Cesar Chavez: a conservative icon?

I recently wrote a blog post on illegal immigration's potential effect on rural America. Research suggests that rural Americans with high school degrees or less may financially benefit from greater border security. I conclude the post by positing that Americans concerned with reducing illegal immigration aren't always motivated by xenophobia.

So what does this have to do with Cesar Chavez? Well, Cesar Chavez represents one such individual who opposes illegal immigration on non-xenophobic grounds.

Mr. Chavez is best known for his work as a pro-labor activist, focusing particularly on Mexican-American farmworkers. Mr. Chavez's accomplishments include creating the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, which organized strikes and led marches on behalf of farmworkers in the Central Valley of California and parts of Texas. Mr. Chavez was also fundamental in the successful passing of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, due to a highly publicized march that his labor union made from San Francisco to Modesto.

Mr. Chavez's views on illegal immigration, however, are less well known. One of Cesar Chavez's first acts as leader of the UFW was to protest the government's use of the "Bracero Program." The Bracero Program was a government program that granted temporary work visas to Mexican citizens to provide farm labor during harvesting season. Mr. Chavez saw the braceros as stealing the jobs of his union members, and once said: "[i]t looks almost impossible to start some effective program to get [my members] their jobs back from the braceros." Mr. Chavez and UFW were able to successfully pressure the U.S. Government to end the Bracero Program in 1964.

In 1974, the U.S. Government announced its plan to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants; Cesar Chavez and the UFW endorsed the plan. Mr. Chavez wrote a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle to clarify his position on illegal immigration:

"[T]he illegal aliens are doubly exploited, first because they are farm workers, and second because they are powerless to defend their own interests," he wrote. "But if there were no illegals being used to break our strikes, we could win those strikes overnight and then be in a position to improve the living and working conditions of all farm workers."

Mr. Chavez spent his life fighting for legislative gains on behalf of his union members. He believed his legislative work was undercut by undocumented immigrants, whom employers could hire in the stead of Mexican-Americans to circumvent labor laws. Mr. Chavez also believed that undocumented immigrants undercut the efficacy of his labor strikes by providing employers with alternate labor sources.

In 1974, Mr. Chavez began his "Illegals Campaign" to deal with these issues by reducing the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States. This plan had two components: (1) UFW members would report any undocumented workers they uncovered to the INS, the government agency in charge of deportations; (2) hundreds of other UFW members would personally patrol the Rio Grande to stop undocumented immigrants from crossing, using violence on the immigrants if persuasion failed. Mr. Chavez essentially created his own paramilitary patrol group--of Mexican-Americans--to guard the border; an action that only far-right conservative groups in contemporary America would make.

I don't bring this up to suggest Cesar Chavez deserves to be cancelled. His reasons for opposing illegal immigration aren't hateful or racist; he seems to hold these views because he believes reducing illegal immigration will benefit his union members. 

The modern conservative viewpoint on illegal immigration is inseparable from Cesar Chavez's beliefs on the matter. Given the racist taint that President Trump gave to all conservative stances on immigration issues, it would behoove Republicans to make Cesar Chavez their immigration icon. This could help center the illegal immigration debate as an economic issue rather than a race one. The claim that all anti-immigration Americans are secretly--or blatantly--xenophobic loses potency when that claim requires declaring Cesar Chavez hated Mexicans to work.