The venerable Hispanic activist Cesar Chavez is venerated no more. After the New York Times reported that he sexually abused women and girls, the union organizer was posthumously cancelled. States and cities announced they would stop celebrating Cesar Chavez Day and many streets and plazas dropped his name.
The sudden cancellation likely marks the end of attempts to turn Chavez into the Hispanic MLK. Some conservatives see something else at work here. They claim Chavez was a border hawk and imply the sexual abuse claims were a convenient way to get rid of an unreliable leftist icon. That’s the argument put forth by Mark Krikorian, executive director of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, in National Review last week.
“Chavez really was a border hawk, because illegal immigration (and guest worker programs) really did undermine the efforts of U.S. citizen farmworkers to better their lot,” Krikorian writes. “And it wasn’t just some ancillary thing — fighting illegal immigration was at the center of his advocacy for American farmworkers.”
Krikorian says that the evidence for Chavez’s opposition to illegal immigration made him “ripe for cancellation.” He suggests, partly in jest, that conservatives should still try to turn the labor organizer’s birthday into National Border Control Day.
It’s a common meme for immigration restrictionists to point to Chavez as one of their own. The Hispanic activist did at times oppose illegal immigrants taking jobs from the farmworkers he represented. It makes political sense to claim a left-wing hero as an advocate for sensible immigration policies, to give the position broader appeal. That’s why immigration hawks are also eager to put forth liberal Democrats Barbara Jordan and Eugene McCarthy as prominent exemplars of immigration restriction. No one would call those two reactionary bigots.
But unlike Jordan and McCarthy, Chavez did not remain an immigration hawk. He came to embrace illegal immigration, and his one-time opposition was only concerned with the immediate interests of his labor union. When those interests changed, he came to see illegal immigrants as potential members of his union and defended them.
With his cancellation, conservatives can finally be honest about Chavez’s opinions. We gain nothing by pedestaling a child sex abuser as an immigration patriot.
Krikorian finds ample evidence that Chavez opposed illegal immigrants in the ’60s and ’70s. The Hispanic organizer publicly opposed the Bracero Program that brought migrant workers to the U.S., reported illegal alien strikebreakers to the feds, created the United Farm Workers’ “Campaign against Illegals,” and even helped form a vigilante Border Patrol unit to use violence against border crossers. He used terms like “wetback” and “illegal” to describe these migrants and made at least one comment that sounded like he opposed all illegal immigration.
Krikorian concludes that Chavez’s position was more than just being opposed to illegal alien strikebreakers. But that’s not really true.
As early as the 1970s, Chavez and the United Farm Workers made it clear that they supported illegal immigrants and wanted them legalized. They just opposed employers using them to replace UFW members.
Chavez laid out his immigration stance in a 1974 letter to the San Francisco Examiner. The newspaper had said in an editorial that his union opposed illegal immigrants and supported the federal government’s efforts to deport them. But Chavez denied the claim. In the letter, he advocated for amnesty and “the liberalization of immigration laws to make immigration from Mexico more equitable with that of immigration from Europe.” He just didn’t like when illegals, whom he called “our brothers and sisters,” were used as strikebreakers.
Moreover, the UFW fought to ensure that legislation, such as California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act, did not exclude migrants from its protections. As early as 1973, it opposed federal efforts to ban the hiring of illegals in farm labor.
Left-wing activist David Bacon, who worked for Chavez as a UFW organizer in the ’70s, wrote in 2011 that the union had long been composed largely of illegal immigrants and that it opposed immigration raids:
Undocumented workers have always made up most of the members of the UFW, because they make up a majority of the farm labor workforce. Chavez and the UFW organized all farm workers, people with visas and the undocumented alike. Many of the union’s most active members and leaders have been undocumented, and the union fought to make sure that California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act didn’t deny workers their organizing rights based on their immigration status. It fought against immigration raids, especially during strikes and organizing drives.
In 1975, the UFW passed a resolution welcoming illegal immigrants into the union. The union accelerated its recruitment of this group that Chavez once thought of as “scabs.” By the 1980s, Chavez had dropped any pretense of opposing illegal immigration and fully embraced the cause. He championed the 1986 amnesty act, and fellow UFW leader Dolores Huerta lobbied Washington lawmakers to pass the bill, which legalized millions of illegal immigrants.
This record should undermine any claims that Chavez was a border hawk. Of course, any hint of opposition to open borders is enough to make leftists queasy, and some of Chavez’s past actions and comments cause them discomfort. Nevertheless, he only opposed illegals so far as they undermined the UFW’s interests, and he came around to the left-wing view eventually.
Before this year, there was political utility in repurposing Chavez as a border hawk. But now that he stands in the public eye as a sex predator who targeted children, he’s no longer useful for the immigration restriction cause. If one wants to find a liberal hero who made the case for serious immigration reform, Barbara Jordan and Eugene McCarthy are still useful. Both made strong cases for reducing immigration to benefit America, and neither was credibly accused of pedophilia.
The Border Hawk Cesar Chavez meme can be put to bed.
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