by Jan Brewer
Gompers was talking about an influx of legal immigrants, not illegal immigrants. But for unions, the logic is even stronger for those who break the law to get here. Unions can survive in a free market only when there is no cheap supply of labor undercutting them. In 1981, the AFL-CIO recognized this, stating, “Illegal workers take jobs away from American workers and they undermine U.S. wages and working conditions.” Why would they stand up for a policy that makes it easier for them to be undercut?
The first reason is simple opportunism. Whereas the unions used to have more conservative members (they were once known as Reagan Democrats), today their membership is different. So the union bosses have made the strategic decision to make themselves the organizational arm of the Democratic Party. The SEIU and their allies are political buddies with the people in the Obama administration, and they want to make sure that their friends keep getting elected so they can throw them more rich union contracts.
Just look at SEIU vice president Eliseo Medina. On April 25, 2010, he showed up at a protest rally at the Arizona Capitol to denounce SB 1070 as “an unjust law.” He did a rabble-rousing routine in front of a cheering crowd. “There is no place for discrimination, for hate and intolerance in America!” he yelled. The enemy, he assured the crowd, wasn’t just me; it was all Republicans. “Governor Brewer and the Republican Party have declared war on Latinos and on immigrants! They don’t care about human and civil rights,” he screamed.
Then he got to his point, which was, of course, that nobody who cares about civil rights, the poor, or puppies and kittens should ever vote Republican. “Governor Brewer and the Republican Party, you have voted against us! It’s our turn now!” he bellowed. “In the next couple of days, they are going to know that we are not defenseless. There cannot be one single Latino vote for any Republican, whether for U.S. Senate, governor, legislature, or dog catcher!”
Medina’s partisan turn at the SB 1070 rally was just his latest attempt to gin up votes for his Democratic paymasters. His speech reminded me of one that he had made in June 2009 at an event for the Campaign for America’s Future, a union-allied liberal advocacy group. It was here that he laid out, in stark black and white, the reason for the unions’ passionate support of continued illegal immigration: more Democratic voters.
“[When] we reform the immigration laws, it puts twelve million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters,” he said. Medina also reminded the crowd (which needed no reminding) that Latinos and immigrants had overwhelmingly supported “progressive” candidates in 2008. Barack Obama got two out of every three of their votes.
“Can you imagine if we have the same turnout and we have eight million new voters who care about our issues and will be voting?” Medina said, practically salivating over the prospect of creating “a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.” Leaving the border open, he said with startling candor, would “solidify and expand the progressive coalition for the future.”
An SEIU Local 1877 sign spotted at a recent Los Angeles rally in favor of amnesty for illegal immigration sums up this strategy nicely: TODAY WE MARCH, TOMORROW WE VOTE!
Democratic interest group politics lead to an open-border policy, which leads in turn to a different America.
Somebody’s thinking beyond the next election.
There’s yet another reason for the unions’ seemingly contradictory support of illegal immigration. Unions—particularly public employee unions—support it because it serves their interests to have a permanent class of people who are financially dependent on the government.
The sad secret about private sector unions is that they are dying. There used to be a reason for private sector unions—like, for instance, protecting people like my dad from inhaling the toxic materials at the munitions plant, which eventually killed him. But in today’s world, such unions have become basically obsolete. All they do now is drive up the cost of doing business, thereby preventing their own members from getting hired. Arizona is what we call a “right to work” state. As mandated by the Arizona Constitution, Arizonans are free to join a union or not—it’s their choice, not some union boss’s command. And interestingly enough, when employees are given the choice of whether or not to join a union, they increasingly say no. These workers understand that the rigid workplace rules and regulations that unions promote are bad for growth, bad for competitiveness, and bad for jobs.
More and more workers recognize this. That’s why in the private sector, where employees have a real stake in the success of the businesses they work for, only 7.5 percent of workers are unionized. By contrast, more than 36 percent of public sector workers are unionized, and more than 42 percent of local government workers. That’s because public sector workers in the federal government don’t have to worry about unemployment. Ever. In many federal agencies, the primary threat to job security is actually death. The job security for all federal workers in 2010 was 99.43 percent. It’s even higher for workers who have been on the job for more than a few years. With the government this bloated, the best guarantee of never-ending employment is a government paycheck. The average government worker has a tenure nearly twice as long as that of the average private sector worker.
Democratic Party bosses love government workers because each of those workers must rely upon the health and growth of government to pay his salary and guarantee his benefits. If the government contracts or shuts down for any reason, those workers are out of a job. And public sector unions love the Democratic bosses because they keep on growing government. The more people the Democrats can put on the payroll, the more voters they can lock up for their candidates.
That gives public sector unions like the SEIU (which includes huge numbers of public employees) unbelievable leverage. Because the party bosses want to keep government workers employed and happy, they’ll give the unions just about anything they want. And the best part (for them) is that it doesn’t cost them a thing. The taxpayers pick up the tab. Liberal politicians spend taxpayer money to grow government; the unions keep voting for (and contributing to) Democrats, and the Democrats stay in office so they can spend more of the taxpayers’ money growing government. It’s a simple, corrupt, mutual back-scratching circle.
How does illegal immigration play into this? Most illegal aliens work hard. That is not in dispute. But the unfortunate fact is that most illegal aliens are also unskilled and uneducated. Unskilled workers have higher unemployment rates and lower earnings. Many rely on government programs to help support them and their families. Either that or they rely on government jobs—if they can get them. In either case, they are more dependent on government than either legal immigrants or the native-born. Households headed by illegal aliens collect more welfare, due to their generally lower education levels and incomes compared with native-born households. Much of this access to the welfare system by these households is gained through their American-born children, who are U.S. citizens. That means more government, which means more public sector union members.
Even if, in the short term, more illegal immigration means fewer union jobs, the unions are okay with that. It is a strategic cost they are willing to bear. Because they know that if the Democrats keep winning, they will give the unions subsidies, grow government, and employ more union members.
Some of the unions’, especially the SEIU’s, massive opposition to SB 1070 may have a more personal motivation. As we waited around for Janet Napolitano to resign and leave, she gave a parting gift to the public employee unions. She issued her final executive order granting something called “meet and confer” status to many of the public employee unions. That mandates that the union’s chosen representatives meet at least once a quarter with state agency heads. I repealed the executive order as soon as I became governor, citing its potential impact on trimming our bloated budget and its conflict with our state’s right-to-work guarantee.
Whatever their motivation, it is unforgi
vable for public sector unions and the Democratic Party to use illegal aliens as a way to ensure their power base. But use them they do. In the condescending belief that illegal aliens will become prompt and permanent clients of big government, thus adding to their power, unions spend their members’ dues (which in the case of public sector unions are provided by the taxpayers) overwhelmingly on Democrats. Unions are by far the biggest contributors to political candidates and parties. In the twenty years between 1989 and 2009, the unions gave almost $500 million in political contributions, and about $450 million of that was to Democrats. It will surprise most mainstream-media-consuming Americans to know that the unions’ closest competition for political influence, the financial investment industry, gave less than half of what labor contributed between 1989 and 2009. Unions are the country’s biggest political investors, and they have invested big in the Democratic Party.
This investment has been handsomely rewarded. It’s why Democrats kill free-trade bills. It’s why they push “stimulus” bills for less than “shovel-ready” jobs. It’s why they support the program known as card check, a kneecapping method designed to allow union intimidation of anti-union workers. And the union’s support of Democrats is why it came as no surprise to us that when Arizona voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to our state constitution to require unions to allow members to vote by secret ballot, the Obama administration filed yet another lawsuit against Arizona to stop it.
President Obama has forced the auto companies to hand over the keys to the United Auto Workers instead of to the creditors who were first in line. The administration has used the National Labor Relations Board in an attempt to shut down a Boeing plant located in South Carolina because South Carolina is a right-to-work state.
And when it comes to immigration, President Obama has made no secret about where he gets his marching orders. As a candidate, Obama spoke to the SEIU and announced, “Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate. Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members. Before immigration debates took place in Washington, I talked with Eliseo Medina and SEIU members.” This was a frank admission that the Obama administration would be run by the SEIU. It wasn’t a tacit deal. It was open and clear-cut. Support me and I’ll do your bidding in Washington. And when you think about it, it’s a win-win proposition. Open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens create more voters for President Obama and more members for the SEIU. This larger power base allows them both to pursue their shared agenda: bigger, more expansive government. That may be a win-win for the president and the unions, but it’s a big loser for the American taxpayers. It’s also dishonest. If President Obama and his allies really wanted to have an honest debate about illegal immigration, they would say openly that they believe our country’s future should be determined by an uncontrolled, illegal influx of immigrants. But they won’t say that. Instead they pretend to care about border security while working to actively undermine it. It’s dishonest, dangerous, and undemocratic. America’s fate should be in the hands of Americans, not human smugglers and drug cartels.
Beyond being a home to bigger and more expensive government, the America being created by advocates of illegal immigration (or of failing to prevent it, which amounts to the same thing) is one defined more by ethnic and tribal differences than by the common values that have always united Americans. In Arizona, we’ve seen this evolution up close in our battle to keep the teaching of race hatred out of our public schools.
In the second half of the 1990s, the Tucson Unified School District quietly adopted something called La Raza Studies. “La Raza” means “race” in Spanish, and as the name implies, La Raza Studies is part of the larger commitment to multiculturalism that is popular among liberals and many professional educators.
“Multiculturalism” sounds like a nice, friendly word that means respect for others. In practice, however, it’s worked out very differently. Multiculturalism encourages its followers to put racial and ethnic identity above all. It says that assimilation into American values is wrong and misguided—even racist. It says that requiring everyone to abide by our laws is xenophobic. Multiculturalism and the open-borders philosophy go hand in hand. As President Obama said to President Calderón, “In the twenty-first century, we are defined not by our borders but by our bonds.” This is just wrong. We are defined by our values, which define both our borders and our bonds. And as the poet Robert Frost once wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Advocates of the La Raza Studies curriculum claim that it is just a way to teach largely Hispanic public school children their own history. But when my current attorney general, Tom Horne, was Arizona superintendent of public instruction in 2007, he found something very different going on in the program. Tucson school officials at first resisted allowing Tom to see the textbooks they use in the La Raza Studies curriculum. When they finally relented, he found a curriculum of grievance and distortion that was being taught in Tucson public schools under the guise of history.
According to Horne, the students were being taught “that Arizona and other states were stolen from Mexico and should be given back.” One of the textbooks Tom finally pried from the hands of the Tucson school district was Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America, a title that conveys the notion that Anglo Americans are illegitimate occupiers. Another textbook was titled Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by a famous anticolonialist writer named Paolo Freire. One former Tucson history teacher, John Ward, reported that the focus of La Raza Studies was to teach students that “Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.” One student who took the classes put it memorably: “I didn’t realize I was oppressed. Now that I took this class, I realize that I am oppressed.”
“By the time I left that class, I saw a change [in the students],” Ward said. “An angry tone. They taught them not to trust their teachers, not to trust the system. They taught them the system wasn’t worth trusting.”
Tom, who had marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. as a teenager in 1963, was deeply disturbed by this violation of King’s call to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. In the name of multicultural tolerance, the La Raza Studies classes were teaching students racial intolerance. What’s more, they weren’t teaching history. They weren’t teaching much of anything at all, except how to be a liberal political activist.
Tom found this out firsthand during a memorable visit to the Tucson High Magnet School in 2006. Several weeks before, in a speech to the high school students, Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers, had charged that Republicans “hate Latinos.” Tom was outraged and sent his aide, Margaret Garcia-Dugan, to the school to rebut this politically charged slander. Margaret only wanted students to move beyond generalities and look at realities. At a minimum, she expected them to hear her out. Instead the students, indoctrinated by their La Raza Studies teachers, turned their backs and walked out.
Tom wasn’t going to sit idly by while hatred and intolerance were being taught in our public schools, and I was with him. These kids don’t need political indoctrination at school; they need to learn to read, write, and speak English. They needed to learn real history, not political propaganda. They needed to be taught to understand and respect their fellow Americans, not hate and resent them. Tom and I deeply believe that we’re not doing Mexican American kids any favors by neglecting traditional areas of study in favor of hip-hop lyrics and politically charged rhetoric.
That’s why, in the midst of all the furor over SB 1070 in May 2010, I signed a bill that cut funds to school districts with ethnic studies programs that teach race hatred or the overthrow of the U.S. government. I was not going to allow Arizona’s tax dollars to be spent on programs that tell some Arizona children that other Arizona children were their oppressors. My spokesman, Paul Senseman, got it exactly right: “Governor Br
ewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.”
In Arizona, we wear our Mexican and American Indian cultural traditions proudly. But it’s one thing to learn and understand other cultures; it’s another to deny that there is a set of values that define what it means to be American. And it is another thing entirely to teach your students to hate their country.
The irony of the whole situation is that in Europe, where multiculturalism has taken deep root, they’re closer to understanding this than the Obama administration is. For decades, the English, French, and Germans, to name just a few, have pursued policies of multiculturalism that have actively encouraged their immigrant populations to retain their native countries’ traditions and values. People who have advocated for a traditional “European” set of values have been accused of hate crimes. The result is immigrant communities in many parts of Europe that are backward, violent, and alienated. But some European leaders are finally realizing that tolerating intolerance in the name of tolerance is a fool’s errand.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain gets it. “We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values,” he said at a security conference in Europe earlier this year. “So when a white person holds objectionable views—racism, for example—we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them.”
Nicolas Sarkozy of France was pithier: “We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.”