Opinion: No resolution for Cesar Chavez

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Labor leader Cesar Chavez would have turned 80 last week, as this blog noted, but you wouldn’t know it in Congress. While a House resolution sponsored by Rep. Joe Baca (D-Rialto) has languished for two months, Senate Republicans shot down a similar measure because Rep. Mitch McConnell (R-Kent.) wanted to throw in a casual mention of Chavez’s opposition to illegal immigration, and refused to give the go-ahead to the resolution without his requested wording.

It might seem strange to imagine Chavez protesting the people who, generations later, would adopt his ‘Si, se puede’ motto as their own. But Arizona-born Chavez did march against illegal immigration in the late 1960s.

Labor movements, particularly Chavez’s farm workers, suffered when businesses hired illegal workers to break strikes. But today’s unions see immigrants--illegal or not--as a major source of membership and political clout, just as they did in the early part of the previous century. It’s quite clear then that not only did McConnell’s objection put present-day politicking ahead of properly honoring a hero of the past, but it also obfuscated the shifting ground of the immigration debate.

The Democrats did a little obfuscation of their own in a Democratic National Committee-issued statement chastising McConnell and calling the Dems the ‘party that continues to honor the legacy of Cesar Chavez.’ While that’s true, the DNC stops short of noting that in 1960s, the Democrats were on Chavez’s side of the illegal immigration debate, and lobbied against the Bracero program’s guest workers. For more on the long history of the U.S. immigration debate, see here. (Thanks to the Immigration Prof Blog for the link.)