Migrant Rights on the Move

Some very idealistic people will depart Los Angeles and other cities this week, heading cross-country on a quixotic bus journey in pursuit of what may seem a politically unlikely goal: legal status for the estimated 8 million to 10 million illegal immigrants living in this country.

Even a sympathetic observer like me -- who shares the view that honest and hard-working people should have their human rights respected despite their legal status -- regards that worthy goal as implausible, if not impossible, given the political climate in Washington.

National security remains a paramount concern of the White House, and President Bush has stopped talking about a guest-worker deal with Mexico or other immigration reforms. And the likelihood of even a modestly liberal immigration law from a Congress dominated by conservative Republicans looks dim.

Yet the historical precedents cited by the organizers of the so-called Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride are so powerful that it’s hard to not take some hope in their effort. Their model is one of the most dramatic turning points of the civil rights movement of the 1960s: the freedom rides to protest the segregation of public transportation facilities in the South.

Although not as stark as the discrimination that African Americans suffered, many of today’s immigrant workers face similar indignities. Their illegal status leaves them uncovered by minimum wage laws and other worker protections and prone to exploitation by employers, slumlords and criminals.

One of the leaders of the delegation from Los Angeles is a onetime Freedom Rider from Tennessee who has since become a powerful moral voice in this city, the Rev. James Lawson, pastor emeritus of Holman Methodist Church. A former colleague of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Holman sees his participation on behalf of immigrant workers as the continuation of a struggle that he and other Freedom Riders helped put on the nation’s front pages.

“Back then we were trying to expose outdated Jim Crow laws,” Lawson told me recently. “Now we are trying to expose outdated immigration laws.” Other organizers of the immigrant freedom ride, which include several labor unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO and civil rights groups like the NAACP, stress the same point. They don’t expect to change this country’s hodgepodge of complex and often contradictory immigration laws overnight, but rather to push along the process of change.

Their timing may be good.

Immigrants’ rights have become a key issue in the current California recall campaign. And there is an evolving consensus on Capitol Hill that the country’s immigration system needs fixing. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and two House Republicans from Arizona, Jim Kolbe and Jeff Flake, have introduced a bill to create a guest worker program for those industries, like agriculture and tourism, that need migrant workers to fill low-paying jobs that U.S. citizens won’t take.

The immigrant freedom riders are concerned that the debate over the bill and other immigration reform proposals could be dominated by lobbies that want only an updated version of the bracero program, under which thousands of Mexican field hands were imported to work in this country during World War II and afterward, often under miserable conditions and for low wages. So they plan to lobby Congress for reform that includes a citizenship process for workers who pay taxes, new rules making it easier to reunite immigrants’ families, labor law protections for immigrant workers and respect for civil rights and liberties.

Four decades after the original freedom rides, Lawson points out, it is easy to forget that they “were just an early step in a long struggle to dismantle a system of American apartheid. In fact, that struggle continued well into the 1970s, and in some areas continues to this very day.” he said. “I see the same model here.... The freedom rides are just a beginning, not an end.”

Coming from almost anyone else, such lofty idealism might be discounted. But I’m not about to underestimate a Freedom Rider.

Frank del Olmo is associate editor of The Times.