New Orleans Sixty odd folks ranging from business, labor,, and even some advocates met with President Obama to talk about a new plan for immigration reform in the troubled political environment we now face and in the still painful wake of last year’s loss of the DREAM Act.  A tongue in cheek tweet from an official at NDLON, the National Day Labor Organizing Network asked if the meeting were a “campaign rally.”

Today’s New York Times reported on a covey of Congress folks who were pressuring the President to use various executive powers to establish a goal line, Hail Mary defense for the millions of families and young people caught in the current immigration crises.   Spokes people for the White House jumped all over themselves to disabuse people of the notion that Obama would do diddle for immigration reform.  They argued that he promised nothing and would do nothing that seemed to be an end around on Congress.  These statements were deflating in a “what is it about ‘no,’ you don’t understand?” way.

Listening to a National Immigration Forum conference call among the activists yesterday afternoon, the only real evidence of progress continue to be in the fights, some successful like the victory by CASA de Maryland, in winning and fighting for mini-DREAM benefits for immigrant children for instate tuition.  Disappointingly, too many other speakers continued to assert that the best strategy was for Obama to “fix” the situations through executive orders, once again arguing for political tactics that Obama himself seems to be expressly rejecting.

It’s not that it is impossible to imagine such a strategy being successful, but it is difficult to envision how it might come to pass without much, much stronger local organizing calling the question district by district, city by city, and battleground by battleground.  I would have thought that the one thing that we would have learned in the most painful way, like a tattoo on our arms for a girlfriend long gone, is that any strategy that relied on the President to make a goal line stand or come through with a game changing ;play was bound to lead to even more heartbreak.

Surely we have learned by now that Obama responds to pressure not appeals. When his feet are held to the fire, he bends with the wind like a willow.  When sweet reason, tears of sorrow, or knees bent to the beg, Obama responds with…well, he doesn’t respond at all.

Immigration reform isn’t hopeless.  Strong local work is proving victories are still possible!  But, nothing is going to happen in Washington or the White House.  The whole fight is now in the streets of the city and the labor needs of the countryside.  If we are willing and able to do the work, something might happen.  If it’s all about hope, then welcome back to another room in Heartbreak Hotel.

            Primarily Indian metalworkers paid brokers up to $20,000 USD, which is literally a king’s ransom in rupees, to undertake the work.  They expected and put up with the terrible living conditions common in a labor camp in the shipyard, especially in the post-Katrina.  What they also expected was that promises of a green card which would allow them to continue working in the USA would also be delivered, since that was so clearly the line that recruited them to the shipyards.   Unfortunately, as any reader would know, that line was a total line.

            As the 500 workers agitated about their conditions, circumstances, and the injustice of it all, supported by assistance from the Workers’ Center and national advocacy by NDLON, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and its leaders, Pablo Alvarado and Chris Newman, the boss according to the court papers and an article by Julia Preston in The New York Times, saw the Indians as “whiners” and wanted to target and remove the ringleaders.  Where did the boss go for advice in this area?  Well, right to agents of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement outfit so notorious throughout the land.  

The advice was a classic labor busting technique more reminiscent of the old organizer tales of the Wobblies tarred and feathered and ridden out on the rails than anything else.  The agent according to the boss said, “Don’t give them any advance notice.  Take them all out of the line on the way to work; get their personal belongings; get them in a van, and get their tickets, and get them to the airport, and send them back to India.”

It didn’t work out so well in this one situation since folks like the Workers’ Center were all over this bad boy, but I have to wonder how many thousands of times this advice would have yielded exactly the expected result?  This situation may see some justice through the courts, but this is rare. 

The notion that we can build a “guest worker” program on the backs of desperate immigrant workers, almost classically exploitative labor contractors and recruiters, and still make a big deal out of the Statue of Liberty and any core values of the United States as a nation of immigrants, is the cruelest irony underlying all of this.