Celeste Drake and Barack Biden: What Do We Know About Labor and the Changing Face of the American Civil Liberties Movement? An Analysis of Lawrence Downes
Celeste Drake, the White House labor adviser, said in a statement that many of Mr. Biden’s accomplishments were passed onto a razor’s edge in Congress with Republican votes. According to the Gallup poll, more than 70% of Americans approve of labor unions.
Mr. Biden has “gestured in interesting ways in certain moments,” said Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago. It doesn’t seem like he has the stomach to view it.
Editor’s Note: Lawrence Downes, a writer and editor, covered immigration and politics for The New York Times Editorial Board from 2004 to 2017. He is a co-author of a song called “Feels Like Home” with Linda Ronstadt. The opinions he expresses are of his own. CNN has more opinion on it.
Joe Biden, the Dream of an American Worker, and the Problem of Immigrants in the 21st Century: Why We Need a Labor President
President Joe Biden talked a lot about jobs and workers during his State of the Union address. The address is a report card for presidents, and they brag about their grades in the case of booming job numbers and the lowest unemployment rate since 1969.
For a president whose bywords are “infrastructure” and “made in America,” the speech was a perfect moment to summon the nation to a great industrial renewal.
Biden has been given a chance to rethink the conversation about work in the United States, to make it more honest, and to show how making the American workplace better for everyone means making it better and safer for immigrants.
In a time of rampant anti-Semitic violence, zero-sum border politics and Donald Trump’s toxic gift to the national discourse, what a missed opportunity.
To defy the mindset about immigrants that separates them from us and make it clear that supporting American workers and doing right by America’s immigrants is essentially the same is what he needs to do.
Most Americans in work clothes, like immigrant day laborers or workers in drive-through booths, are more similar to foreign-born people than to the right-wing politicians and media figures who stoke America with rage about foreign-born.
But hope is a hard thing to suppress, and immigrants’ determination can prod leaders into action. Former President Barack Obama ran a prodigious deportation campaign, but he also created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to protect young immigrant “Dreamers” — a bold executive move that did more for immigrants than Congress has in decades. The young immigrants asked Obama to do the right thing. Biden can be inspired by immigrant workers.
It is a bold move that protects the rights of native-born Americans. If Biden wants to be the labor president, he should be hitting this point hard and often. We cannot have labor protections for all workers because some immigrants are abused and exploited while others are treated like they do not exist. We can’t keep deferring justice until some illusory goal is met — until a 2,000-mile wall is built or Congress passes an immigration bill or some other future thing happens.
And we can’t keep delegating immigration policy to governors in states like Texas and Florida, whose cruel, useless stunts include busing immigrants across the country in the dead of winter and dumping shipping containers on the border and calling it a wall.
Biden is going to finish the job. Starting now, he can focus on the ways his administration is going to honor immigrants’ contributions to the state of this union. He can protect, support and unleash them to do great things, changing the country for the better.
Why don’t we just call for Congress to fix things instead of Biden meeting with day laborers to help sign them up as workplace whistle blowers?
What if he promised to go to a memorial service for immigrant essential workers who labored on the front lines of the pandemic, who got sick and died so that the rest of us could stay safe at home? What if he proposed immigration relief for their surviving relatives — citizenship to honor their ultimate sacrifice?
Most Republicans wouldn’t be happy. But of course they would. They don’t pay much attention to the injustice of millions working on the edge of survival. Their base uses immigrants as bait to point out the wrong people to blame for the problems.
It’s an old story, and many native-born keep falling for it. On Long Island, where I live, people spent years arguing over immigrant day laborers — and missing the point completely. The gap was filled by the workers, who were hired by contractors and homeowners for jobs they wouldn’t do themselves. Politicians and talk-show hosts milked the hostility until it curdled into hatred. Workers were hunted and killed.
This was true around the country. A real estate developer and entertainer in Queens stated that he was running for President to deal with Mexican immigrants who were rapists. He later called America “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.” In 2015, some opinion journalists were intrigued to see an entertaining new celebrity shaking up our politics.
Four years of hatred followed the election of the entertainer as president. Federal agents took children away from their parents. At the border migrants were wrongly turned away. Limits on asylum made conditions more dangerous. For decades, migrants have died crossing the burning Sonoran Desert; under the Trump administration, others battled freezing temperatures in refugee camps beside the Rio Grande as asylum seekers were forced to wait outside the US while their cases were pending. In El Paso, Texas, in the year of 2019, a man killed dozens of Latinos at a WalMart, after posting an online manifesto that repeated Republican talking points about a Hispanic invasion.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/opinions/biden-state-of-the-union-immigration-downes/index.html
Michelle Su, Labor Secretary, for the President Joe Biden Foundation, and Marty Walsh, the NHL Players Association, in a Brief Introduction
Biden may tread lightly on immigration because conventional political thinking says that it’s a third rail; that he’ll regret giving Fox News more things to rouse the rabble with.
Julie Su, President Joe Biden’s nominee for Labor Secretary, was introduced on Wednesday by the president.
Su was the Secretary for the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency and the state’s labor commissioner. Su was the litigation director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles. She’s also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, gaining national recognition for her expertise in workers’ rights and civil rights.
In brief remarks, Su recounted her mother’s journey, from coming to the United States on a cargo ship to receiving a call from Biden to tell her that her daughter would be a Cabinet secretary.
Biden has made workers, worker well-being, and worker power central to his economic vision, Su said, adding that she has spent her career fighting for workers who deserve to be seen.
The president on Wednesday offered praise to outgoing Labor secretary Marty Walsh – pronouncing his first name, as Biden often does, with an exaggerated Boston accent – calling him a partner as he praised Walsh’s commitment to US workers. Walsh is leaving the administration this month in order to work for the NHL Players Association.
Thank you for what you have done, Marty, for standing up for labor, for standing up for ordinary people, and for having my back, mate.