Liar, liar, panties on fire
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Kamala and corn pop — perfect together
“In a glowing piece published at The Nation website on Labor Day that detailed how Harris was seemingly a perfect fit to be tasked by President Biden with raising the visibility of and jumpstarting support for the faltering labor movement, Harris told a story about how she didn’t eat grapes until she was in her mid-20s, in solidarity with a long-running boycott unions staged against growers at the time:”
Growing up in California in the late 1960s and early ’70s, with a mother who was “very deeply rooted” in the movements for economic, social, and racial justice, the vice president was inspired by Cesar Chavez, Delores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers, which used grape boycotts to force growers to negotiate. “The farmworkers movement was very much a part of my childhood,” she recalled. “This sounds quaint, and so I’m reluctant to say it, but, you know, I didn’t eat a grape until I was in my 20s. Like, literally, had never had a grape. I remember the first time I had a grape, I went, ‘Wow! This is quite tasty.’ It was absolutely ingrained so deeply in me: Never cross a picket line.”
In fact, the (unnoticed even by Whole Foods shoppers) boycott continued well past our VP’s shelf-life: the UFW’s third and longest California grape boycott was launched in June 1984, just over four months before Harris’ 20th birthday, and it lasted until 2000 when Harris was 36.
But who cares? No one expects anything even close to the truth from the Biden administration. But here’s the part that’s missing, here’s the important part of the story: Harris’ hero Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, and the driving force behind the boycott, was a fierce foe of illegal immigrants, and even dispatched goon squads to attack them and drive them back across the border.
Why his opposition? Because, unlike today’s open border advocates, he understood the law of supply and demand — farm work would remain low-paid, exploitative work so long as an unlimited supply of stoop labor could just come across the border and undercut his efforts at increasing pay and benefits. So he took action, as detailed here:
In the mid 1970s, he conducted the “Illegals Campaign” to identify and report illegal workers, “an effort he deemed second in importance only to the boycott” (of produce from non-unionized farms), according to Pawel. She quotes a memo from Chavez that said, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight.”
Chavez wasn’t coy about the need to keep out intruders. David Gregory Gutiérrez has written that “from its inception in 1962 the UFW lobbied for strict control of the Mexican border” and that Chavez “was among the most vocal critics of illegal immigration.” In 1969 Chavez testified before Congress:
“A year ago we assigned many of our organizers to do nothing but to check on the law violators coming from Mexico to break our strikes. We gave the Immigration and Naturalization Services and the Border Patrol stacks and stacks of information. They did not pull workers out of struck fields. . . . This is why we are forced to boycott: We have had no enforcement by the Border Patrol.”
In a 1972 interview, he described a strike in which the employer was unable to find strikebreakers; then, “all of the sudden yesterday morning, they brought in 220 wetbacks, these are the illegals, from Mexico.”
In 1973, Chavez sent his cousin Manuel down to the border to establish a “wet line” patrol to prevent illegal aliens from coming in to break a strike. Unlike the peaceful and hands-off Minuteman gatherings a few years ago, the United Farm Workers’ efforts sometimes involved more direct means of border control, including roughing up the illegals.
In 1974, he sent a memo to UFW operatives announcing “the beginning of a MASSIVE CAMPAIGN to get the recent flood of illegals out of California.”
In 1979, he testified again before Congress:
“It is apparent that when the farmworkers 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.”
Also in 1979, Chavez spoke at the National Press Club, demanding that the federal government faithfully execute the immigration laws and keep illegal aliens out of the country. He added that if “my mother was breaking the strike and if she were illegal, I’d ask the same thing.”
Now that the Democrats’ goal has shifted from building up new union constituencies to beggaring the entire population and making it dependent on its rulers’ largess, protecting wages is no longer a concern. Bringing in millions of new, unskilled laborers to drive down wages, and adding millions more welfare dependents, serves the ultimate goal, while a growing middle class does not. The Hispanics remain pawns, of course, it’s just how they’re being used that’s changed.
