Why we want a freedom agenda.
The night time Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York Metropolis, he referred to as his triumph “the victory of the Bangladeshi aunty who knocked on door after door till her ft throbbed and her knuckles ached … of the Gambian uncle who lastly noticed himself and his battle in a marketing campaign for town that he calls residence.” Countering arguments that defending immigrants is an election loser, incompatible with combating for jobs and residing requirements of all employees, Mamdani answered, “Dreaming calls for solidarity … A lifetime of dignity shouldn’t be reserved for a lucky few. … We may be free and we may be fed.”
“We may be fed” is a name not only for municipal grocery shops however for attacking the company domination that retains employees hungry and indignant. To win an election, he says, candidates should defend employees’ class pursuits. However he combines this with “We may be free,” which implies ending raids and detentions. Divided households hear that decision, and white employees with German or Italian surnames ought to keep in mind it from Ellis Island greater than a century in the past. On Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, these held in detention by racist anti-Chinese language restrictions heard it too. It was a name to carry households collectively right here, within the US
Mamdani’s embrace of immigrants acknowledges a fundamental actuality. Fashionable migration is the product of the exploitation of immigrant-sending nations, and of wars which are each a legacy of colonialism and an effort to maintain a neocolonial system in place. Enforced debt, low wages, and useful resource extraction produce displacement and migration, but in addition make nations engaging to traders. They relocate manufacturing, benefiting from the huge gulf created in the usual of residing between the worldwide south and the worldwide north.
This technique criminalizes all people who find themselves displaced—migrants actually, but in addition the unemployed and homeless who lose jobs in wealthy nations. Employees are pitted in opposition to one another, and political defenders of the system use this competitors to maintain them from altering it.
Militarism is the enforcer, whether or not ICE on the border and in immigrant communities, or armed intervention overseas and the specter of it. Immigrant employees endure consequently, however so do employees basically. Large budgets for ICE and “protection” take in cash for assembly social wants.
Immigrant communities and unions name as a substitute for a freedom agenda: for household reunification and authorized standing for folks already right here; for labor rights for immigrant employees; and for ending mass detentions and deportations. Migrants who depend upon work within the US need to make authorized migration doable, however with out being pressured into company guestworker visa applications. These communities additionally search political and social change at residence, and an finish to treaties like NAFTA, in order that migration turns into voluntary, not a alternative pressured by starvation and poverty.
In the course of the Chilly Warfare, Chicano and Asian American communities endured the best wave of deportation in historical past (1.1 million in 1954) and the biggest recruitment of braceros (450,000 in 1955). As a result of the left had been expelled from most US unions because the Chilly Warfare started, the dominant right-wing ideology in lots of unions was hostility to immigrants. Ultimately, that led to help by the AFL-CIO for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Management Act.
That regulation included a restricted legalization for some undocumented folks, however it additionally included poison capsules that provoked fierce opposition by a brand new wave of left-wing unionists and immigrant neighborhood activists. The regulation’s worst characteristic—employer sanctions—made it a criminal offense for an employer to rent a employee with out papers, and for that individual to work. The AFL-CIO supported the invoice, asserting that if undocumented immigrants couldn’t legally work, they wouldn’t come, and people right here would go away.
Present Concern
Activists like Mike Garcia, who turned a nationwide chief of the janitors’ union, warned it could be used to make immigrant employees weak to retaliation—and it did. When Garcia’s union organized janitors cleansing buildings for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and different tech corporations within the early Nineties, many have been fired. Related examples multiplied. Making immigrant employees extra weak solely made organizing more durable. Employees’ lifestyle didn’t go up.
Labor opposition to the regulation grew, and in lots of unions immigrant employees turned organizers and officers. Lastly, in 1999, the AFL-CIO conference in Los Angeles referred to as for repealing sanctions, for one more immigration amnesty, and for ending guestworker applications. Many immigrant communities started taking a look at unions as defenders, and union organizing amongst immigrants mushroomed. Regardless of raids and firings underneath each Democratic and Republican administrations, the political alliance of immigrants with the communities round them has turn out to be an engine for social change.
In Los Angeles’s civil-rights upsurge of the Sixties, the coed and antiwar actions amongst Chicanos turned a bedrock for office organizing. Many leaders from the left—from Bert Corona to Maria Elena Durazo—fought to get the labor motion to simply accept the rising actions of undocumented employees. Political change, they argued, comes by means of their alliance with African American and white employees.
When Governor Pete Wilson gained his 1994 marketing campaign on an excessive anti-immigrant platform, the fee was excessive. Tons of of hundreds of immigrants turned naturalized residents, and with their native-born kids they turned voters. Non-citizen union members went door to door urging help for political candidates they couldn’t vote for themselves, as they’ve executed in each election since.
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Their alliance was typically troublesome, however collectively they remodeled Los Angeles’s metropolis politics. The bastion of the open store has turn out to be one of many nation’s most progressive metropolis governments, with an African American mayor from the left and 4 DSA members on town council.
The essential political dynamics underlying change in different California cities are related. Probably the most highly effective union in San Francisco at present is Unite Right here Native 2, the place a Chinese language and Latino majority of resort employees share energy with smaller numbers of Black and white members. Their enemies at present are Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, who spend huge quantities of cash on municipal elections. Most of the teams doing the combating are based mostly in immigrant communities, working in broad labor formations like Jobs with Justice that ally them with unions and employees throughout the board.
This isn’t a simple-minded argument that altering demographics is future. Immigrant radicalism has modified this nation’s politics all through its historical past. And whereas California has at all times had a working class with a big share of immigrants, most states have a historical past of immigration as effectively. Within the Midwest and South, related alliances have gotten extra vital politically. The present raid regime is driving help for them, reasonably than the hostility and division Trump and Stephen Miller hope for.
In Omaha, Nebraska, and plenty of small meatpacking cities, the variety of Mexican immigrants has elevated considerably within the final three many years. ICE raided one firm, Glen Valley Meals, earlier this 12 months and threatens to construct the Cornhusker Clink, whereas the state is constructing its personal detention middle.
Final 12 months, Margo Juarez, born and introduced up in Omaha, was elected to Nebraska’s unicameral state senate, its first Latina, representing the historic South Omaha barrio. After the Glen Valley raid, she visited the detainees in detention, and emerged in tears after speaking with girls who had determined to self-deport to Mexico, leaving their US-born kids behind. She then made an unannounced try to examine the Cornhusker Clink and slammed Governor Jim Pillen and US Senator Pete Ricketts for supporting ICE’s raids.
Juarez is a Democrat, however in 2024 Dan Osborn, a strike chief who jettisoned the Democratic Get together, nearly beat Republican Deb Fischer for senator as an impartial. Now he’s working in opposition to Ricketts, attacking the company cash behind him, but in addition interesting to anti-immigrant voters with an advert providing to assist Trump construct the border wall. Even in conservative Nebraska, nonetheless, the room for this type of marketing campaign is shrinking. In rural meatpacking cities, immigrants at the moment are typically the bulk, and their kids will quickly be voters.
In the meantime, the UFCW has mounted organizing drives whose success depends upon uniting meatpacking employees throughout the traces of race and nationality. Nebraska was as soon as a stronghold of the CIO’s radical Packinghouse Employees, and will rediscover its radical roots in a brand new period. Campaigning by telling immigrants that they don’t seem to be a part of Nebraska’s working class is a technique that places a progressive future in jeopardy, not one which brings it nearer.
In rural North Carolina, the identical tables are turning. The large Smithfield slaughterhouse in Tar Heel was organized a decade in the past after a battle of just about twenty years. That victory started to look doable when immigrant Mexican employees stopped the traces and marched in one of many enormous Could Day rallies of 2006. African American employees, seeing their motion, then shut the plant to demand a vacation for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Many Mexicans have been pushed from the slaughterhouse in mass firings and raids, however that in-plant alliance and broad neighborhood help lastly gained a union contract.
This fall, when infamous Border Patrol head Greg Bovino terrorized Charlotte’s streets with bands of militarized brokers, neighborhood activists shaped a broad community to observe their motion, calling their immigrant-protective effort “Bless Your Coronary heart.” As Alain Stephens of The Intercept recounted, when the Border Patrol moved into Appalachia, brokers have been met with organized hostility in Harlan County, well-known in labor historical past for its militant coal strikes. In rural Boone, after brokers picked up employees at two Mexican eating places, 150 native folks held indicators saying “Time to Soften the ICE!”
ICE has introduced it should proceed focusing on Southern communities, with raids in Mississippi and Louisiana referred to as Swamp Sweep, and in New Orleans referred to as Operation Catahoula Crunch. Right here too they’ve met neighborhood opposition. Even in conservative areas, the raid regime is closing the political area for marketing campaign formulation attacking firms whereas limiting immigration.
Bernie Sanders slammed the Democrats after the 2024 election, accusing them of abandoning the working class, and plenty of employees know the sorry historical past. Bush negotiated NAFTA, however Clinton signed it. Obama campaigned on opposing NAFTA whereas telling Canada he had no intention of adjusting it. However, Democratic Get together centrists nonetheless argue that candidates in 2026 ought to assault Trump and company financial insurance policies however name for restrictions on immigration and extra immigration enforcement.
This was the tactic utilized by Biden and Harris. Centrist Democrats and Republicans negotiated an immigration invoice in 2023 after which campaigned in opposition to Trump from the appropriate, attacking him for telling Republicans in Congress to not vote for it. That invoice would have made it a lot more durable to use for asylum. It proposed $3 billion for including extra detention facilities to the 200 current ones run for revenue by personal corporations just like the GEO Group (previously the union-busting Wackenhut Safety Firm).
A latest New York Instances article by Christopher Flavelle, “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Misplaced People’ Religion in Immigration,” argues that these measures weren’t anti-immigrant sufficient. The proposal responded to a media-driven frenzy that consistently referred to an immigration “disaster,” referred to as the border “damaged,” and handled migrants as criminals. Political operatives in Washington then took polls, saying that the general public needed draconian enforcement, and suggested candidates that going in opposition to this tide would result in election losses.
In the long run, confronted with a alternative between Biden-Harris’s and Trump’s rhetoric demonizing migrants, many citizens—employees included—opted for the actual factor. The technique value the votes of huge numbers of Latinos, Asian People, and immigrant-rights and labor activists. As a technique for Democrats, it was a bust, and it demobilized the social gathering when Trump used the hysteria to justify even higher immigration terror. Over half the individuals who voted for Trump cited immigration as their prime problem, however solely 3 p.c of Harris voters did, in line with a Navigator post-election survey.
Politically self-interested polling by the media is a lure for progressives, as a result of combating for social change requires an organizer’s strategies. When unions begin an organizing drive, they don’t ballot employees to search out out if a majority helps the boss. Worry of the boss typically impacts the bulk. The organizer’s job is to assist folks lose that concern, discover these employees who need to battle, and construct a majority group to battle with.
Employees are consistently bombarded by false concepts about immigration and immigrants that maintain immigrants answerable for the whole lot from poverty and misplaced jobs to crime. They then hear appeals to help anti-immigrant enforcement. Simply as unions do in organizing drives, progressives need to battle on the terrain of concepts, telling the reality in regards to the causes of migration, plant closures, and poverty. To arrange for political change, employees need to be satisfied to help the rights and welfare of all working folks, not just a few.
New York Metropolis’s election was not a ballot. It was a radical training in what’s doable, what employees actually need, and who the working class actually is. It was an training about capitalism that employees want. As training director for the AFL-CIO, after John Sweeney dumped the chilly warriors in 1995, Invoice Fletcher tried to fulfill that want. He developed a program, Frequent Sense Economics, that unions might use to develop a deep understanding of capitalism—and language for speaking it within the office.
Working-class communities want a political training program. As an alternative, centrists would inform them there’s not sufficient to go round and urge them to vote for politicians who will be sure that they get their share—in opposition to different employees. However the future is with Steve Tesfagiorgis, who helped lead Teamsters Native 320 to a contract on the College of Minnesota. “There are greater than 600 African immigrant employees on the college,” he says. “Each one in all us got here to this nation afraid. We have been instructed to work arduous and preserve our heads down. Teamsters for a Democratic Union confirmed us we will battle again. Nobody is coming to save lots of us. If we wish respect, we have to battle for it ourselves.”
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Love and Solidarity,
John Nichols
Government Editor, The Nation
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