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ILLEGAL* IMMIGRATION TO THE U.S.:

MYTH vs. REALITY

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by John Spritzler

October 17, 2023

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The URL of this article for sharing it is https://www.pdrboston.org/illegal-immigration-myth-vs-reality

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OVERVIEW 

 

There is an important fact about illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America that many people do not know. The reason for the massive illegal immigration is primarily because American Big Money, for decades, has been using our government to do things to force millions of people to have to illegally migrate into the United States to survive.***

 

If Americans knew this key fact, then they would be focused on stopping Big Money from doing this, rather than focused--as the mass media (and increasingly neo-Nazis) want us to be--on whether, or how, to stop these illegal immigrants from immigrating. We need to get the facts straight in order to have a proper debate.

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Big Money wants millions of Mexicans to be forced to illegally immigrate for two reasons: 1) it makes them a source of super-cheap labor because their illegal status makes them easy to cow into submission, and it enables employers of American citizen workers to force those workers to accept lower pay and worse working conditions or be replaced with illegal immigrant workers; and 2) it makes the illegal immigrants a perfect scape goat to be the object of anger that we would otherwise justifiably direct at Big Money because of the very real hardships we citizens suffer due to Big Money.

 

Big Money for decades has conspired with local elites in Central America to make life-threatening conditions for poor people the norm there, which is why so many of those people are seeking some safety inside the United States by illegally immigrating. The fact is that the immigration laws and procedures are designed to prevent the vast majority of these overwhelmingly good and decent people from Mexico and Central America from being able to legally immigrate, and they know it.

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Yes, Americans have a right to limit immigration into our nation. This is discussed at some length below. And yes, under normal circumstances people should only immigrate legally. And yes, the massive illegal immigration causes some very real problems for American citizens. But when Big Money--for its own very selfish reasons--forces millions of people to immigrate illegally, and then declares them to be criminals for doing so, the moral--and practical!--response is not to preach to the illegal immigrants about the importance of obeying the law, but to stop Big Money from forcing people to illegally immigrate.

 

And guess what? The people who want to stop Big Money from doing this the most are the illegal immigrants themselves! We should treat these people as friends with a common enemy--Big Money. We should not treat them like dirt by deporting them as if they were our enemy.

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DETAILS, EVIDENCE & CONCLUSIONS

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American Big Money, for decades, has been using our government to do things that have forced millions of people south of our border to have to illegally migrate into the United States to survive.

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Immigrants from Mexico

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NAFTA was all about getting cheap labor to undercut American citizen labor. Big Money got the federal government to subsidize agribusiness so it could dump very cheap corn into Mexico to force small Mexican farmers out of business and force them to survive by seeking employment the only place they can find it--in the United States or in the cheap labor maquila factories newly set up just south of the Mexican-US border. The U.S. government even made it a condition of the NAFTA agreement that Mexico eliminate the section of its constitution that gave Mexican peasants rights to the land that would have enabled them to stay in Mexico and remain farmers despite the dumping of cheap U.S. corn.

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This article (PDF, give the PDF files time to load) by Citizen.com reports:

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Before NAFTA, Mexico only imported corn and other basic food commodities if local production did not meet domestic needs. NAFTA eliminated Mexican tariffs on corn and other commodities. NAFTA terms also required revocation of programs supporting small farmers. But NAFTA did not discipline U.S. subsidies on agriculture. The result was disastrous for millions of people in the Mexican countryside whose livelihoods relied on agriculture. Amid a NAFTA-spurred influx of cheap U.S. corn, the price paid to Mexican farmers for the corn that they grew fell by 66 percent, forcing many to abandon farming. From 1991 to 2007, about 2 million Mexicans engaged in farming and related work lost their livelihoods. Mexico’s participation in NAFTA was conditioned on changing its revolutionary-era Constitution’s land reforms, undoing provisions that guaranteed small plots (“ejidos”) to millions of Mexicans living in rural villages. As corn prices plummeted, indebted farmers lost their land, which newly could be acquired by foreign firms that consolidated prime acres into large plantations.

 

According to a New Republic exposé: “as cheap American foodstuffs flooded Mexico’s markets and as U.S. agribusiness moved in, 1.1 million small farmers – and 1.4 million other Mexicans dependent upon the farm sector – were driven out of work between 1993 and 2005. Wages dropped so precipitously that today the income of a farm laborer is one-third that of what it was before NAFTA.” The exposé noted that, as jobs and wages fell, many rural Mexicans joined the ranks of the 12 million undocumented immigrants competing for low-wage jobs in the United States.

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A State of Iowa government document (PDF) reports:

 

NAFTA put Mexican farmers out of business. It allowed U.S. government-subsidized farm products into Mexico. Local farmers could not compete with the subsidized prices. As a result, 1.3 million farmers were put out of business, according to the Economic Policy Institute. It forced unemployed farmers to cross the border illegally to find work. In 1995, there were 2.9 million Mexicans living in the United States illegally. It increased to 4.5 million in 2000, probably due to NAFTA. The recession drove that figure to 6.9 million in 2007.

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The New York Times reported in 2003:

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The more than $10 billion that American taxpayers give corn farmers every year in agricultural subsidies has helped destroy the livelihoods of millions of small Mexican farmers, according to a report to be released on Wednesday.

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The BBC reported in 2004:

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US maize ‘threat’ to Mexico farms

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The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) is having a severe effect on rural Mexico, TVE’s Earth Report programme for the BBC claims.

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Nafta was set up 10 years ago by Mexico, Canada and the US to promote competition and efficiency. But US maize farmers, propped up by subsidies, are outcompeting their Mexican counterparts. As a result, US maize is flooding Mexican markets, threatening to put traditional farmers out of business.

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Citizen.org describes (PDF) the disaster in 2004 this way:

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As a condition for NAFTA, Mexico was required to amend the historic land redistribution provisions of the post-Revolution 1917 Constitution which forbade foreign ownership of land and had redistributed lands seized from large landowners to a system of ejidos under which peasants and indigenous communities were granted rights to small plots of land that could not be sold. When these progressive land rules were dismantled for the first time in 80 years, small farmers were threatened with forfeiting their land for bad debt. This has been the fate for hundreds of thousands of campesinos, who have been put at a devastating disadvantage by dumping of corn and other agricultural products by U.S. agribusiness.

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At least 1.5 million Mexican farm livelihoods have been lost to NAFTA so far. In 2002 alone, an estimated 600 Mexican farmers were forced off the land every day. Deprived of their livelihoods, most of these displaced farmers have had little choice other than to become economic migrants, streaming into northern cities in search of scarce maquila factory jobs, or making increasingly desperate efforts to cross the border into the U.S. More than 1600 Mexican migrants have died attempting to reach the U.S.in the past five years. If NAFTA is fully implemented many more Mexican farm families will be displaced; with some estimates as high as 15 million or about one in six Mexicans.

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Political Research Associates in a 2014 article titled "Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico," recounts many ways that NAFTA and other U.S. government policies have forced Mexicans to illegally cross the border to enter the United States (PRA says this should more accurately be called "migration") in order to survive, and concludes:

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In fact, while debating bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs, four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which has caused more displacement and more migration.

 

Immigrants from Central America:

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“Rio Grande border to US sees 57,000 young migrants in nine months”

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This was the headline of a Guardian article in 2014. Tens of thousands of children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala were fleeing danger in their home countries and seeking relative safety in the United States. Why were they in such danger? The Guardian gives the immediate cause without bothering to give the underlying cause:

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The Department of Homeland Security reports that the surge in minor refugees is due to widespread violence. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that 50% of the minors it interviewed “reported experiencing violence or having received threats from gangs, drug cartels, or state actors, such as the police.”

• Guatemala has one of the highest violent crime rates and one of the highest murder rates in Latin America, according to the US State Department.

• El Salvador’s murder rate hit an all-time high in May 2014, it’s got the second-highest murder rate in Latin America, and the US State Department even issued a travel warning for Americans considering going there.

• Honduras, from where a significant proportion of the migrant children come, has the world’s highest murder rate, child murders are up 77% from just a year ago, and many child murders are thought to be gang-related.

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But why is this gang violence so extreme in these nations? Here's why. 

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The super rich who rule the United States have for decades violently (extremely violently!) killed whoever in these countries have ever tried to create a decent, equal, safe and democratic society there instead of the oligarchic dictatorships that have kept people in abject poverty and terror for the pleasure of themselves and the protection of U.S. corporate profits.

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Liberal President Jimmy Carter, no less than conservative President Ronald Reagan, worked to keep ordinary people in Central America living in violent nightmare of terror by the rich against them.

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Nicaragua

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Carter backed the murderous Somoza regime in Nicaragua (while uttering mere words of concern about its human rights violations, of course.) Read about this here, where the Harvard Crimson reports:

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In a letter to President Carter, Nicaraguan church leaders charged that the U.S. has helped maintain Somoza's power through "brute force," and called for an end to U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan government. The annual American contribution of twelve million dollars in economic aid continues to flow into Somoza's coffers even as his troops attempt to institute their reign of terror in the cities of Nicaragua.

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Noam Chomsky wrote about Carter's support for the brutal Somoza regime as follows:

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When his rule was challenged, by the Sandinistas in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called "Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza"-that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power.

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The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be "ill advised" to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out.

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Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of "Somocismo without Somoza," but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed.

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The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help reestablish the Guard-soon to be re named the contras, or "freedom fighters.")

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Carter also had the U.S. Army School of the Americas train 250 Salvadoran officers and non-coms for El Salvador's brutal and violently repressive military that blew up every union meeting place and opposition newspaper as it killed opposition leaders.

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Read here in PoliticalTheology.com how the "Godly" Carter was denounced for being on the wrong side of God with his support for the Salvadoran armed forces' brutal repression of the Salvadoran people:

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Instead of favoring greater justice and peace in El Salvador, your government’s contribution will undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for respect for their most basic human rights.

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Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote these words in a letter to President Jimmy Carter just over a month before the Salvadoran pastor was assassinated on the altar while celebrating mass in the early months of 1980. Over the next decade, the rightist Salvadoran government would receive $6 billion in military aid from their strongest anti-communist ally—the United States. President Carter, of course, did not heed the archbishop’s warning, and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would increase military aid to its highest levels.

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El Salvador

 

Wikipedia reports on Carter's despicable role in El Salvador as follows:

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The Salvadoran Civil War (Spanish: guerra civil de El Salvador) was a twelve-year period of civil war in El Salvador that was fought between the government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition or "umbrella organization" of left-wing groups backed by the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro as well as the Soviet Union.[33] A coup on 15 October 1979 followed by government killings of anti-coup protesters is widely seen as the start of civil war.[34] The war did not formally end until 16 January 1992 with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City.[35]

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The United Nations (UN) reports that the war killed more than 75,000 people between 1979 and 1992, along with approximately 8,000 disappeared persons. Human rights violations, particularly the kidnapping, torture, and murder of suspected FMLN sympathizers by state security forces and paramilitary death squads – were pervasive.[36][37][38]

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The Salvadoran government was considered an ally of the U.S. in the context of the Cold War.[39] During the Carter and Reagan administrations, the US provided 1 to 2 million dollars per day in economic aid to the Salvadoran government.[40] The US also provided significant training and equipment to the military. By May 1983, it was reported that US military officers were working within the Salvadoran High Command and making important strategic and tactical decisions.[41] 

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A New York Times article January 18, 1981 reports:

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After months of controversy and hesitation within the Administration over supplying ''lethal'' military aid to El Salvador, President Carter has authorized the emergency delivery of $5 million in combat equipment to help the Salvadoran armed forces combat a major uprising by Marxist guerrillas.

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The role of the U.S. government in El Salvador was described by Allan Nairn, a freelance journalist, to a Columbia University audience in 1989 [The report is in the Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CXIII, Number 54, 1989 ]. His talk was reported in the school’s paper:

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The story Americans are getting from the press is that the recent guerrilla offensive is a re-initiation of violence. The fact is, violence never left El Salvador. Killing in El Salvador and Nicaragua is the worst in the world on a per-capita basis….Four hundred thousand people have been killed in El Salvador, 90 percent by the Salvadoran army. There is no comparison in the modern world, with the possible exception of Pol Pot and Idi Amin. The difference is that the Salvadoran death squads are trained and run by American advisors and the CIA…I have talked to a colonel in the El Salvadoran Army who said he was willing to kill 200,000 to 300,000 people to maintain the Salvadoran oligarchy…What people need to realize is that it is our government that is supporting mass murder in El Salvador.

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Guatemala

 

ABC News in 2013 posted an article titled, “Did Reagan Finance Genocide in Guatemala” and the answer it gives is, essentially, Yes. It reports:

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“On Monday, a Guatemalan court ordered the country's government to apologize to the Ixil population for the crimes of José Efraín Ríos Montt, a dictator who was sentenced to 80 years in prison for his role in war crimes committed between 1982 and 1983.

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“The verdict concluded that the army, under the command of Ríos Montt, had engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Ixiles, a small Mayan ethnic group. In that sense, it finally offered an answer to the thousands of victims' families who had pleaded for justice since the 1980s…

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"U.S. military and intelligence units worked closely with the Guatemalan army over the decades of Guatemala's civil war," said Geoff Thale, Central America Program Director at the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA)…

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“Despite mounting concerns about human rights abuses, between 1978 and 1980, the military received $7.9 million through the State Department's Military Assistance Program and Foreign Military Sales program….

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“Reagan met with Ríos Montt, "a man of great personal integrity and commitment," according to the president. When Reagan was asked about human rights violations in Guatemala he said, ''I am inclined to believe they've been getting a bum rap…[but shortly afterwards] the U.S. embassy was investigating credible reports of numerous massacres involving the Guatemalan military…

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“Reagan's administration ultimately decided to ignore the warnings, and indirect assistance was secretly resumed through the CIA. "Overall, U.S. intelligence, training, political support and assistance to the Guatemalan government and military in the early and mid-1980s uncritically supported counter-insurgency strategies that targeted civilians, in the cities and in rural areas like the Ixil Triangle," Geoff Thale said. "U.S. policy makers of that era bear some responsibility for the human rights abuses that took place."”

 

The ugly role of the very liberal Harvard University in honoring a mass murderer of Guatemalans is the subject of this article, copied in full here:

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Hector Gramajo

Master's in Public Administration (Mason Fellowship), Kennedy School of Government, 1991

Massacres, Torture, and Command Responsibility

Hector Gramajo Morales held a number of senior positions in the Guatemalan military and was Minister of Defense from 1987 to 1990. From 1982 to 1983 -- while Gramajo was ‎Army Vice Chief of Staff and director of the Army General Staff -- the Guatemalan military killed 75,000 people and destroyed some 440 villages in a massive counterinsurgency campaign directed primarily against the country's Mayan inhabitants.

Gramajo studied at the infamous "School of the Americas" (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1967, where the US government trained generations of Latin American military officers later associated with human rights abuses and dictatorships.

Apologists for the U.S.-backed genocidal dictatorship in Guatemala considered Gramajo a "moderating force" who scaled back the level of atrocities and supported a transition to civilian rule. As Gramajo infamously remarked in an interview while at Harvard:

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"We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system ... which provides development for 70 percent of the population while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent." [1]

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Or, as one U.S. government official put it: "Gramajo understands how we function. He's testified in front of Congress. He speaks good English." [2] [emphasis added]

After stepping down as defense minister, Gramajo went to study at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government on a yearlong Mason fellowship while preparing to return home and launch a presidential campaign. He also gave a public address at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics.

In June 1991, while heading to his commencement ceremony in academic robes, Gramajo was handed court papers informing him that he was being sued by eight Guatemalans for abuses perpetrated against them or their family members by forces under his command. Soon thereafter, the suit was combined with one brought by Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who had been raped and tortured by Gramajo's forces filed a similar lawsuit. Both cases were filed under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows lawsuits in U.S. courts for some human rights violations committed abroad.

Gramajo did not contest the lawsuit and eventually left the United States. In April 1995, a federal judge in Boston ruled against him and awarded $47.5 million in damages to the plaintiffs. Gramajo's bid for the presidency later that year failed. Gramajo never paid the award, nor did he ever return to the US, which revoked his entry visa.

On 12 March, 2004, Hector Gramajo died after being attacked on his farm by a swarm of "Africanized" bees.

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A personal note: This author organized a panel discussion at the Harvard School of Public Health when General Gramajo was to receive his masters of public administration degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government about this. I invited, in addition to opponents of Harvard giving Gramajo this degree, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government to be a panelist and to defend the decision of that school; he declined to show up. I am happy to learn that "Africanized" bees seem to have a better sense of justice than the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

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The conditions in these Central American nations are simply unsafe for ordinary people. The oligarchs and drug gangs are in power and they rule by terror. The Guardian article about 57,000 young migrants crossing the border to the U.S. in nine months tells a typical story:

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When the gang came for him, Ceferino decided he had three choices: join them, refuse to join and risk being killed, or flee the country.

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The teenager left his family in Guatemala and headed for the US, becoming part of a wave of unaccompanied children from Central America that has overwhelmed authorities at the Texas border and sparked a humanitarian crisis and a political row.

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Cole Kazdin's article in Vice is titled, "The Violence Central Americans are Fleeing Was Stoked by the U.S.: We're still dealing with the aftermath of atrocities committed by U.S. allies in Central America during the Cold War."

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Watch this 12 minute video for more information about Central America and the role of the U.S. government creating unlivable conditions that force people to flee.

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The Guardian has an informative article about Central America titled, "What Is Forcing Thousands of Migrants to Flee Their Home Countries?" by Michael Deibert. Among many other similar things in the other Central American nations it reports:

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In Honduras, where the caravan originated, the past decade has seen the terrorizing effects of street violence by criminal gangs exacerbated by an increased presence of Mexican cartels, police abuses and the murder of human rights and environmental activists, most notoriously that of Berta Cáceres in 2016.

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Much of this current instability can be traced back to the June 2009 ouster of its then president, the erratic leftist Manuel Zelaya. Though the then US president Barack Obama declared the ouster “not legal”, his administration subsequently worked with regional powers such as Mexico to assure Zelaya did not return to office.

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After Zelaya’s overthrow, Honduras was run by a series of rightwing leaders. When the most recent of them, Juan Orlando Hernández, looked likely to lose his re-election last year to the former journalist Salvador Nasralla, his government responded with a repression that Amnesty International characterized as having “violated international norms and the right to personal integrity, liberty and fair trial guarantees”.

 

Another informative article about how the U.S. government is a major cause of people in Central America having to migrate north is "A Century of U.S. Intervention Created the Immigration Crisis: Those seeking asylum today inherited a series of crises that drove them to the border." As this article points out, a major cause of unemployment, which in turn forces people to migrate north, is the fact that U.S. agricultural products are dumped into Central American nations duty-free, meaning the price is so low that local farmers cannot compete and are driven to migrate north. The reason these agricultural products are duty-free is the trade agreement the U.S. has with these nations, called the Central America Free Trade Agreement, which bans a tariff duty on U.S. agricultural exports to Central American nations. Note that, as discussed here, the Trump administration was making noise about getting a "better deal" for the U.S. than the current CAFTA terms, but by "better deal" Trump meant making it harder for Central American nations to export products to the U.S., not--by any means!--making it harder for U.S. Big Money agribusiness to sell its crops duty-free in Central America.

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An article titled, "How Joe Biden’s privatization plans helped doom Latin America and fuel the migration crisis," focuses on Joe Biden's role in creating conditions that force people in Latin America to migrate north into the United States illegally just to survive.

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About Equador, read "Leaked Chats Reveal a U.S.-Linked Prosecutor Is Behind the Assault on Ecuador’s Social Democratic Movement" to see why people there are migrating for their safety.

 

Illegal immigration into the United States is a source of super-cheap labor because the immigrants' illegal status makes them easy to cow into submission, and it enables employers of American citizen workers to force such workers to accept lower pay and worse working conditions or be replaced with illegal immigrant workers.

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Cheap labor anywhere, in Mexico or in the United States, lowers the wages and worsens the working conditions of ALL workers.

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Here's how cheap labor in Mexico, produced by the NAFTA deal between the Mexican and United States governments, adversely affected U.S. workers.

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A State of Iowa report on (PDF) the effects of NAFTA states:

 

[U]nemployed Mexican farmers went to work in substandard conditions in the maquiladora program. Maquiladora is where United States-owned companies employ Mexican workers near the border. They cheaply assemble products for export back into the United States. Employment in maquiladoras rose 120,000 in 1980 to 1.2 million in 2006.

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The Economic Policy Institute reports in its "NAFTA’s Impact on U.S. Workers" :

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The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.

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By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.

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NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.

 

Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico. The same threats were used to fight union organizing efforts. The message was: “If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border.” With NAFTA, corporations also could more easily blackmail local governments into giving them tax reductions and other subsidies.

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The Myth That It is "Bigotry" When American Citizen Workers Express Anger at Being Forced to Compete Against Lower-Paid Illegal Immigrants

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To those who refer to American citizen workers who oppose illegal immigration as "bigots," one might ask: Who are you referring to as "bigots"?

One might ask this question because the ruling class wrongly portrays working class opposition to illegal immigration as just bigotry. While there are no doubt some working class American citizens who are bigoted against illegal immigrants, this is not the realistic way to understand opposition to illegal immigration. Here's why.

To start with, Cesar Chavez--the famous organizer of a farm workers union whose members were mainly Hispanic--opposed illegal immigration. Read about this in an ABC NEWS article  that reports:

For a significant period of his storied career as a labor organizer, Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration.

He encouraged union members to join "wet lines" along the Arizona-Mexico border to prevent undocumented immigrants from crossing into the U.S. He accused immigration agents at the border of letting in undocumented immigrants to undermine the labor efforts of Latino farmworkers.

If anybody was NOT bigoted against illegal immigrants from Mexico, it was Cesar Chavez! Chavez's opposition to this illegal immigration had absolutely nothing to do with bigotry; it was opposition to the employers bringing in strike-breakers.

The fact is that there are about 1.1 million illegal immigrants working in construction jobs in the U.S. Read this article about how the residential construction industry in Massachusetts, for example, is based on illegal immigrants--paying them much less than would be paid to American citizen construction workers and forcing the citizen workers to compete for jobs against the lower paid illegal immigrant workers. Citizen construction workers have every right to be angry at this attack on their livelihood.

The point is that the ruling class does in fact use illegal immigrant workers to lower the wages of citizen workers, and not just agricultural workers, and it is not bigotry for citizen workers to express anger at having their wages lowered this way.

The other point on this topic is that the sensible response of citizen workers to illegal immigration is to join with illegal workers in fighting against the ruling class's practice (both political parties, for many decades) of doing things in Latin and Central America to FORCE people there to have to illegally immigrate to the United States just to survive. Thus  Cesar Chavez responded to the problem wrongly. He should have required the illegal immigrants to join the farmworkers union, and only opposed their entry into the United States if they refused to join it.