‘Racism is a cover, but it’s all about cheap labor,’ says LACLA leader
More than 700 people turned out in Sacramento on March 28 to protest the appearance of Thomas Homan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Homan had been invited to speak at a “town hall” by the right wing Sacramento Sheriff, Scott Jones.
Homan didn’t get the welcome he expected. Mothers and grandmothers spoke against ripping families apart. Hundreds chanted, “No ban! No fear! Say it loud, say it clear! Immigrants are welcome here!”
“The community voiced a solid ‘Get out!’” according to Mackenzie Wilson, a local organizer. “The rhetoric [Homan and Jones] used is that they would come after career criminals. But we know it is going to be the mother coming home from work with a broken tail light.”
Bernard Marks, in his eighties, a survivor of Auschwitz death camp, compared the targeting of migrant workers with the Nazi assault on Jews in Germany.
“When I was a little boy in Poland,” he recalled, “for no other reason but for being Jewish, I was hauled off by the Nazis. My family died in Auschwitz and Dachau.”
“Stand up here, Sheriff Jones,” he demanded. “Don’t forget – history is not on your side.”
Al Rojas is an original founder of the United Farm Workers union and current president of the AFL-CIO’s Northern California Chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LACLA).
Rojas points out that “the corporate agenda is to attack labor – the minimum wage, worker’s compensation, health and safety, even social security. “
“Unions won these benefits because the working class was organized and unified,” he says. “That gave us power. They intend to take away that power.”
“Racism is used as a cover, but it’s all about economics – cheap labor,” says Rojas. “They want guest workers, they want to break up and expel migrant families, they want temporary, single workers, both men and women, not only in agriculture, but also in the expanding service industry.”
What will that mean, he asks. “No right to report labor violations. No right to organize. No freedom of movement. No path to citizenship. Recruited in Mexico, desperate for work and totally controlled – by the employer, by Homeland Security, by the Mexican government.”
That’s why we need to defend migrant workers here and to support the agricultural workers in San Quintin Baja California, Mexico, he says. Paid less than a dollar an hour, they are calling for a U.S. boycott of Driscoll’s berries. Millions of flats get imported here, summer and winter.
“In March, we gathered in San Ysidro, at the border,’ Rojas relates — “travelling from all parts of California, to support these workers, who organized protests on the other side and took over the Mexican border station.”
“Like the confrontation with ICE in Sacramento, this was an historic first step.”
