only the rich employers. And the only way to fight that kind of oppression is for all workers to stick together. You remember – they used to call it solidarity.

 

I wrote a book along these lines, “Opening the Borders” (Level 4 Press, 2007), and there are others, but it’s not going to be books that finally bring about immigration reform. It’s going to be the working men and women of America and their unions realizing that anything that oppresses any part of labor is oppressing all of labor.

 

Yes we can! Si Se Puede!

 

And it’s damned well about time.

 

 

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