Progressive union leaders are ditching ordinary Americans as they embrace illegal migrants in Los Angeles, just eight months after voters elected a president who declared his solidarity with ordinary Americans.
“In the labor movement, we were built on this word, and that word is ‘Solidarity,’” union leader Liz Shuler announced Monday at a raucous rally on Capitol Hill, adding:
Solidarity is what our brother David Huerta was showing up for last Friday, when he stood up for [illegal] immigrant workers in his community [Los Angeles] and when he was legally exercising his constitutional rights … That’s why I’m here, bringing the voices of 15 million working people in the AFL-CIO standing strong together to … end these unjust ICE raids right now! Ahora! [Today]
The arrested migrants “are our neighbors, our co-workers, these are people who are looking for a better life and are contributing to our economy,” Shuler told HuffPost.
But Americans’ wages are forced down when migrants can cross the border into Americans’ workplaces, just as strike breakers cross a picket line by striking workers at a workplace.
David Huerta is the head of the SEIU-United Service Workers West, which includes many illegal migrants. He was arrested during Friday’s chaotic blockade of a federal building in Los Angeles and faces several years in jail. He said in a Friday statement:
Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice.
The progressives’ solidarity with wage-cutting illegal migrants was underlined by Shuler’s fellow speaker, Indian migrant Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who is the former head of the Democrats’ progressive caucus:
I am also here as a naturalized citizen and a proud immigrant doing immigrant rights in the streets for 20 years … I have one word for you today: Enough! Enough of these mass ICE raids that are sweeping up innocent people of every legal status, tearing apart families and our communities … and the arrests of community members and leaders like the incredible David Huerta! … He is somebody who was simply standing up peacefully for justice, someone who is one of the best of our country’s labor movement. Free him immediately! …
It is actually in the interest of all American people to stand up for these rights. They know that dividing us is what will make them strong, and they know that when we are united, nobody can divide us.
Jayapal is a leading advocate for more immigration — regardless of the impact on Americans — because new migrants often depend on government aid and so mostly vote for the Democratic Party.
The unions’ turnabout is a revolutionary shift from 1924, when unions provided the leaders and political power needed to reduce migration into the United States. After the turmoil of World War II, the curbs on migration allowed the creation of a vast and prosperous middle class. That prosperity stalled when Congress reopened migration in 1965, and then doubled it in 1990.
Since 1990, the federal government has quietly invited many millions of legal and illegal migrants to cross the 50-state union line that marks the border between Americans’ society and the rest of the world.
The policy of extracting migrants from poor countries has driven wages down, pushed up housing costs, reduced wealth-generating productivity, while redirecting vast profits into the stock markets.
But under Trump’s low migration policy, wages are turning upwards as employers compete for new hires.
Progressives ignore the economic and civic costs of migration in their pursuit of political power and personal status. Josh Marshall, for example, a prominent progressive blogger, suggested that migrants who take jobs from Americans should not be deported:
a raid on a Home Depot is literally an effort to arrest people who are eager to work and whose labor is in great demand. It’s about as far as you can get from just going after the bad guys, as the White House routinely claims.
The demonstration at the Capitol included a speech from a Spanish-language, illegal migrant who said through a translator that she has been in the United States for 40 years. “Our communities deserve respect, we do not deserve persecution — we are the heart of this country,” she said at the labor leaders gathered around her to cheer.
The woman was wearing a T-shirt provided by CASA de Maryland. The group’s diverse leader did not speak at the event.
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