The Dallas Morning News
Thursday 24 April 2008
It's a critical time in the U.S. with an enthusiasm for politics unseen in decades, and that's given muscle to the Latino vote, said a U.S. labor leader Wednesday at a conference of Mexican immigrant leaders.
"In over 40 years of organizing, I've never seen this level of interest and it will be good for this democracy," said Eliseo Medina, the executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest labor groups in the U.S.
Mr. Medina urged the advisory council of the Mexican government's Institute for Mexicans Abroad to organize, to vote and to push for an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, as the conference moved into its second day.
"We can't have two classes of workers here," Mr. Medina said in Spanish.
Then, Mr. Medina, 62, shared his own immigrant story: His family immigrated to the U.S. legally to Delano, Calif., when he was 10, because like so many Mexican families today, they were tired of being separated from their farm worker father, the family's breadwinner.
In Delano, he met César Chávez, the founder of the United Farm Workers, and became an organizer.
Organizing to defend immigrant workers - both legal and illegal - was a theme that's being discussed often throughout the conference.
It began on Tuesday with an address by Mexico's President Felipe Calderón, who called himself "an ally who is indefatigably on the side of the Mexicans in the United States." Later Tuesday evening, Mr. Calderón met privately with a group that calls itself the American and Mexican Anti-Discrimination Alliance, and has received organizing assistance from the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League - two groups that have long fought anti-Semitism.
"We have been the focus of many attacks," said organizer Gloria Inzunza-Franco, a Mexican immigrant and university administrator from the Long Beach area. "We always hear about the negative as though it were the norm."
The theme continued Wednesday with Rosa Rosales, the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who emphasized the need to vote and then urged members to "organize, organize, organize." LULAC's greatest base of membership is in Texas, where it was founded in the late 1920s to defend the rights of U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry.
In Texas, Latinos already make up a quarter of the electorate.
At the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that wants immigration restrictions, spokesman Ira Mehlman said that the conference's focus on defending immigrants and pushing for a federal legalization program isn't new.
"They have been advocating for that for some time," he said. But "the Mexican government seems to think that U.S. immigration policy is as much their business as it is ours, which we would dispute."
The advisory council is made up of about 125 people, and was started as a 2003 initiative of Mexico's Foreign Ministry. Most, but not all, members are Mexican immigrants, and they range from pediatricians to construction contractors. About 9.4 percent of Mexico natives lived in the United States in 2005, according to estimates from the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute.
Mexico City native Jacobo Kupersztoch, a retired Dallas microbiologist and a former member of the IME council, said the meeting with Mr. Calderón was productive and included Mexico's ambassador Arturo Sarukhan.
"The meeting was positive with a big desire to do something for the migrants," Mr. Kupersztoch said.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
No comments:
Post a Comment