In Part One, Victor Fernandez looked back on moving to Los Angeles, joining the fight against the minute men, and organizing for the massive “Day Without An Immigrant” strike of 2006. Here he draws out crucial lessons from the successes and failures of that movement for today.
At the hight of the movement of 2006, we felt we had shifted society and legalization was around the corner. So why didn’t we get it? Why are we still in this same place?
For that, we have to go back to understanding the importance of the split of the coalitions right before May 1st. All over the nation, the coalitions formed two camps. In Los Angeles, the split was sparked by liberal organizations who organized their marches in the afternoon to avoid calling for a strike. The remaining groups moved forward with the strike and marched in the morning. Once the strike happened, both groups formed around a particular set of demands. While on the surface they might seem similar, they were radically different. The left of the movement organized around Legalization or Amnesty, which is basically what most immigrants wanted. This would entail a regularization of people’s status from undocumented to residency. This would guarantee full rights for all undocumented and also get rid of their second class status in the workplace. This is the only just solution.
The more liberal sections of the movement coalesced around Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR). Completely avoiding saying legalization or amnesty, CIR would become a set of bills pushed by both Republicans and Democrats directly after the marches and throughout the years that followed. It was considered comprehensive since it was seen as a compromise that gave both sides something. However, what it promised immigrants was not legalization, but a “path to legalization”, which meant legalization was not guaranteed. On top of that, a second part of the bills would provide for a guest worker program. This would be a temporary visa for workers to be able to come to the US, work, and then leave. For us in the movement, this was reminiscent of the Bracero Program which, while legally allowing workers to come from Mexico, still put them as a second class status of worker. Thus, legalization was not guaranteed and neither was full equality. Finally, increased anti-immigrant enforcement provisions were added to these bills.
In order to push for CIR, these sections of the movement pushed the movement into electoral campaigns. Slogans of these new coalitions centered on voting. A popular one was “Today we march, tomorrow we vote”. Movement discussion shifted away from protests, actions, organizing and strikes, and into supporting Democratic candidates. The culmination of this campaign was the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Riding on the wave of massive support from the immigrant community, Obama coined the term “Yes, we can!” which was a direct translation of the Latin American “Si se puede!”, a chant used in many of our marches. Obama promised immigration reform during the campaign. He was voted in with massive support and Democrats controlled the House and the Senate. But legalization never came.
Gradually the meager positive aspects of the CIR Bill were watered down. The path to legalization became even more difficult. In one of the iterations of the bills, the path included self-deportation before your application for residency was considered. Thus, CIR lost support among the immigrant community. Obama, wanting to appease Republicans who attacked him for being soft on immigration, ended up pushing only the enforcement measures within CIR. His rationale was that if we give the Republicans something, they’ll give us something back. They never gave immigrants anything. Obama was the president that initiated the detention of immigrant families, including children. He deported more immigrants than Bush before him. He sent troops to the border.
As for the left, when the liberal forces split, they were left with few of the connections that made the movement so powerful. The radio DJs no longer supported their marches. The media was no longer as willing to televise them. Thus, the strategy of calling out mass marches through press conferences was not as effective. With the media so focused on pushing CIR as opposed to legalization, the small groups on the left were isolated. Eventually everyone went their own way with their own efforts. The left also failed in training a new group of leaders. It was so focused on mass marches, announcements, and press conferences, that newer people who wanted to join the movement did not find a space to join and grow as leaders. Without these spaces, the increasingly difficult tasks of defending the movement against deportation raids fell on the same few people who were there at the beginning. This would lead to burnout and demoralization.
There was one group that was able to be successful in spite of this. The Dreamers, young people who supported the Dream Act, were able to win DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Initially organized and trained by the liberal sections of the movement, their impatience led to them breaking off on their own. They went on a campaign of mass civil disobedience nationwide. They would go to the border, cross into Mexico, then cross back and get put in detention. Meanwhile, they would document all the abuses at the detention centers while fighting to stay in the US. Their fight then culminated in the taking over of the Democrat’s campaign office in 2012, including a sit-in at Obama’s campaign office in Chicago. This led to Obama passing DACA, an order which allowed undocumented children to defer their deportation and be legally allowed to work.
Yet, unlike the response against May 1st, which took the form of increased raids and repression from the state, the response against the Dreamers came from within the movement. The backers of CIR pushed it as a final solution to all immigrant issues. Thus, they would tell the Dreamers to wait for CIR to be signed into law. When they didn’t, and went ahead and won their hard-earned rights, sections of the movement shamed them by calling them selfish. They were told that they only cared about their rights and not their parents’ rights. This had a chilling effect on the Dreamer’s movement, and by removing support for their movement from organizations and political figures, the Dreamers were effectively demobilized.
We are now at the beginning of another possible upsurge of the immigrant rights movement. The Trump administration has pushed us past the breaking point, and like HR4437, it has pushed us up against a wall. The only option is to fight back. Meanwhile, the Democrats have openly stated that they don’t have the ability to enact change. They have no alternative. The only alternative is us. We have marched before, we have struck before, and we have won before. There is nothing that says we can’t do it again.
Lessons from those days
The point of this write up is to give my personal experience in the movement as a way to provide some of the lessons I learned during this time period. These are lessons that were based on mistakes the movement made that we hopefully don’t make again.
1. Don’t be apologetic! – One of the most powerful slogans of the movement was by the Dreamers. It was “Undocumented and Unafraid”. The Dreamers had shed any shame associated with their status. Much like the Black Power and Gay Pride movements of the 60s and 70s, they had become unapologetic. The right wing will shame us by calling us criminals, scoffing at our flag waving, or any other details meant to degrade us and have us crawl back into the shadows. Yet, the Dreamers did the opposite. They came out from the shadows, organized unheard of civil disobedience (literally self-deporting and coming back), and confronted the powers that be and they won!
2. Unity is important! – When all the immigrant rights organizations came together to push for the marches in the beginning on a national scale, we were able to defeat one of the most racist and anti-immigrant bills ever created. Unfortunately, the movement was successfully split. Liberal sections were convinced they had to accommodate to the needs of the Democratic and Republican parties. Meanwhile the left, rather than organizing together an alternative, split into various factions all looking to be seen as the head of the movement. This led to some of the most embarrassing aspects of the movement. At one point, so many different organizations asked for permits for a May Day march in Downtown LA, that the LAPD told them they had to join forces in one march because only one permit would be given. When the LAPD is doing more to organize your movement than your own organizations, there is a serious problem of unity.
3. Demands are important – You only win what you fight for. When we organized to defeat HR4437, we wiped it off the map. However, when large sections of the organized movement and the general immigrant population were convinced to back Comprehensive Immigration Reform, our movement was redirected into the needs of the Democrat and Republican parties, many of whom receive massive donations from the same businesses that benefit from the exploitation of immigrant work. Thus, we never stood up to them. Since the very beginning of our support for CIR, we started with a compromised political position. And when further demands were placed on the path to citizenship in the CIR Bills “requirements for speaking English, exclusion of certain people, self deportation, etc” the leadership of this part of the movement accepted it. Unfortunately, many organizers and the immigrant population backed CIR only to realize how bad it was when details of the bills were released. This then led to the drop in support for it. Since the very beginning, we dropped the demand for Amnesty/Legalization. Thus, the movement itself negotiated away the rights of immigrants. It is not up to immigrant rights activists to negotiate away those rights. We must be principled fighters for the full rights of our communities. It is the job of politicians to heartlessly do that, and it is our duty to push them out of the way to win the full rights of immigrants.
4. The left failed to organize a new layer of leaders – We were enamored by the mass marches. It was exhilarating to call out a march and have thousands and hundreds of thousands of people come out. This worked for a while. However, the left focused on this tactic too much. We believed we could always call out mass marches and that would win our rights. We relied heavily on the media to amplify our message. Yet, when the movement split, we couldn’t rely on the media as much. Our marches and meetings became smaller, and demoralization led to splits and infighting. Thus, the movement focused on a small leadership being able to call out the masses whenever it could. It never was able to organize new people into the movement. It failed to create leadership and organizations deeply rooted in the immigrant community on a mass level. This not only would have bypassed the reliance on media, but would also create the foundation for an ongoing movement that could defend itself against attacks and win full rights for immigrants in the long run.
5. We split the national and local efforts. – With CIR in congress, much of the movement ceded that part of the work to lobbying organizations. Therefore, many focused on local initiatives without questioning the decisions from above. A lot of great work was done at the local level. In California, we stopped checkpoints, won sanctuary cities, educated people on their rights, and organized against deportations. Yet, with all these victories, we were still supporting a CIR bill that would not significantly change the status of a majority of immigrants. The local fights could have been used to build the organization and leadership that would be the backbone of a national campaign for true legalization.
As of this writing, there is no alternative, we have to fight. We are experiencing daily protests against the deportations, and with the right organization and politics, we can stop them. We stopped them under Bush. However, Obama switched tactics and deported immigrants on a one on one basis, thereby avoiding the negative optics of large scale raids. This means that we must organize for this immediate need and for the long road ahead to win full rights for all immigrants through unconditional legalization. For that we will need a stronger movement than we’ve ever had. We need thousands and thousands of leaders who can organize independently of the existing political system and not need to rely on corporate media to push its message. We need extensive political education that can train activists and the community as a whole to not accept any measure other than full legalization and to be able to defend against the myriad of false myths and talking points that the right throws at us. We also need unity of all organizations to win this, and the many new organizations that need to form in order to carry this movement forward. We need our own media that can carry our messages forward, because we know the corporate media and social media algorithms are not on our side. We need to understand that every local fight can be tied to a national fight and that we are training activists to defend our communities at every level of struggle: national, regional, state, city, and local. Finally, we must understand that our role is to push for the full rights of all immigrants, nothing more, nothing less. We need to be “Undocumented and Unafraid” because under the current circumstances, when the powers that be are pushing us against the wall, we must do everything in our power to push back and win.
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