"Las Redadas" y la Union

A leader in our union, Gustavo Arias, was deported last month to Colombia, which he fled twenty years ago after his life was threatened because of his political activity. His wife and their two teenaged sons, who were born in the United States, recently left Boston to join him in Cali.

Many members of the Service Employees Union here in Boston, who work as building janitors, maintenance workers, and security guards, face the threat of deportation because they entered the United States without a visa or work permit. Many of them have built lives here over many years, and now live in fear that government agents will one day knock at their door.

20 years ago Gustavo received a deportation order in Texas, shortly after he crossed the border, and did not appear for the hearing. He moved to Boston, found a job as a janitor, started a family, bought a condo, was elected union steward in his building, and was a lay leader at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church. In recent years, as the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) became more aggressive about enforcing immigration laws and more immigrant workers were being arrested and deported, Gustavo became concerned about his own situation. Last year he decided to move his family to Canada. They were unlucky, and the Canadian border authorities sent them back to the U.S., where the Border Patrol arrested Gustavo and his wife. Recently, an immigration judge ordered them deported to the country they fled because of threats from the paramilitary gangs which still murder hundreds of community and union activists each year.

I worked with Gustavo on our contract campaign in 2004 at Tufts University, where he worked with a cleaning contractor and was a union steward. He was a good union activist, a little cautious maybe, the guy his co-workers would go to if they had a problem. I didn’t know that he was working with fake documents, but I knew a lot of our members were. 12 million people in the United States are working, and paying taxes, without proper work authorization. My family did the same thing in the 19th century—now, it’s a crime.

Stories like Gustavo’s have become so common in Boston, and public attitudes about immigration are so polarized, that the story almost seems not worth repeating. In September, when ICE picked up dozens of immigrants throughout the city, these raids (or “redadas” as they were called in the Spanish-language media, dragnets) did not even make the English language media. It has become accepted in mainstream America that the people who clean most of the hotels, offices, and universities, who fix most of the roofs and automobiles, and harvest most of the agricultural produce, are criminals who deserve to be rounded up, jailed and deported, often without any notification to their families. According to one watchdog group in Boston, 63 people have died in ICE custody over the past three years.

So what? The world is full of injustices and we can’t fight them all, or even very many of them, and be effective. As a labor organization representing service workers, we have to respond to the question: how can we best exercise power to advance the interests of our members? Now—as immigration raids threaten the livelihoods of many of our members—we have to figure out how to deal with this difficult problem.

Community organizations and service providers have responded valiantly to the government’s increasingly harsh and arbitrary enforcement of immigration laws. Neighborhood groups and legal aid advocates are convening “know your rights” meetings in kitchens, community centers and churches, informing immigrant workers of their rights to remain silent, refuse searches and avoid self-incrimination. The phone numbers of immigration attorneys who speak Spanish and Portuguese are being circulated in the neighborhoods where our members live.

On a policy level, national legal advocates have filed lawsuits to slow the worst abuses of the Bush Justice Department. A legal team led by the AFL-CIO convinced a judge to temporarily stop a regulation promulgated by the Social Security Administration which would have held employers criminally liable for knowingly employing workers with document problems. Meanwhile, our unions are fighting in Congress to change the law.

We welcome and support these educational and legal responses even though, as union organizers, this is not our usual way of acting. We’re not lobbyists, but we can call our Congressmen to ask them to change the law. We’re not service providers, but we can make sure our members have fact sheets and phone numbers informing them about their legal rights, for what it’s worth—they don’t have many. We’re not attorneys, but our unions have legal departments that challenge unfair, contradictory laws. But many of us find these responses deeply unsatisfying.

What we are is organizers. We know, through our experience and our power analysis, that policy change does not come primarily from lobbying, or services, or education, or lawsuits. Gerald Rosenberg illustrated this in his brilliant 1991 book, The Hollow Hope, which cautions social movements not to depend on the courts to make long-term, sustainable changes to public policy. Policies change because organized people, and/or organized money, demand the change and fight for it and win it, at least some incremental part of it. Our union, and some community organizations, are struggling to come up with an organizing response to the recent attacks on immigrant workers.

Organizers have responded to threats on immigrants before. In the 1980s, political refugees from the civil war in El Salvador could not get asylum in the U.S., because the Reagan administration considered that government an ally in the cold war. Churches and community networks responded by creating the sanctuary movement, which activists Renny Golden and Michael McConnell called “the new underground railroad.”

Some church congregations are considering a revival of this movement. In Chicago, for example, Adalberto Methodist Church sheltered Mexican immigrant Elvira Arellano for a year before she was finally arrested. A group of Catholic and Lutheran congregations in Los Angeles announced in June 2007 that they are beginning a New Sanctuary Movement to help immigrants they feel are wrongly targeted for deportation.

Our members are not afraid to take action against unjust activity by employers or the government; they’re used to doing it. SEIU, our union, has been slow to identify the decision makers who arbitrarily enforce immigration laws, as well as the policy makers who write them, and to call injustice what it is. Part of the reason for this is that many of our own members feel that workers who are here illegally should be deported.

It is time for those of us who believe that deportation of undocumented workers is wrong, to act. We have to begin the hard work of building a political consensus in the union in support of immigrant workers. We have to make the case to the public that the concept of “illegal aliens” has been constructed as a political hobby horse for conservatives to ride, and explain to non-immigrant workers that a general amnesty would help, not harm, their own standards of living.

We know that any organizing drive, in order to succeed, must be planned, focused, reflected on, and have a long-term commitment of resources. Let’s get moving.