President Joe Biden has put a bust of Cesar Chavez in the Oval Office, even though Chavez was a militant opponent of Biden’s cheap labor migration policies.
Progressives portray Chavez as a heroic Latino who fought to win legal rights for foreign-born Latinos.
But Chavez is a hero to American solidarity activists because he and his allies fought the farm industry’s relentless campaign to import cheap labor instead of hiring Americans at decent wages.
“Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union, was a fierce opponent of illegal immigration and supporter of tight border controls,” wrote Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration studies. “That’s why it’s fitting to observe March 31 each year as National Border Control Day, in honor of the farmworker leader,” he wrote in 2014
Ann Coulter has repeatedly touted National Border Control Day, and she showcased Chevez’s pro-solidarity policies on January 20 when media outlets saw Biden’s bust of Chevez in the Oval Office:
The Phoenix New Times reported in March 2014:
With the help of UFW [United Farm Workers] co-founder Dolores Huerta, Chavez launched the “Illegals Campaign,” which he believed was nearly as important as the boycott. He criticized President Nixon and the Border Patrol for letting in so many “wets,” as he called them.
Under the campaign, he turned the UFW into an anti-illegal-immigrant spying organization. Union volunteers became dedicated to finding and identifying undocumented immigrants working on farms — as well as those giving them aid and comfort. The information was turned over to the feds. While doing yoga “standing on his head,” Pawel writes, Chavez gave 19-year-old Liza Hirsch the job of heading up the Illegals Campaign.
“Hirsch distributed forms printed in triplicate to all union offices and directed staff members to document the presence of illegal immigrants in the fields and report them to the INS,” the books states.
Chavez believed that the campaign would help his supporters explain to the public why the boycott against grapes and lettuce wasn’t effective: Farmers were hiring illegal workers who didn’t care about the strikes or boycott. A favorite line of Chavez’s was, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight.”
The article was titled, “Cesar Chavez’s Rabid Opposition to Illegal Immigration Not Covered in New Movie.”
In sharp contrast, Biden’s draft amnesty and labor-delivery bill would give more foreign stoop-labor to farmers, further reducing the pressure on farm companies to raise the wage of their Latino workers or to buy high tech machinery from Silicon Valley and American manufacturing companies.
Without such investments, farm companies maintain prehistoric practices, for example, forcing employees on their knees to pick crops with their hands, and to kill weeds with long sticks, dubbed “hoes.”
In contrast, Donald Trump’s curb on migration successfully pressured farm companies to raise wages, automate farm production, and also invest in high tech vertical farming.
This forced investment is also helping farm companies — as well as meatpackers — to compete with the rapidly growing number of high tech farm companies in Latin America and Asia.