Thread: CSU professors exchange words over immigration issues

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CSU professors exchange words over immigration issues
By SARA REED
SaraReed@coloradoan.com



Two Colorado State University professors exchanged harsh words during and after Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at CSU.

CSU anthropology professor Norberto Valdez delivered the keynote address during a community celebration at the Lory Student Center. He criticized, but did not mention by name, the chairman of the economics department, Steven Shulman, and his research regarding illegal immigration and its relationship to low wages for African-American and Latino workers.

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He also challenged Shulman’s contention that United Farm Worker leader Cesar Chavez opposed the use of undocumented immigrants in the labor force.

“In order to avoid questions about the real causes of low wages which are associated with capitalism, a system he defends, and to attack immigrants, which he obviously despises, he distorts the contributions of Cesar Chavez in the farm labor movement, saying that he opposed undocumented workers entering the U.S. and that African-Americans and Latinos should do the same,” Valdez said during his address.

Shulman, who wasn’t present for the speech, reviewed Valdez’s remarks and called him a “coward” for not referring to the economics chair by name in his speech.

In an e-mailed statement to the Coloradoan, Shulman said Valdez was misrepresenting Chavez’s stand on illegal immigration and accused him of trying to rewrite history. Shulman cited two articles that mention Chavez’s opposition to illegal immigration in the 1960s and 1970s.

Shulman said Valdez’s comments regarding his research were “false” and “reprehensible.”

“He cannot deny the research that has consistently shown that mass immigration drives down the wages and employment of African-Americans, so he insults the scholars who do the research,” Shulman wrote.

Valdez’s remarks should not have been made during the King celebration, Shulman said.

“Martin Luther King stood for truth and reasoned debate,” he said. “He believed in the promise of America. He fought for the citizenship rights for African-Americans. All of this is completely contrary to Valdez.”

Valdez said the point of mentioning Shulman’s positions was not to discuss his research but to illustrate what happens when heroes become icons — people know so little of them that they do not recognize misrepresentation.

Chavez did not die in the 1970s, Valdez said, and he continued to fight for farm workers until the 1990s.

“My point is that he (Chavez) grew during these times by working right alongside undocumented workers and citizens alike,” Valdez said in an interview. “Through these experiences, he changed his views on the issues of ‘illegal immigration’ over time when he empathized with their common humanity.”

“My point is that he (Chavez) grew during these times by working right alongside undocumented workers and citizens alike,” Valdez said in an interview. “Through these experiences, he changed his views on the issues of ‘illegal immigration’ over time when he empathized with their common humanity.”

Yea, give us some source material because I'm not taking your word for it. Right now, Valdez you have a credibility problem.

Unlike Shulman who "cited two articles that mention Chavez’s opposition to illegal immigration in the 1960s and 1970s."

Secondly, I really don't see how Chavez's work has anything to do with the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Dixie

Hey Dixie

I agree.


Illegal immigration has nothing to do with our countries civil rights history. They might have a case in Mexico or South America, but I see no shared history here with our civil rights stuggle in the US.

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......Growers fought back by busing the reserve army up from Mexico. In 1979, Chavez bitterly testified to Congress:

… when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration service has removed strikebreakers. … The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking…

In 1969, Chavez led a march to the Mexican border to protest illegal immigration. Joining him were Sen. Walter Mondale and Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph Abernathy.

The UFW picketed INS offices to demand closure of the border. Chavez also finked on illegal alien scabs to la migra. Columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. reported in the Arizona Republic, “Cesar Chavez, a labor leader intent on protecting union membership, was as effective a surrogate for the INS as ever existed. Indeed, Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union he headed routinely reported, to the INS, for deportation, suspected illegal immigrants who served as strikebreakers or refused to unionize.”

Like today’s Minutemen, UFW staffers under the command of Chavez’s brother Manuel patrolled the Arizona-Mexico border to keep out illegal aliens. Unlike the well-behaved Minutemen, however, Chavez’s boys sometimes beat up intruders.

Successful unionization typically leads to management investing in mechanization, which reduces the number of jobs. United Mine Workers boss John L. Lewis proclaimed that he intended to force underground coalminers’ wages up so high that his union would shrink. If his members were paid enough today, they could afford to educate their kids to earn a less dangerous living by the time the bosses had figured out how to do without most of them.

During the 1970s, a similarly benign outcome appeared inevitable for American stoop laborers. The inflated piecework rates paid UFW members impelled simple productivity improvements such as light aluminum ladders for fruit tree pickers, to be followed, it was expected, by mechanization. In Ventura County, the average output of lemon pickers during the UFW’s reign rose from 3.4 boxes per hour in 1965 to 8.4 boxes by 1978. A few more decades of high pay, it appeared, would eventually turn these literally backbreaking jobs into merely a painful memory.

Then the 1982 Mexican economic collapse sent a flood of illegal immigrants north. Growers that had signed generous contracts with the UFW got out of the business and were replaced by new firms that relied upon subcontractors for cheap workers, no questions asked about their documents. Automation efforts slowed.

The rotten pay and conditions suffered by today’s workers—three laborers died of heat stroke last summer—are a matter of supply and demand. The government can pass regulations, but if there are enough jobseekers on the spot to undercut their fellow workers, laws hardly matter.

Economist Martin has noted, “We have essentially privatized the immigration policy of this country, and left it in the hands of California’s growers.” The benefit to the consumer is minor. Martin notes that about 7 percent of the price paid by shoppers for strawberries goes to the pickers. In return, the public picks up the tab for the workers’ medical care and their children’s schooling. A National Academy of Sciences commission estimated in 1997 that an immigrant without a high-school degree ultimately costs America $100,000 more than he contributes.

In the 1980s, the UFW declined into irrelevance as it ascended into the pantheon of political correctness. Losing interest in the gritty work of organizing, the aging Chavez began to back mass immigration as he became a symbol of Latino identity politics.

Chavez’s ambivalence about immigration is also widespread among the Latino-American electorate. A 2002 survey by the Pew Hispanic Center found that 48 percent of Latino registered voters felt there were “too many” immigrants in the U.S. today, while only 7 percent thought there were “too few.” This shouldn’t be startling since Hispanics suffer mass immigration’s most direct consequences: lowered wages, stressed schools, and that annoying third cousin from Hermosillo who shows up uninvited and wants to sleep on the couch until he gets himself established in a few years.

Yet when the Pew interviewers immediately rephrased the question in ethnocentric terms to read, “Thinking about Latin American immigrants who come to work in the United States,” suddenly only 21 percent of Latino voters wanted to “reduce the number” and 36 percent wished to “allow more.” Thus, Hispanic activists can easily arouse for their own profit understandable but irrational racial chauvinism.

The emergence of a truly Latino-American leader like the young Chavez, one more interested in the economic advancement of his own American ethnic group than in identity politics, would be good for American Hispanics, good for other Americans, and good for Mexico as well. As former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castaneda has admitted, the mostly unfenced border allows Mexico’s largely white ruling class to bleed off the discontented poor rather than make the fundamental reforms necessary to fix that dysfunctional country. Yet any of that is unlikely as long as the truth about Chavez is so little known. _____________________________________________

Steve Sailer is TAC’s film critic and a VDARE.com columnist.


February 27, 2006 Issue

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_02_27/article.html