Posted on 11/16/2002 9:46:35 AM PST by ODDITHER
When Coloradoans went to the polls on November 5th,2002 they were asked to vote yes on Referendum E. "Shall the thirty- first day of March be designated a legal holiday for observing the birthday of Cesar Estrada Chavez as "Cesar Chavez day"?
Approximately 80% of Coloradoans voted NO. This included counties such as Conejos and Costilla Counties in which hispanics are in the majority Initiatives and Referendums have become a tool of special interest groups to rally the voting population to the polls. However, sometimes they can backfire, as in the case of the Cesar Chavez referendum. Some believe that this measure was put on the ballot to give hispanic voters (who generally vote Democratic) a reason to come to the polls. The outcome of the vote shows that Coloradoans are not as easily misled as Californians.
Who is Cesar Chavez and why does he warrant a special holiday? Was Cesar a hero or tool of labor unions? Did he help the plight of immigrant workers or did he actually make illegal immigration worse and migrant worker's wages decrease?
The following article is from the VDARE web site. VDARE is a project of The Center for American Unity which is a national non-profit educational organization dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century. The Center's education program emphasizes that America's common language, English, is the basic bond uniting and strengthening the United States.
Steve Sailer is president of the Human Biodiversity Institute. And the author of the essay found below.
Well, I suppose that's a better way to memorialize Chavez than letting the kids hang out at the mall. But we can be confident that the propaganda fed the students will portray him the way the Chicano verbalist elite prefers: as the patron saint of the reconquista of Alta California by La Raza
" The truth about Chavez is much more interesting. A third-generation American citizen from Yuma, Arizona, he was first and foremost a labor leader, as crafty and sometimes ruthless as any effective union boss must be. Today, Mexican-American educators and politicians have one simple priority: more immigration. Every warm body with a brown skin increases their clout. But, then and now, union leaders have the opposite need. "
The UFW's essential problem was the same as all other union's, straight out of Econ 101. Chavez needed to limit the supply of labor in order to drive up wages.
From this grew the fundamental conflict of his life. Was he an American class warrior or a Mexican mestizo racial activist? What came first: La Causa or La Raza?
This irresolvable dual identity culminated in the terrible irony of his tragic last dozen years. Chavez's success at bringing better wages to stoop laborers in the early Seventies stemmed from the long-term decline in the pool of available migrant farm workers. According to agricultural economist Philip L. Martin of UC Davis, migrant farm workers in the U.S. numbered 2,000,000 in the Twenties. But the U.S. government started to crack down on Mexican illegal immigrants, most notably during 1954's "Operation Wetback," when a million were loaded onto railroad cars and shipped home.
By Chavez's heyday in the early Seventies, there were only 200,000 migrant farm workers left. Which made his triumphs feasible.In his prime, Chavez fought constantly against illegal immigration. He frequently complained that the Immigration & Naturalization Service wasn't tough enough. When Chavez would lead a strike, the grower would send trucks across the Mexican border, load them up with scabs, and race back to the Central Valley in the dead of night. Chavez even offered his UFW staffers to the INS to serve as volunteer border guards to keep Mexicans from sneaking into California.
As Ruben Navarrette Jr. reported in the Arizona Republic: (8/31/97) "Cesar Chavez, a labor leader intent on protecting union membership, was as effective a surrogate for the INS as ever existed. Indeed, Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union he headed routinely reported, to the INS, for deportation, suspected illegal immigrants who served as strikebreakers or refused to unionize."
Successful unionization typically leads to management investing in mechanization, which in the long run drives down the number of workers. In fact, United Mine Worker boss John L. Lewis would explicitly proclaim that he wanted to drive miners' wages up so high that his union would be much smaller in the next generation. If his members were paid enough today, they could afford to educate their kids to do something less miserable with their lives by the time the bosses had figured out how to do without them.
During the Seventies, a similarly benign outcome appeared to be inevitable for American stoop laborers. The inflated wages paid Chavez' members would impel mechanization, which would eventually turn this literally backbreaking job into merely a painful memory.
It didn't happen. In fact, stoop labor wages stagnated in nominal terms from 1981 onward. In other words, over the last dozen years of Chavez's life (he died in 1993) real wages for migrants fell. As workers stopped paying dues to an organization that couldn’t deliver, the UFW withered to a fraction of its former size.
Why? No doubt California's 6,000,000 public school students will be told that it was all the fault of the evil Republican governors who reigned from 1983-1998, those divisive anti-immigration racists like Pete Wilson. Chavez's memory has been used so many times by Chicano intellectuals and politicians to insist on the moral necessity and practical inevitability of la reconquista that few remember who really sank the UFW: Mexican immigrants, hundreds of thousands of them.
The lure of higher wages; the Mexican economic catastrophes of 1976, 1982, and 1994; the fraudulent 1986 immigration "reform;" and a loss of will among white elites to defend the nation's borders has lead to a huge increase in the number of migrant farm workers in America. Since somewhere between 30% and 60% are illegals, the exact number can only be guesstimated. Dr. Martin pegs it at between 800,000 and 900,000, a rise of at least fourfold since Chavez's glory days.
The rotten pay and working condition suffered by today's migrants is all just a matter of supply and demand. The government can pass a lot of regulations, but if there are enough desperate job seekers on the spot to undercut their fellow workers, it won't matter. For example, growers now evade labor laws by turning their workers into subcontractors, although in truth they are just old-fashioned sharecroppers.
Eric Schlosser's impressive 1995 Atlantic Monthly article on the extreme poverty of California's strawberry pickers (e.g., hundreds were found living in caves outside of Salinas) quotes economist Martin:
Lax federal enforcement [of existing labor and immigration laws] has amounted to a tremendous subsidy for fruit and vegetable growers, one that has distorted the economics of those industries.
"Cheap labor benefits agriculture in the short run," Martin argues. "But it also helps to blind farmers to the technological changes they will have to make in order to compete with foreign producers, who have access to even cheaper labor." As long as the United States tolerates the employment of illegal immigrants in agriculture, Martin believes, the farm-labor market will continue the endless cycle in which farm workers quit for better jobs and illegals arrive to replace them. "We have essentially privatized the immigration policy of this country," Martin says, "and left it in the hands of California's growers."
Finally, as Mexican political scientist Jorge G. Castenada has pointed out, by draining off Mexico's most desperate, energetic, and courageous mestizos, America's porous borders have long helped keep Mexico's corrupt elite in unchallenged control. But, somehow, I don't think California's students will learn much of this.
Cesar Chavez was against illegal immigration for the most part and he was opposed to unlimited immigration for many of the same reason some American programmers oppose unlimited H1B visas. Chavez was born an American citizen ---Mexican's wouldn't likely vote him in a day for any reason.
I do not want to reopen old wounds, but frankly, the fact that Martin Luther King's birthday is a holiday, today, and George Washington is only honored indirectly on "Presidents' Day, while Jefferson is only honored in a few States, is an absurd demonstration of how far we have drifted from any common sense celebration of the American heritage. Enough is enough.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Homer: "Hey, but you're not some Caesar Chavez ghost, or whoever. You're Caesar Romero!"
Romero: "Yes, because you do not know what Caesar Chavez looks like."
You need to distinguish between those Union Leaders who have adopted the Leftist approach to economics and politics, and the many fine, patriotic Union Leaders--especially in the more skilled unions, and at the local level, who are often more Conservative than local business leaders.
There was a major gain for the Leftists in Unions, with the New Deal, which deliberately sought to push the Unions to the Left and use them as part of a power base. But if you go back a few years before that, and look at the AF of L, during the tenure of Samuel Gompers, you will see a different picture. (Gompers, himself an immigrant, was one of the real forces who helped America wake up to the need for the restrictions on immigration that were imposed between 1924 and 1965. He was a passionate foe of the sort of thing that is going on now.)
Chavez, representing the unskilled, may not have been that much different than some others representing unskilled workers in other fields, but that does not excuse his Leftwing commitment. Nor does it say anything about the skilled Labor movement, which after all is really part of the middle-class mainstream.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Today they'd call him a racist for not wanting all the Mexican citizens coming over to the US and they'd say he had no compassion for wanting to control the border.
Now, some racist blacks and anti-Mexican ultra-left wingers might oppose such an arrangement. They would make up silly arguments like, "it would be disrespectful of the memory" of one or the other or both. Any such criticism would simply mask the hatred that blacks and leftists have for Mexican and Mexican-Americans. If we can merge recognition of the birthdays of the two greatest Americans, Washington and Lincoln, into President's Day, what legitimate opposition could there be to recognizing the birthdays of two lesser Americans on a single day.
No, any opposition to merging Chavez Day and King Day is based solely on black racism and hatred of Mexicans. Not a pretty sight in this day and age.
Yeah they came to the polls and they voted for Republicans (Allard, McInnis and Owens), the only RAT that they voted for was Ken Salazar for Attorney General. The majority of my family lives in Conejos County and I always have to explain the reasons why they should vote for the Repubs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.