Unionists Provide Large Share of Huge Pro-Immigrant Rally
Thursday, April 11, 2013
(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