BY KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock

In the wake of the student walkout over illegal immigration, I wonder if students are being taught all immigration history. 

I wonder if they are being taught about major, early advocates for less immigration, Democrats all:  labor activist Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King and,Bill Clinton’s advisor on immigration, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D. – Texas).

While media, falsely, label Chavez as an “immigrant-rights advocate,” in testimony before a Congressional committee in the 1960s, he warned that if the U.S. government wouldn’t do border enforcement, he would.  Indeed, Chavez’ United Farm Workers—back when the UFW cared about resident poor—patrolled California’s southern border, intercepting the illegal border crossers that Big Ag used to consistently break UFW strikes meant to give farm workers decent wages and better working conditions.

Coretta Scott King, Dr. Martin Luther King’s wife, lent her name to stopping a bill, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), to legalize illegal border crossers working in the U.S.  In a letter to Congress, she stressed that it was time for American business to hire Blacks and other minorities—at a living wage—rather than “import” cheap illegal labor. As a result, Hatch’s bill died in Congress.

Barbara Jordan was born in abject poverty in Texas, passionately sought an education, went to law school and was eventually elected to Congress, where she advocated tirelessly for civil rights and other liberal issues. President Clinton chose her to head his “Immigration and the American Future” presidential commission, a bipartisan commission that studied what Jordan soon labeled as “over immigration.”  At a press conference, she summed up the commission’s findings in one blunt, by today’s intolerant standards, politically incorrect sentence:  “The credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, do get in; people who should not get in are kept out; and people who are judged deportable are required to leave.”

She also cautioned that over-immigration was happening on the backs of resident poor and minorities, who were underpaid and who deserved better than the pretense of the labor shortage that business used to justify its unending thirst for immigrant labor.

So, I’d like to hear some assurances that these parts of immigration history are being taught too, along with, perhaps, students educated that, no, the Statue of Liberty was not built to welcome immigrants. It was a gift from the people of France to commemorate the birth of our democracy and a government “by and for the people”—all people, not just those with the “correct” views on immigration.