May 1, a day of worker celebration, began in the U.S. around the struggle for the eight-hour day. Now it is honored across the world, but largely ignored in the U.S. How fitting that this year, immigrant workers from across the world have revived the day, marching to defend their dignity.
The new immigrants seek precisely what has made our country great: They thirst for democracy and freedom, a job and security for their families, for citizenship rights and to leave repression and poverty behind.
Lower-wage workers in this country – many of them African Americans – worry that employers are using immigrants to displace them, to undermine good jobs, force wages down and weaken labor organizing. But the answer to that isn’t to turn on other poor workers.
Part of the anger directed at immigrants comes from workers understandably scared as manufacturing jobs are shipped abroad, and lower-paying service jobs take their place. Global corporations, not immigrants, are taking those jobs abroad. The answer isn’t cleaning up immigration, but electing leaders who will challenge the corporate hold over our trade policies.
Each wave of immigration inspires hot anti-immigrant anger and rhetoric. Even African-Americans migrants from the South were once cursed as scabs on the “white worker.” Now Mexican and other undocumented immigrants are said to threaten African Americans, not to speak of the entire “American way of life.”
Immigrants of previous generations, including African Americans, should see the new undocumented workers as allies, not threats. They share with African Americans a history of repression, of being subjected to back-breaking, soul-deadening work.
They also share a common heritage. Less than 10 percent of enslaved Africans ended up in the United States. The vast majority were shipped to Latin America and the West Indies. Numerous Asian workers were also brought to the Caribbean and Latin America to serve as cheap labor.
When the right wing of the House forced through its latest anti-immigrant legislation, which would criminalize 11 million people living in America and all those who provided them with any services, insult turned to threat. And so in April and on May 1, across the country, immigrants and their supporters took to the streets, reigniting this era’s civil rights struggle.
In today’s movement, many undocumented immigrants have already lost their jobs, been detained or deported, and separated from their families. But like the African-American freedom fighters of the 1960s, their minds are “stayed on freedom.”
As I see it, their rallying cry – “Sm se puede” (“Yes We Can”) – is Spanish for “We Shall Overcome.”
No human being is “illegal.” All human beings have human rights. Let no legislation pass that violates this fundamental principle. We must not create a permanent, exploited underclass in America that, like slaves, have no path to citizenship.