Earlier in the week there was major concern about the continued backward, and repressive, direction that the Obama Administration has taken around immigrants in the United States and its mouthing of reform while it mandated repression.  Loud cries of anger and protest rose at the announcements of a toughening stance by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over the controversial and coercive Secure Communities program which too often has been a fast track to criminalizing economic refugees rather than violent interlopers, as well as a tool for the worst among us on these issues like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and other wannabe police officials that Secure Communities forcibly impresses into being immigration cops.  Some states, many cities, and other political jurisdictions have refused to comply with Secure Communities, rejected its attack on human rights and civil liberties, and refused the money, while the Administration has continued to force feed the program regardless and upped the ante in doing so recently.  Illinois and some other jurisdictions have continued their resistance, but clearly a deeper and perhaps more cynical politics is at work.

What seemed especially traitorous was the endorsement of Secure Communities in a hearty embrace by Cecilia Munoz, who has been a shining light for immigrant rights and before joining the Obama Administration after the election, one of the clearest and most effective voices for change with friends and allies in all sorts of organizations.  We certainly counted ourselves proudly among them at ACORN.   One of my friends speculated earlier this week about whether Cecilia had jumped to this conclusion or been pushed.

Yesterday’s announcement that the Administration will use “prosecutorial discretion” in dealing with deportation cases involving children who have been in the USA virtually all of their lives because they were brought here by their parents, perhaps illegally, families of servicemen and other divided family situations, those trying to serve in our military or attend college or similar situations, and instead only focus deportation procedures on criminal elements with records, gang membership, or similar problems essentially implements much of the promise of the DREAM Act.  Advocates estimated this could impact up to 2 million immigrants in the USA now.  Senator Durbin of Illinois, who has been a consistent and courageous advocate of the DREAM Act, was more subdued and guessed it might impact 100-200,000.  Anyway you count it, the announcement is a major step forward in alleviating a huge injustice and moral insult on the deepest principles of America.  DHS’s Napoliano was quick to point out that it doesn’t change the need for real reform or the DREAM Act, and for the first time in a long time, I have to say I absolutely agree with her on that point!

This is all temporary, and the President is making clear through these actions not only that he wants to hide behind Secure Communities on his right flank, but also that Latino and other voters in 2012 have to see him as the thin line between coming and going for immigrants and their families in this beleaguered category.

Though the details have not emerged, there can’t be much doubt that this was a deal that had Cecilia’s fingerprints all over it, while leveraging Senator Durban big time along with Majority Senate Leader Harry Reid, who still needed to deliver for the huge lift he got from Latino voters in his Nevada re-election last fall.  Obama never seems to understand that you have to give as well as get in politics to hold support, but Munoz, Durban, and Reid all understand the political equation only too well and no doubt knew the anger and frustration at losing everything was disillusioning if the only hope was the thin one of taking back control of Congress.

This was a classic velvet gloved fist political deal.  Give some relief to the the more innocent victims of our failure to enact DREAM and immigration reform, while hitting immigrants hard where they live and work, day after day, in their communities.  As NDLON attorney, Chris Newman, remarked on twitter last night, the new announcements on careful reading, still have moved to criminalize all immigrants in the USA.  The foot has been lifted from some necks with “prosecutorial discretion,” the principle continues to press down on all immigrants that the foot is still there, hovering, and can fall with any misstep or political push in an opposite direction.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Cecilia and the Senators crafted a deal, and it’s definitely better than nothing, so that’s something to celebrate.  Thank goodness Obama is facing an election, so he had to finally deliver something.  The sad part of it has to remain, that this is the best that all of their work on the inside could deliver.

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.

New Orleans

John and I go back almost 40 years now to common ties with welfare rights even before ACORN and to his several weeks in Little Rock one summer helping organize unemployed workers with ACORN around 1972 or so.  It’s sometimes a rocky road but given his last 15 years as an erstwhile and sometimes controversial keeper of the keys in the “house of labor,” I see these kinds of initiatives among “informal” workers as a kind of “values” statement for John and his inside advocacy within the corridors of labor power that help justify some of the more contentious weight he has carried in various disputes.  His personal crusade as general counsel for immigration reform was one such touchstone, as well as his merging of labor law and labor organizing strategies with his efforts to support the organizing of carwashers in Los Angeles as an affiliate of the Steelworkers is another.  Not all of these efforts have worked out well, and who despite the steps forward labor made in the 2009-10 campaign for immigration reform, it’s a mixed bag as well and a conundrum still unresolved.

Nonetheless there is no questioning the sincerity with which the AFL-CIO has adopted some of the “newer” forms of organizing under a bigger tent philosophy particularly with new organizing experiments among informal workers including day laborers, domestic workers, and others.  The AFL-CIO has formally taken steps which would have been unheard of 20 years ago to come to agreement with organizations representing these groups like NDLON (the National Day Laborers’ Organizing Network), Enlace (a multi-national membership based organization of where Local 100 and ACORN International have been charter members), and the Domestic Workers Alliance, which recently won breakthrough labor standards protection in New York State and seems to have new campaigns in California and others pending in the next year in Colorado, Maryland, and Massachusetts.  They have also signed agreements with the Interfaith Worker Justice, a labor/religious support organization based in Chicago and headed by our friend, Kim Bobo, and John mentioned that the Restaurant Opportunities Council (ROC) in New York and elsewhere may be moving towards a form of affiliation as well.

I have argued in Citizen Wealth and in a coming essay in Social Policy (The Maharashtra Model v.41#1) that the future of the labor movement lies not only in the USA , but worldwide in our effectively organizing what one speaker called “excluded” workers and what I call “informal” workers.  These steps by the AFL-CIO are encouraging in that sense though they are largely symbolic unfortunately.  They are signals and placeholders of change and openness without being taken seriously as “real organizing.’  These efforts by and large are not backed by resources and organizers, but by favors and suasion or the leverage of “powerful pockets” as the DWA leader argued.  All of this that is part of a successful organizing plan and what has been proven to create victories, but that’s a lot more than a piece of paper and some good dialogue.

Saying hello to John after the plenary and before my panel, I complimented him for his remarks and the AFL-CIO’s initiatives, but he quickly interrupted me with a grin, and said, “if we could only figure out how to collect dues and bring in members!”

It’s a longer conversation and a different kind of conversion experience on the way to the “new labor movement,” but as Cesar Chavez argued 40 years ago and as I say all the time, “you can’t collect dues without asking people to pay.”

This is the future, if we can just step up to get there.

Shreveport

There is a clearly a strategic split among the reformers that has existed in a dialectic for some time, but is increasingly sharpening in more stark relief between organizers who believe that the chance has to come from local projects and grassroots organizing and resistance versus the policy-lobbyist wonks with the greater resources still spinning the stories of a immaculate change conception with the Beltway.  This division is spoken of in quiet tones behind the scenes but is constantly part of the debate.  With more than 150 organizers in New Orleans the absence of some of the folks from the national campaign “table” was shocking to me, even if there presence had been no more than solidarity.

I hope I’m not grabbing at straws but the best news I heard in my conversations was the increasing confidence that the days of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror in Maricopa County, Arizona are numbered.  I heard rumors repeated from Justice Department sources, which has now sued Arpaio for federal violations in recent weeks, is that he will be indicted after the mid-term elections are over in November.  He will be a martyr to the whack right, but given the line drawn in the sand for years by so many in Arizona; this will be a significant victory.  I wish I could report more optimism from organizers on the chances of Attorney General Godard replacing Governor Jan “Brain Freeze” Brewer, but most just shrugged that there was no contest still.  I don’t know.

Good energy and deepening conviction will have to be what we go on now, since the numbers and politics seem aligned increasingly against us.

New Orleans

There are not many times when someone can rise out of the street corner day laborer pool, and end up leading the Network, the cholos, and their own hermanos and hermanas in a charge against vigilantes killing immigrants coming across the border.  This is one, so enjoy!

Futhermore, the Mexicano-naros rationale for wanting an electrified border fence between both countries so that they could drive up the price of drugs by controlling any of the fence’s vulnerabilities, actually started to make some sense out of this billion dollar folly by the end of the movie.

Luckily for Rodriguez, his movie escapes being a total comic book portrayal thanks to real live “stranger than fiction” politicians like Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer and her well watched brain freeze in the days before the movie went nationwide.  Many had known that her brain had frozen years before but the proof was there for everyone to see, and that actually made the politicians seem more credible and real in the movie.

Life goes on and it’s hard.

New Orleans

The first paragraph of the decision was chilling:

“This appeal raises a First Amendment challenge to

Redondo Beach Municipal Code § 3-7.1601, which prohibits

the act of standing on a street or highway and soliciting

employment, business, or contributions from the occupants of

an automobile. We have previously upheld a virtually identical

ordinance against a constitutional challenge. See ACORN

v. City of Phoenix, 798 F.2d 1260, 1273 (9th Cir. 1986). We

reach the same result here and hold that the Redondo Beach

ordinance is a valid time, place, or manner restriction.

Accordingly, we reverse the contrary decision of the district

court.”

Fred Brooks, one of the legendary ACORN canvass directors during the early and mid-1980’s, and now a professor of social work at Georgia State University in Atlanta, when running a program for us in Columbus, Ohio, introduced a brilliant piece of low technology, but stunningly effective grassroots fundraising methodology called “tagging.”  Based on annual fundraisers by firefighters (who used their boots) and other groups, with a recycled tennis ball can and masking tape with a slit on the top, an armada of “taggers” including members, organizers, and street kids would collect at busy traffic intersections and ask for contributions to support either ACORN or Local 100, and in return for a donation would hand the driver a “tag” thanking them and describing the organization’s work.  The money raised was serious.  Danny Cantor (now head of the NY Working Families Party), Cecile Richards, an outstanding class A tagger (and now head of Planned Parenthood), Kirk Adams (now chief of staff of SEIU), Beth Butler (executive director of A Community Voice in Louisiana), and their teams would often net over a $1000 back then on a Saturday tag even after paying 40% of the can to their taggers and discounting leakage (theft) of some cans which was common on the streets.  But, as good as tagging was, the pushback was as fierce in various communities.

In the New Orleans area restrictions became onerous and expensive even though often honored in the breach.  In Denver an organizer running a successful tag program was arrested and convicted of “public begging,” and in places like Phoenix ordinances were crafted to try and prevent or curtail any tagging that could arguably interfere with traffic in the name of public safety.  ACORN’s defense, led by our attorney Steve Bachmann at the time, was straight up first amendment freedom of speech, which of course it was.  With such arguments we prevailed in places like University City, a suburb outside of St. Louis, and other venues.  We expected to prevail in Phoenix, but it didn’t happen.  We elected not to appeal to the Supreme Court so that we could leave as much confusion as possible between various decisions in different appeals districts and keep more “bad law” from being made by the courts.

Now my friends at NDLON (the National Day Laborers Organizing Network) and their chief lawyer, Chris Newman, are caught in the same dilemma as various California cities copied the original Phoenix ordinances protected by the 9^th circuit.  It’s hard to be optimistic about courts anywhere around California not deciding that traffic comes first with livelihoods very distant on the list.

It’s hard to believe that we will end up with many choices other than to craft political decisions because I’m no more optimistic of a fair shot in the courts on these issue now than I was more than 20 years ago.  Maybe the answer is in set aside jornaleros areas like the ones maintained by the City of San Antonio?  Maybe the answer is to not ruffle the feathers and to make it work on the streets wherever it is possible and make some other deals in these smaller uptight California communities?

Anyway you look at it, we’ve drawn a tough hand.

As for tagging, I think about it all the time, and mark my words, I’m going to bring it back to support ACORN International in streets and cities near you.  I’m just not telling when and where!