Subjects Archives: Immigration

  Opening March 30 Quad Cinema 34 W. 13th St., New York filmmaker will be present Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings Opening April 6 Laemmle Music Hall 3 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills filmmaker will be present Friday and Saturday evenings Click on the still to watch the trailer of Sacco and Vanzetti. A documentary […]

February 14, 2007 To:  The Honorable Immigration Judge, I’m a 2nd grade Two-Way Spanish Immersion (TWI) teacher at Rosa Parks school in Berkeley.  Today is Valentine’s Day.  It was my last day with one of my top students, Gerardo Espinoza.  His father, Felipe Espinoza Senior, received an order of deportation and is moving the family […]

Heavily-armed federal agents stormed six Swift meatpacking plants last month and rounded up nearly 1,300 immigrant workers in one of the largest workplace raids in U.S. history.  The raids represented the climax of a year in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ratcheted up its workplace operations. ICE claims that it’s tripled its workplace raids […]

Members of the Service Employees (SEIU) in Northern California are demanding just immigration reform.  That’s not too surprising.  For the past two decades, SEIU has been one of organized labor’s strongest advocates for immigrant rights. This campaign, however, pits SEIU members not against anti-immigrant employers or politicians, but against their union’s top officials.  Dubbing their […]

I was at a conference titled Build the Left, Fight the Right this past June.  The speakers and workshops at the conference ranged from the war in Iraq to the immigrant rights movement in the United States.  One of the most interesting (and there were many) and hopeful (in terms of a brighter future for […]

What Happened on May Day? On May 1, 2006, the largest strike in US history took place, with over a million people on the streets in a powerful show of force.  The May Day strike represented a culmination of waves of marches across the country demanding full, immediate legalization for all undocumented immigrants, workers’ rights […]

  CHICAGO — Hundreds of immigrant activists and supporters met in Chicago August 11-13 in a national strategy convention of the legalization-for-all wing of the movement. The event was the largest of at least three national gatherings of immigration activists held over the summer, and the one that was directly based on the “Calendar Coalitions,” […]

Capitalism’s demand for cheap labor is the thread that runs throughout the history of immigration in the U.S. and remains the central issue today.  Currently, the crux of the immigration issue is the status of the undocumented Mexican and Central American labor force working in this country.  Just how closely the U.S. economy is linked […]

  Andrew Stern, president of the 1.7-million-member Service Employees International Union, once likened the leadership of a mass movement to the crew on a sailboat.  What matters is the wind in the sails, he said, not the fight over who steers. The wind behind the movement for immigrant rights had reached gale force by May […]

During the countdown to the May Day immigrant walkouts, transportation industry commentators worried about the impact that immigrant strikes would have on the nation’s ports.  Many feared repeats of the 2004 and 2005 strikes by mostly immigrant Latino port truckers (or troqueros), which crippled freight traffic up and down the West Coast. Troqueros at the […]

A nation of immigrants: This is a convenient myth developed as a response to the 1960s movements against colonialism, neocolonialism, and white supremacy. The ruling class and its brain trust offered multiculturalism, diversity, and affirmative action in response to demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, social equality, an end of imperialism, and the rewriting of history — not to be “inclusive” — but to be accurate. What emerged to replace the liberal melting pot idea and the nationalist triumphal interpretation of the “greatest country on earth and in history,” was the “nation of immigrants” story.

So Bush and company want to put thousands of armed troops on the border between the United States and Mexico.  The supposed reason for this move is to stem the flow of immigrants coming into the US from the south.  I have a feeling that this move will be probably popular in Congress and amongst […]

Migration between countries occurs if and when it “resolves” social and especially class contradictions inside both of them.  One set of contradictions pushes people out of a country just as another set of contradictions in other countries pulls them in.  Finally, while migration “resolves” some social contradictions, it likewise engenders or aggravates others. These days, […]

  NATIVO LÓPEZ is president of the Mexican American Political Association and a spokesperson for the Great American Boycott 2006 — a national day of action for immigrant rights on May 1.  Nativo talked about the huge protests against anti-immigrant legislation and plans for May 1 with SARAH KNOPP, a teacher in Los Angeles and […]

Si el pueblo trabajador en Estados Unidos ha de alcanzar unidad, autoconfianza colectiva e independencia política en el futuro próximo (¡y cuanto nos hacen falta!), la demanda del movimiento de los trabajadores inmigrantes de derechos plenos debe ser el primer punto en su agenda.  El pueblo trabajador en este país necesita darse cuenta de lo […]

  Yiwen Cheng lives in Kansas City, and Stephen Philion lives in Minneapolis.

  Click on an image to watch a slide show of the immigrant rights march in Milwaukee on 23 March 2006. SOURCE: Kristyna Wentz-Graff, “A Day without Latinos,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 23 March 2006 March 23, 2006 was a historic day for Milwaukee.  It was a day of Latinos in a city that still thinks […]

  In October 2005, I ran into several Guatemalan guest workers in a village laundromat.  My first guess was that they worked on a large dairy farm, but in my poor Spanish and their almost non-existent English, we managed to communicate, and they made me understand that their jobs were in new home construction!  I […]

Solo, Frente a luces ajenas Oye otras voces calladas, distantes: Este puente te lleva al olvido, Te cambia de nombre. Ya nada será tuyo Escucha el sonido del tren que se aleja, El viento que roza la tarde. Ya nada será tuyo Y cuando vuelvas Traerás en las uñas, en el tacto, en tu aliento, […]