Unionists Provide Large Share of Huge Pro-Immigrant Rally

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
Aided by a huge contingent of unionists, at least 10,000 people jammed the U.S. Capitol lawn on April 10 to demand comprehensive immigration reform.  

Led by advocates for Latinos, Asian-Americans and African-Americans, the crowd demanded Congress write legislation providing a path to citizenship and other legal rights for the estimated 11 million undocumented people in the U.S.

And that includes the right to unionize and collectively bargain, said Auto Workers President Bob King, one of five union leaders to address the crowd.

Organizers called the rally as bipartisan groups of lawmakers are on the verge of unveiling their versions of comprehensive reform.  The reform should include not only a path to citizenship, but provisions for family unification, and an end to deportations, which are running at 1,400 daily, speakers said.

"My students tell me, ‘I’m afraid I’ll come home one day and find my parents have been deported.’  No child in any country should live in fear like that,” National Education Association President Lilly Eskelsen, a 6th-grade teacher from Utah, told the crowd.

King encouraged the crowd to keep up the pressure on Congress.  “Change never happens unless people come together to march, rally, demand and sit in,” the veteran activist, unionist and civil rights crusader declared.

“We commit to stay in the movement, to demand a path to citizenship, to families being reunited and that workers – immigrant workers and other workers – have the right to collectively bargain.  Hasta la Victoria!” he concluded.

And Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., one of the House working group drafting that chamber’s version of a comprehensive bill, sounded the same theme.  He exhorted the crowd, in English and Spanish, to keep the pressure on lawmakers until immigrants not only get citizenship through the new law, but the right to vote.

“The time is now for freedom!  The time is now for equality!  We need to bring 11 million workers out of the shadows and into citizenship once and for all,” declared another unionist from the podium, Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry.

“And they want us to stay in the streets, to keep marching, to keep pressuring Congress to pass common-sense immigration reform,” she concluded.   

The comments from Henry, King and Gutierrez point to one high hurdle backers of comprehensive immigration reform still face: The attitude of the ruling House GOP, many of whose Radical Right/Tea Party members are dead set against any immigration legislation at all.  Others are willing to grant a path to citizenship of 15 years or more.

“Work hard, keep pushing us, and we’ll have immigration reform,” Gutierrez said, to cheers.

But one UAW officer from Michigan gave an example of the more-common attitude in the House GOP.  He told PAI that his Latino members in the state’s “thumb” – where thousands of workers pick fruit and vegetables – have gotten no response at all from their lawmaker, GOP Rep. Candice Miller.

Nevertheless, lawmakers were optimistic a comprehensive immigration reform bill would emerge this month.  One, Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., predicted he and his seven colleagues in bargaining there would have “a strong foundation” of a bill in time for hearings scheduled for the week of April 15.

Union leaders emphasize immigration reform helps all workers.  That’s because venal and vicious employers exploit undocumented workers and threaten them with deportation if they organize.   And those employers also force native workers to accept low pay and no benefits, under the threat of being replaced by undocumented workers who can’t legally fight back.

Besides Henry, King, Eskelsen and the Farm Workers officer, longtime activist and Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta issued the rally’s closing call to action.

- report by Mark Gruenberg, PAI