“Chavez understood that an infinite supply of cheap labor would drive down real wages.”
This week, the Senate is supposedly voting on the biggest immigration overhaul in decades. That is a polite way of saying that US workers are on the chopping block. The Senate’s “border deal” is a terrible bargain hashed out behind closed doors, one that sells out the American working class in favor of illegal immigrants, the biggest corporations, and Wall Street. To appreciate the harms that would befall workers from this bill, we’d do well to look to one of the heroes of the modern left: Cesar Chavez.
A co-founder of the United Farm Workers, Chavez is remembered today as a fierce champion of immigrants’ rights. His name adorns countless buildings and roadways across the American Southwest. Yet history is complex, and Chavez was, too. Though he is venerated by contemporary progressive activists, Chavez was a fierce opponent of illegal migration. He would have had little time for the open-borders agitation of today’s left liberals. In fact, he even encouraged his colleagues to report illegal aliens to federal authorities.
“Chavez understood that an infinite supply of cheap labor would drive down real wages.”
There was a good reason for this stance: Chavez understood that an infinite supply of cheap labor would drive down real wages. He knew that illegal immigration is just another form of labor arbitrage that undercuts worker power. Allowing unlawfully present agricultural workers to flood the labor market would burst any picket line and cripple any effort to organize for better outcomes. In the end, Chavez was more concerned with getting results than retweets.
America’s big corporations want cheap labor. They don’t want to raise wages or improve working conditions. They’d prefer to maintain the status quo of stagnant wages, unsafe workplaces, increasingly oppressive scheduling practices, and countless other harms. They want employees who will work as cheaply as possible, which means they want massive immigration flows—legal and illegal—to continue.
At the heart of the new border bill is a radical idea: legal provisions that, after a quick intake screening, would grant immediate work authorization to individuals requesting asylum. That might sound nice, until you recall that “asylum” is a primary vector of immigration-system abuse. Thousands upon thousands of illegal migrants claim that they’re entitled to “asylum,” but not even 20 percent of claimants end up proving it in court when facing removal proceedings. But now they will get work permits as soon as we can give them away.
By Josh Hawley
