Tefere Gebre came to the United States in 1984 as a teenager. He and four friends had left their home in war-torn Ethiopia and walked nearly 500 miles across the desert to a refugee camp in Sudan. He was eventually granted asylum as a political refugee and came to the United States by himself, without parents. He settled in Los Angeles, where he learned English and became an advocate for workers’ rights.
In 2008, Gebre was elected executive director of the Orange County Labor Federation. In 2013, he became the first immigrant and the first black American to serve as executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, the largest labor union in the United States, representing more than twelve million workers. In 2017, he was honored as “Roving Ambassador for Peace” by the World Peace Prize Awarding Council. We spoke by telephone in early March.
Q: Please tell us about being an immigrant to the United States.
Gebre: I came like everybody else, looking for opportunity, looking for safety, looking for protection. Every one of us, as little children, fantasized about being here someday and being a part of the fabric of it—helping ourselves while helping the fabric of this country. So my story is an original immigrant story going back to the founding of this country, really.
Q: How was the process for you then, and how is it different for immigrants coming to the United States today?
Gebre: Well, in the current day, with this administration, things are scary. I came as a refugee, but now, the term refugee in this country is poisonous. People don’t realize that people like Madeleine Albright and Albert Einstein were refugees. But somehow today, we have poisoned that name associating it with terrorists.
There is this notion that one immigrant is different from another immigrant. We immigrants know better, that we are all immigrants. We all came into this country looking for something. We all came into this country, not to mooch from it, but to be part of it, and to build it, and to help it, and to be an American.
To me, by definition, that’s what being an American means. When I hear our national anthem, “the land of the free, the home of the brave,” I don’t see bombs bursting in air. I don’t see war. What I see is the brave people who wanted to be free who came here and built this country, because it takes bravery to pack it up and leave. And I don’t think this country can afford to not have these people here, because they are the most driven people in the world.
Q: Recently, we’ve seen quite a large increase in the number of immigrant workers. What is the AFL-CIO doing to support immigrant workers at this time?
Gebre: Well, first of all, I don’t know if the numbers are really any different. There used to be a large amount of Irish and Italian immigrants at the turn of the century and before that, it was Chinese immigrants. We always have had an influx of immigrants into this country. And there are those who didn’t want to come here, who came here in shackles—for which some have recently used the term immigration, which is very offensive for Africans like myself. But the beauty of this country is that we all claim this country because no one really claims it. Except for those with native ancestors, everybody came from somewhere else.
‘If we’re not risking something, we’re not ever going to gain anything.’
Yes, the people who are coming in right now are more brown and more black. And that sort of scares some people. And our labor leaders talk a lot about the emerging workforce of immigrants and people of color. The majority of our members [in the AFL-CIO] are people of color and immigrants. If you add women into that, that’s 72 percent of the labor movement in this country.
The tension in the country is understandable. But when that tension becomes legislation, it becomes poisonous policy that drives people who want to be free in this country, the brave people, from coming into this country.
Q: You’ve spoken about the importance of having immigrant voices at the table when policymakers make immigration policy. What can be done to make this happen?
Gebre: Well, I talk about that because I know the power of that. Before my current job, I worked in Orange County, California. We decided to organize migrant workers. And I have seen the power of migrants telling their stories to policymakers.
When I came to D.C., I started experiencing something different. I would be in immigrants’ rights meetings, and sometimes I would say, “Raise your hand if you are an immigrant,” and I would be the only one raising my hand. They meant well, but I believe that if we want salvation for immigrant workers, the progressive movement has to allow immigrants to be at the table and allow immigrants structurally to lead that fight.
We still need everybody, but keeping the immigrants in the shadows and being their agents is not going to help. They need to come out of the shadows and fight their own fight.
Q: You have spoken about your grandmother as an influence. Tell us more about that.
Gebre: Yeah, she taught me to take risks. She encouraged me, at a very young age, to pick up the biggest rock and not be afraid of it. Throw it through a fence and not be afraid of it. And so, the message I got from that is that if we’re not going to risk getting hit by a rock, getting squashed by the fence, we’re never going to get to the other side of the fence and that’s where we need to get to. It requires a risk.
So I keep with me the idea that if we’re not risking something, we’re not ever going to gain anything.
Q: Could you say a bit more about the American dream as you see it, as an alternative to the anti-immigrant tone that’s coming out of Washington, D.C.?
Gebre: The American dream is America’s uniqueness. There isn’t a nation in the world like us. That’s because our DNA is made from the best of the best. Even when slaves came on boats into this country, only the strongest made it. When kids are coming from Central America, in a journey of 1,700 miles, through heat and jumping on a train, only the strongest make it. That strength is what makes America’s DNA.
And the danger that Donald Trump brings, the danger of putting one American on a scale next to another American to see who is the better American is, to me, the most dangerous thing because that is messing with America’s DNA. And that is something we have to protect.
I came into this country with no mom, no dad, no education, and this country has been a beacon to me. It has provided me with everything that I needed to have. I have worked hard, but it has given me that opportunity.
And I believe truly this country is better off because I’m in it. This country is better off because there are millions of immigrants in it. This country will always be better off because the brave people who want to be free will always search for and come to us, unless we shut the door on them.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.