Cesar Chavez Fought Illegal Hiring, a Part of His Story Rarely Told

Every country keeps a few heroes in a glass case, and every country's heroes are better dusted than studied. The dust is useful. It lets everyone point at the same picture and say whatever they like about it. Cesar Chavez has been in the glass case for a long time. Schools name themselves after him, states mark a day in his honor, and politicians who have never set foot in a vineyard recite his name like a password.

Now, I have a policy, and the policy is that when somebody becomes a symbol that everybody agrees on, you go and read what the man actually did. The result is almost always more interesting than the postcard. In this case the result is a union leader who spent years fighting growers, and who also spent years fighting the use of unlawful labor to defeat his strikes, a fight that sits awkwardly with the story that gets told about him now. Let me walk you through the public record, carefully, because the story deserves to be told straight and not as a gotcha.

A farmworker's son and a Catholic organizer

Cesar Chavez was born in 1927 in Yuma, Arizona, to a family of Mexican American farmers who lost their land during the Depression and took to the migrant stream in California. He served in the Navy after the war, worked in the fields and the vineyards, and in the 1950s began organizing with the Community Service Organization, a Latino civic group associated with the organizer Fred Ross. He left the organization in 1962 to build a farmworkers' union, founding what became the National Farm Workers Association in Delano, California.

His method was distinctive. He drew on his Catholic faith, on the language of the Gospels, on the nonviolence of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and on a style of patient door-to-door organizing. He fasted publicly several times, including for roughly twenty-five days in 1968, to hold his movement to nonviolence. Whatever a person thinks of unions, and conservatives have strong and varied views, it is hard to deny that Chavez's discipline and moral seriousness were unusual in American labor.

I am going to be fair to him for the rest of this post, because that is how you get the argument right. A man who organized some of the poorest and least protected workers in America, in conditions that were genuinely harsh, deserves a hearing on his own terms.

Delano, 1965

The event that made him famous began on September 8, 1965, when Filipino American grape workers, organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee under Larry Itliong, walked off the farms around Delano over pay. A week later, on September 16, Chavez's association voted to join the strike, and the two groups, in time, merged into the United Farm Workers. The grape strike turned into a boycott of table grapes that spread across the country, and it lasted for years. In 1966 Chavez led a march of strikers from Delano to the state capital in Sacramento. Growers began signing contracts in 1970.

Let me add one thing that conservatives and liberals can agree on. The strike and the boycott used the tools a free society offers: peaceful assembly, public persuasion, a refusal to buy. Nobody was drafted into it. That is the market and the First Amendment doing their ordinary work, and a conservative who believes in voluntary association has no quarrel with the method.

The Bracero program and why he opposed it

Now to the part of the story that gets skipped. From 1942 to 1964, a federal program, commonly called the Bracero program, brought Mexican workers into the United States on temporary contracts, chiefly for agricultural work. It was created during the Second World War to fill labor shortages and extended by Congress after the war through Public Law 78. It ended on December 31, 1964, after years of criticism from labor leaders, religious groups and some members of Congress.

Chavez was among the program's critics, and the reason is plain once you think about the economics. A union is a seller of labor. Its power depends on the ability to withhold work, and a strike works only if the employer cannot easily hire replacements. A program that let growers import large numbers of temporary workers, workers who were tied to an employer and could be sent home, gave employers a standing supply of replacements and undercut wage demands. That was the labor argument, and it was the argument of organized labor's leaders across the era. When the Bracero Program Ended, California Built a Tomato Harvester tells what happened when the program ended, including the mechanization of crops that growers decided they could no longer afford to harvest by hand.

Chavez's union, born the year after the program closed, inherited that suspicion. Its first great challenge was a labor market in which growers could still reach for workers who had no legal status, no contract and no protection, and who could be used to break a strike. That is the root of the position the record shows.

Strikebreakers, the border, and the immigration service

Here I need to be precise, because this is the part where people overreach in both directions.

During the grape strikes and the lettuce strikes that followed, the union and its allies complained that growers were using workers who had entered the country without authorization, and in some cases workers brought across the border for the purpose, as strikebreakers. The union's response included reporting such workers to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency that then handled enforcement. Historians who have studied the union have documented that the United Farm Workers made such reports in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the union's leaders defended the practice as a way of protecting the strike. In 1974, the union also set up what it called a "wet line" along the Arizona-Mexico border near Yuma to discourage unauthorized crossings by people who might be used as replacements. Accounts of that effort describe confrontations and some violence among the participants, and I will leave the details to the historians, since the record is more contested than a short post can resolve.

What can be said safely is this. The union's leadership, including Chavez, took the position that unlawful labor was being used against its workers, and that the enforcement of immigration law was a legitimate tool of the strike. This is hardly a footnote from a hostile source. It is a feature of the union's own history in the period, one that scholars of the labor movement have written about at length, and one that sits uneasily beside the way the movement is often described today.

I will say what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that Chavez was hostile to Mexican workers as a people. His organization was overwhelmingly made up of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants who were lawfully in the country, and he described his work in the language of dignity and brotherhood. I am not claiming that his later views never changed. The union's own position may well have evolved over the years, and I do not claim to know where it stood on the 1986 immigration law. I am claiming something narrower: that during the years of his greatest organizing, the union saw illegal hiring as a weapon employers used against workers and answered it with enforcement.

Why the position made sense

Strip away the political labels and the logic is not mysterious. It has four steps.

1. A wage is the price of labor, and the price depends on supply. If an employer can draw on a large pool of workers who cannot complain, the going wage falls for everyone who competes with them.
2. Workers without legal status are the easiest to exploit, because they have the most to lose by reporting abuse, so employers who prefer them are choosing, on purpose, workers with the least bargaining power.
3. A strike depends on a shortage of replacements. If an employer can hire strikebreakers across the border, the picket line is a theater and not a threat.
4. Therefore the people who most need the immigration laws enforced against employers are the lowest-paid workers already in the country, including the immigrants who are lawfully here.

That is a classic labor argument, and it is a more serious case for enforcement against employers than many on the right ever make. It is also a case that conservatives should find familiar, because it is about the rule of law protecting the weakest party in a contract. The Employer Who Hires Off the Books Is Breaking the Law, Not Helping makes this point from the employer side of the ledger, and Jobs Americans Won't Do Is an Argument About Wages, Not About Americans takes apart the claim that there are jobs no one will take at any price.

The 1986 law and the missed lesson

The strongest evidence that the policy question was real is what Congress did in 1986. The Immigration Reform and Control Act made it unlawful for an employer to knowingly hire an unauthorized worker, required employers to check documents, and offered legalization to people who had been here long enough, with a special program for agricultural workers. It was a bargain: enforcement against employers in exchange for an amnesty. The enforcement half was weak, and The 1986 Law's Real Failure Was the Fake Document Industry It Created explains why, with the result that the bargain failed on the half that Chavez's labor logic would have cared about most.

If a policymaker wanted to learn from the farmworkers' union, the lesson would be that the people who gain from a lax system are employers who want cheap, quiet labor, and the people who lose include the lowest-paid citizens and lawful residents. That is the opposite of the tale in which enforcement is a plot against the poor.

The other side of the ledger, stated fairly

A fair reader will want the objection. Chavez's defenders say that the union's reports to immigration authorities were a tactic in a hard fight, taken when growers held every advantage, and that the people turned in were, in many cases, desperate workers themselves. They add that Chavez spent his career on behalf of poor Mexican and Filipino laborers and that the enforcement stance was about the strike, not about the workers. Critics on the left have asked whether a labor movement can claim solidarity while reporting some workers to the government.

I think both points are fair, and they do not cancel. The tactic was real. The motive was labor protection. Whether the tactic was wise is a judgment that reasonable people, including people who admire him, have made differently. What a conservative can fairly say is that the episode shows the problem was never invented by one party. When employers can hire workers outside the law, someone's wages pay for it, and sometimes the people who notice first are on the labor side of the table.

What it does not mean

Let me be careful about the other direction too. It would be a mistake to turn Chavez into a conservative or to claim his endorsement for any modern bill. He was a union organizer who believed in collective bargaining, boycotts, state labor legislation and the activism of the Church, positions that many conservatives oppose, and he worked with the political left of his era. California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which gave farmworkers a legal framework to organize, was a union victory, and we can debate whether it was good policy. He is not our man in any simple sense.

He also should not be turned into a fixed symbol of any one position on immigration today. The country's laws, the labor market and the union have all changed since. What the record supports is limited: that he opposed the use of unlawful labor against his strikes, that his union acted on that opposition, and that his view rested on wages and on the dignity of work rather than on hostility to anyone's origin. Beyond that, we should say "the record does not say" and stop.

What the story teaches

Three lessons, one for each side of the aisle and one for all of us.

For the left: if you honor a man, honor his actual positions. The case that employers should not be allowed to break strikes with workers they can threaten and fire is serious, and it belongs to the tradition you celebrate. It cannot be set aside when it becomes inconvenient.

For the right: do not let anyone tell you that wage-conscious immigration enforcement is a betrayal of the working poor. Some of the most impressive organizers in American labor history thought it was the opposite. Make that argument with confidence, and make it with respect for the people who work the fields.

For everyone: honor work. The dignity of a person who picks lettuce for a living is not in question. The question is whether the law that governs that person's job is enforced fairly, so that the employer who follows the rules is not undercut by the one who does not. A country that cannot answer that question cannot say it values the worker. Two Economists, One Boatlift, and the Fight Over Immigration and Wages looks at the economists' fight over how immigration affects wages, a fight that is more complicated than either side lets on.

The case in brief

1. Cesar Chavez led the Delano grape strike of 1965 and built the United Farm Workers on peaceful organizing, Catholic faith and public persuasion.
2. His movement opposed the Bracero program, which ended in 1964, because a standing supply of imported workers weakens the bargaining power of workers already here.
3. During his strikes in the late 1960s and 1970s, his union treated the use of unauthorized workers as strikebreakers as a labor problem, reported them to immigration authorities, and in 1974 set up a "wet line" at the Arizona border.
4. The reasoning was about wages and the dignity of work, not about hostility to any group, and it shows that enforcement against employers has deep roots in labor history.
5. The record supports only that much, and anyone claiming more, in either direction, has stopped reading it.

What you can do: look up how your own state treats employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers, and whether it requires E-Verify, on your state legislature's website, then ask a candidate for local office where he or she stands.