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Liberal activist group wasted no time after President Obama’s controversial executive action on immigration to do a fundraising and petition drive. Just hours after the President’s televised announcement that he’d be stopping the deportations of millions of illegal immigrants, MoveOn sprang into action sending out an email with the subject “Join me in thanking President Obama for doing the right thing on immigration,” that came from “Helen F. Chavez, widow of Cesar Chavez.”

It’s a bitter irony because legendary farm worker union activist, Cesar Chavez, was passionate in his hatred for illegal immigration, something that he said drove down wages and hurt workers. Chavez even turned illegal immigrants that he called ‘wetbacks’ into the government.

Of course, MoveOn mentions none of this. Their letter from Helen Chavez says:

Tonight, President Obama kept his promise to me and to the American people by using his power to help many of the immigrants who toil in our fields, make beds, clean rooms, cook meals, work in construction and manufacturing, and care for our young and elderly. They serve our country in the military. I’ve known the farm workers all my life. Like other immigrants, they take jobs most other Americans won’t take, for pay most other Americans won’t accept, and under conditions most other Americans won’t tolerate. Big parts of our economy can’t survive without immigrants.

Her late husband Cesar Chavez must be rolling in his grave. The fact that illegal immigrants take “for pay most other Americans won’t accept” was exactly why he despised them.

Chavez wasn’t just talk: he wanted the illegal immigrants gone. As author Miriam Pawel wrote in her book The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, he had an aide named Liza Hirsh work with him on what he called the Illegals Campaign.

Hirsch distributed forms printed in triplicate to all union offices and directed staff members to document the presence of illegal immigrants in the fields and report them to the INS.

As the Phoenix New Times explains:

Chavez believed that the campaign would help his supporters explain to the public why the boycott against grapes and lettuce wasn’t effective: Farmers were hiring illegal workers who didn’t care about the strikes or boycott.

A favorite line of Chavez’s was, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike .”

Obama and his allies want it both ways: they want to use the name of Cesar Chavez to promote their immigration policies but their policies are 180 degrees away from anything that Chavez himself wanted. It’s cynical manipulation that hopes the audience is too ignorant of Chavez to call them on it.

More importantly than mere hypocrisy, however, is the substance of the issue: Obama’s policy is going to hurt workers and job seekers. He’s changed immigration policy at the expense of working Americans.

Don’t believe it? Just ask Cesar Chavez.

13 Responses

  1. Scout

    Mr. Chavez isn’t the only one turning in his grave. The millions of Americans who would have liked to work and couldn’t get a job because they were given to illegal aliens are as well. It is a bold faced lie that American citizens do not clean houses, provide companion care, work on farms, etc. I would say that the majority of 1 percenters who hire illegal aliens for these positions are doing it because they are cheap and dishonest. They are doing it so they don’t have to report taxes and obey laws and they know that illegals will not report them because they might be deported. I would be willing to bet they are mostly Democrats too because Republicans for the most part have more integrity.

  2. WmCraig

    Who is doing good work for urban Americans that can emancipate prosperity and liberty from the clutches of the Democrat controlled big blue cities.

  3. Linda Nitzschke

    There go those loving and caring democrats again…showing their compassion for everyone….except the people they were elected to represent. BIG SURPRISE !


    Until we change that and get back to having GOOD MORALS the people will always be able to be fooled by our government. DEMOCRATS and the REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT (no difference than the democrats) will continue to lead us to COMMUNISM and ISLAM (TYRANNY),which is what Barrack Hussein and others like him have as their ultimate goal (his idea of HOPE AND CHANGE). Learn what the Tea Party truly stands for and not what DEMOCRATS and REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT types tell you they are. Here are some good sources to learn from ,BCF (ELBERT GUILLORY), CURE (STAR PARKER), REBEL PUNDIT. GOD BLESS YOU ALL, MAY GOD NOT FORSAKE AMERICA ! YOUR BROTHER IN FREEDOM, H-TOWN KID

  5. HRW

    Leave it up to a progressive/socialist/communist/marxist not to let the truth get in the way of a good shake-down. This is the reason why they’ve decided to dumb-down eduction with fluffy nonsense, people that are clever enough to question their BS can’t be forced down the road they want us on.

  6. Tom Simpson

    Okay so now what? Do we sit and wait for the end to come? Or do we do something like throwing Obama out of office? And while the Democrats have abstained from leading, the Republican Party’s policies will lead us straight to Hell. No, there is another way. The BRICS nations are showing the world the way to safe harbor. They have a global economic development perspective led by China and Russia. It is urgent that the US accept Chinese Premier Xi Jinping’s invitation to join the BRICS. The sooner we do the sooner we get the US into recovery.

  7. black conservative


    • Scout

      I may not be a union but if I can’t get a job because I am an American and I pay taxes and there are certain laws governing how employers must take care of me and treat me and because of that the illegal alien gets hired instead it is not fair. I have moved to other countries because that is where my search for a job took me. I got a visa and work papers and had to prove why a citizen of that country could not do the job I had been hired for. When my visa was up I came home. The USA loses a lot of taxes to Mexico and others. Those countries benefit from the increased spending power of American money in their economies. The illegal aliens receive a lot of free entitlement services; free to the illegal alien but a very high cost to the American citizen. Our borders should be tracked, secure, and we should stop paying for signs in five different languages, one of which is aramaic, that are put in the desert instructing illegal aliens how they can find their way into this country and a website that tells them how to sign up for the free stuff. These are just a very few of the problems I see with the lack of enforcement of our current immigration laws which are, by the way, very fair and good and while Mr. Chavez and I may not have agreed on everything I was a great admirer of his work and he was not in favor of a broken immigration system. I’m currently working two part time jobs of about 7 days a month while I look for full-time work or at least more robust part-work so I don’t have a lot of time to argue the obvious. Your job has given you a lot of practice spinning things. Je peux vraiment dire que il est un grand canard.

      • Marc Grossman

        American citizens and legal residents have not worked in farm labor in significant numbers for decades. That’s just a fact. My job working with Cesar Chavez for much of the last 24 years of his life was fairly easy: All we had to do was tell the truth.

      • Scout

        I am a farmer and I live in an agricultural area and there are farmers of all colors and ethnic backgrounds and less work than workers. Like I said I worked as a legal alien. If as you say, there is a need for workers that cannot be met by American citizens then we issue a special work visa for that. California at the time Cesar Chavez did so much of his work had large numbers of undocumented people at critical crop times. This hidden population was easily abused. We have children traveling through the desert by themselves to get here or worse traveling with the worst kind of people. Immigration should be controlled for many economic, health, and security reasons. It is irresponsible to the citizens of the country being immigrated to and to the illegal aliens themselves to not enforce immigration policy. If there is a country in the world that does not have one and does not enforce it I would like to know who it is. This administration’s immigration policy is not meant to help anyone but himself and his party.

    • Whydad

      If you are the real Marc Grossman, we did some research on one of the speeches you apparently co-wrote with Mr. Chavez in 1984 after it appeared as a lesson plan in an Engageny ( 7th grade). We found it to be completely misleading at best and the lesson to be educationally bankrupt. I do understand that when you wrote the speech, it was not done with somebody thinking this would be good study material for an 11 year old 30 years later. I believe the way NYSED is presenting this speech (without context) is a lesson in manipulation and the speech is doing more harm than good for education, labor and society as a whole.


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