Proposition 187

Immigration efforts leading up to 1986.

A group of volunteers created the Sacramento Immigration Committee in 1978. Leaders were Duane Campbell, Dolores Delgado-Campbell, Ricardo Torres.

( as reported by David Bacon) Under pressure from employers in the late 1970s, Congress began to debate the bills that eventually resulted in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That debate set in place the basic dividing line in the modern immigrant rights movement. IRCA contained three elements. It reinstituted a bracero-like guest worker program, by setting up the H2-A visa category. It penalized employers who hired undocumented workers ("employer sanctions"), and required them to check the immigration status of every worker. And it set up an amnesty process for undocumented workers in the country before 1982.

The main trade union federation to which most U.S. unions belong, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), supported sanctions, saying they'd stop undocumented immigration (and therefore, presumably, job competition with citizen or legal resident workers). The Catholic Church and other Washington DC liberal advocates supported amnesty and were willing to agree to guest workers and enforcement as a tradeoff. Employers wanted guest worker programs. The bill was opposed by immigrant communities and leftwing immigrant rights advocates, from the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), founded in Los Angeles by labor and immigrant rights leader Bert Corona, to the Bay Area Committee Against Simpson Mazzoli in Northern California, the Sacramento Immigration committee and similar groups around the country. Local labor activists and leaders also opposed the bill, but were not strong enough to change labor's position nationally. The Washington DC-based coalition produced the votes in Congress, and Ronald Reagan, one of the country's most conservative presidents, signed the bill into law.

Once the bill had passed, many of the local organizations that had opposed it set up community-based coalitions to deal with the bill's impact. In Los Angeles, with the country's largest concentration of undocumented Mexican and Central American workers, pro-immigrant labor activists set up centers to help people apply for amnesty. That effort, together with earlier, mostly left-led campaigns to organize undocumented workers, built the base for the later upsurge of immigrants that changed the politics and labor movement of the city. For more on this issue see David Bacon, “The Modern Immigrants’ Rights Movement,” http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6080

The Sacramento committee split into two parts as differences emerged on the approach to organizing.

The Sacramento Committee for a New Immigration Policy, which consistently worked with Bert Corona from Los Angeles ( see above) dissolved. Catholic Social Services and other church based groups took up the issues of helping the undocumented to qualify for the amnesty.

Bert Corona taught Chicano Studies at California State University – Los Angeles from 1970- 1982, when he was dismissed. (Campbell, p.41)

One of the Corona’s significant contributions was to educate the majority population that immigrant workers were a substantive part of the U.S. labor force, not a temporary phenomenon. His efforts and the work of CASA encouraged a unity between immigrant workers and U.S. born Mexican Americans.

As a founder and leader of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional he played an important role in the efforts to gain an amnesty program for undocumented workers in the Immigration Reform and Control act 1986. IRCA. Corona continued to organize along with labor unions to change immigration policy and practices of unions and of the nation. In part as a result of his efforts, the AFL-CIO changed its policy on immigration in 2000, and some member unions began to restructure their unions to address the needs of immigrant workers. (Shaw, p.214, Bacon, 2008.)

Sources.

Randy Shaw. Beyond the Fields; Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21^st. Century. 2008. University of California Press. P. 214.

David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globilization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. 2008. Beacon Press. Boston.

Duane Campbell, “Bert Corona : Labor Radical,” in Socialist Review. Vol.19, No.1. January-march, 1989. Pp.41-55.

Anti Immigrant politics. 1993-2000.

The U.S. economy passed through a difficult recession and stagnation from 1991 to 1993. A recession plagued the economy and combined with government cutbacks to make California Governor Pete Wilson the most unpopular governor in recent history. He was able to recover and win election with over 56 percent of the California vote in 1994 by attacking immigrants and blaming the federal government for the state’s economic problems. Wilson won in large part by using a hostile, divisive campaign that blamed the state’s economic woes on the Mexican and Mexican American populations (Adams, 1995; Chávez, 1998).

This 1994 California election demonstrated that anti-immigrant campaigns can mobilize angry white voters. (Adams, 1995; Chávez, 1998). In contrast, in New York and Texas in 1994 and 1998, both also led by Republican governors, immigrant bashing never became as popular, and anti-immigrant fervor was marginalized to extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan rather than becoming part of the mainstream political debate.

Anti-immigrant politics continue as a popular theme in U.S. political life with the Immigration Reform Act of 1996, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and California’s 1998 Proposition 227, which banned bilingual education. In response, the percentage of Latino voters increased dramatically by the year 2000 in border states.

From. Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. 3^rd. edition. Page 103.

The Sacramento campaign against Prop.187 and against Governor Pete Wilson was intensive. ( see photo)

See also the 2010 campaign against Arizona’s SB 1070.