Immigration expert and Executive Director of Voces de la Frontera, Christine Neumann-Ortiz.
“You better be smart. They’re taking your jobs. You better be careful.”
President Trump got elected last November in large measure with race-baiting comments like that one, aimed at native-born workers in the United States—goading them to turn against undocumented fellow workers from Mexico and Central America.
Many supporters of these immigrant workers have attempted to appease these voters by arguing that these immigrant workers do "jobs Americans don't want."
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the intrepid leader of Voces De La Frontera, says that while these arguments are popular, they aren't really that productive or persuasive. A better argument, she says, is to urge native born workers to look back on history and recognize that dividing workers has always been a tactic to keep all workers down.
“The only way for U.S. citizen workers to really make progress is if immigrant workers can achieve greater rights in their jobs, to work with them to advance higher wages and working conditions. The historic gains of the American labor movement, which is a diverse, is precisely rooted in workers coming together and organizing for those gains.”
And that can’t happen, Neumann-Ortiz insists, when “you have one group of workers more vulnerable to retaliation or being taken advantage of. That undercuts the ability of U.S. citizen workers to make demands. That’s always been the case and we’ve seen that play out in very real ways." For example, in an industry where an employer is taking advantage of someone because of their status or lack of knowledge and wants to cut corners to save money by not providing proper safety equipment, that undermines the safety of all workers.
"Working people need to know where their power comes from," she says. "It comes from uniting with other working people.”
Neumann-Ortiz argues that President Trump’s hidden agenda is to set in stone the current status quo of "undocumented immigrants stuck in a lower caste” with a re-vamped guest worker program. The goal, she says, is legalized exploitation. “That will mean even greater degradation of the ability of workers in this country to advance.”
Voces de la Frontera
Monday, May 1st is a “Day Without Latinxs, Immigrants, & Refugees” in Wisconsin and a "Day without Immigrants" nationwide. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands are expected to strike and withdraw children from school, and hundreds of businesses will close to join the 12pm statewide march in Milwaukee
Instead, she says our goal should be to create a country where the approximately eleven million undocumented workers are given a broad path to citizenship and allowed to fully integrate into their communities as previous generations of immigrants have done. Bringing immigrant workers out of the shadows helps all workers, she argues.
Neumann-Ortiz's argument is backed up by history: Bloomberg recently reported that when broad immigrant amnesty was granted under President Reagan, “more than two decades of research have since shown the 1986 law raised wages and helped lift the economy.”
To promote this message of assimilation over degradation, she said that a special focus of the Day Without Latinxs march her group is organizing on May 1, is passage of a state driver's license for immigrants.
The main focus of the march, which will start at Voces de la Frontera’s Milwaukee headquarters and end at Milwaukee County Courthouse, is to protest President Trump’s attempts to remove federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities.” Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who is also a paid contributor to Fox News and a fervent Donald Trump supporter, has been a leading supporter of efforts to end “sanctuary city” protections for undocumented immigrants.
Neumann-Ortiz’s group is also organizing bus transportation to and from the march from eleven of Wisconsin cities.
“We need everyone's help now more than ever.”