On Immigration, the Left Must Learn from Cesar Chavez

Compact, March 31, 2025

Julie Chavez Rodriguez was the manager of last year’s reelection campaign for the most anti-borders and racially divisive administration in American history. Her grandfather must have been turning in his grave. March 31 would have been the 98th birthday of that grandfather, the late Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. His birthday is a holiday in some states, as Chavez has been turned into a secular saint of the open-borders left and an icon for Hispanic identitarians.

Except that he was a border hawk and an anti-identitarian. To drive that point home, I and others have been campaigning for some time to have March 31 designated National Border Control Day.

As the Democratic party grapples with the implications of defeat and searches for a way forward, it would do well to learn from Chavez.

I don’t mean to imply that Chavez was a man of the right. He was certainly culturally conservative by today’s standards, but he worked with Saul Alinsky, then-Sen. Walter Mondale, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor Ralph Abernathy while battling Republican business interests.

But he was part of the old trans-racial, pro-worker economic left, not today’s racially obsessed gentry left. And if Democrats are to have any hope of getting people to vote for them (as opposed to against Trump), they’ll need to ask WWCD? What Would Cesar Do?

Modern leftists like his granddaughter, embarrassed by Chavez’s 1969 march against illegal immigration and his mid-1970s Campaign Against Illegals, have tried to cast his opposition to border-jumpers as exclusively a matter of opposing strikebreakers. And indeed, Chavez sometimes did frame the issue that way. At a 1979 event at the National Press Club in Washington, for example, in response to a question accusing him of being allied with the KKK in calling for stricter enforcement of immigration laws, he answered: “If my mother was breaking the strike, if she was illegal, I’d ask the same thing.”

But his opposition to foreign labor clearly wasn’t only about opposing scabs.

Even before he began his union activity, he was opposed to the Bracero Program, an initiative to legally import Mexican farmworkers, started during World War II to keep wages low, which continued until union pressure persuaded Congress to end it in 1964. One of Chavez’s biographers quotes him saying at the time: “It looks almost impossible to start some effective program to get these people their jobs back from the braceros.”

During the Campaign Against Illegals, the UFW collected signatures for a petition calling on the INS to remove “hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens now working in the fields.” The petition mentioned strikebreaking, yes, but not just that; it said, “these illegals are breaking farm worker strikes, displacing farm workers from their jobs in the US and depressing agricultural wages.”

In a 1974 memo, Chavez himself wrote, “We’re against illegals no matter where they work because if they’re not breaking the strike they’re taking our jobs.”

Chavez’s opposition to the kind of racial chauvinism prevalent on the modern left is not as frequently mentioned but if anything was even more emphatic. He was especially opposed to the concept of “la raza,” a notion developed by Mexican intellectual Jose Vasconcelos in the 1920s, partly in reaction to notions of Nordic supremacy, that asserted that, in fact, it was mestizos—Mexicans with mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry—who were the biologically superior race.

In a 1969 New Yorker profile, Peter Matthiessen quotes Chavez denouncing the idea of la raza . “I hear more and more Mexicans talking about la raza —to build up their pride, you know,” Chavez said. “Some people don’t look at it as racism, but when you say ‘la raza,’ you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and it won’t stop there. Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro, and the day after it will be anti-Filipino, anti-Puerto Rican. And then it will be anti-poor-Mexican, and anti-darker-skinned Mexican … La raza is a very dangerous concept. I speak very strongly against it among the chicanos.”

In a biography Matthiessen published the same year, he quoted Chavez deputy Leroy Chatfield explaining why Chavez was “so upset about la raza.” One source of his frustration was the fact that its advocates were embracing him. “The la raza people are not secure. They look upon Cesar as their ‘dumb Mexican’ leader; he’s become their saint. But he doesn’t want any part of it. He said to me just the other day, ‘Can’t they understand that that’s just the way Hitler started?’”

Indeed, Chavez resented the role large foundations played in promoting identitarianism. As Chatfield explained to Matthiessen, “A few months ago the Ford Foundation funded a la raza group and Cesar really told them off. The foundation liked the outfit’s sense of pride or something, and Cesar tried to explain to them what the origin of the word was, that it’s related to Hitler’s concept.” (That “outfit” became the National Council of la raza . After decades of defensiveness about the stench of racism in its name, the group in 2017 finally changed its name.)

The Democrats have a ways to go if they’re going to return to the path Chavez followed. His granddaughter, then still a White House functionary, in early 2023 berated New York Mayor Eric Adams for expressing concern about the effects of Biden’s migration crisis on his city. And more recently, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz said Democrats failed because they weren’t “bold enough” in their support for immigration and DEI.

It’s only a little better at the intellectual level. Liberal writer Matt Yglesias, who is willing to buck the left’s party line, recently acknowledged that opposing enforcement is a political loser, but nonetheless ascribes concern over excessive immigration to “cultural panic” and urges Democrats to focus on making better arguments for mass importation of workers rather than embracing a different policy.

Blogger Mickey Kaus offers better advice. “It’s blindingly obvious what the Democrats should do on immigration: Give up. Change. Retreat,” he wrote. “Don’t start babbling about ‘abundance’ and ‘One Billion Americans.’ Revert to a traditional Dem immigration restriction position. Say you’ll be as effective as Trump but more humane, with more punishments for employers.”

This isn’t mere speculation. The one country in Western Europe that does not have a surging right-wing movement is Denmark, where the Social Democrats have averted a populist wave by embracing immigration restriction.

Personally, as a conservative Republican, I’m tempted to hope the Democrats cling ever-harder to unlimited immigration, DEI, and the rest. But it’s bad for the country. It’s healthier for the parties to be clustered around the 50-yard-line, where most of the public is; if the polls are any indication, the left is currently not even in the stadium.

There’s no reason they can’t get back in the game, and Chavez’s example should be a guide. As he would have said, ¡Sí se puede!