That would be the 27 percent of Californians who were born in another country, and have reason to fear that Trump’s threat to build a wall along the Mexican border, or to deport Muslims, or other similar ideas, might solidify into racist and anti-immigrant federal policies, should he be elected.
On this Labor Day, it’s worth reviewing a few moments from California labor history that shed light on the destructive role such policies have played in our state. Luckily, that same history reveals other moments when better choices were made, giving us realistic hope that people can outgrow fear and hatred to find community.
During the terrible economic depression of the 1870s, a populist movement swept briefly to power throughout the state, capitalizing on workers’ resentment of obscene wealth growing side by side with expanding poverty. The Workingmen’s Party of California called for taxing the rich, controlling the railroad corporations and free public education. A trade union-oriented wing of the movement wanted working-class unity. But these goals were co-opted by leaders like Denis Kearney (ironically, an Irish immigrant), who coined the slogan, “The Chinese Must Go!” The result was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. No part of the progressive populist program that might have benefited workers was enacted, diverted instead by demagogues into division and xenophobia.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the reaction of conservative politicians to a collapsing economy and a quarter of the workforce unemployed was to “repatriate” Mexican nationals — along with American citizens of Mexican heritage. Repatriation laws were passed in several states, uprooting as many as 2 million people across the western United States. Hundreds of thousands of Californians were “sent back” to where they didn’t come from. The California State Federation of Labor supported the program, theorizing that more jobs would be available for “real Americans.” The policy led to no improvement in the economy.
It did, however, benefit antiunion employers who fingered labor activists to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for deportation.
A better outcome for working-class advancement, and the beginning of the end to official anti-Asian platforms in the labor movement, occurred in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1938, when more than 100 Chinese American workers walked out of the National Dollar Store garment factory, demanding union recognition. The San Francisco Labor Council broke with its racist past to grant strike sanction, meaning that white members of the Retail Clerks union honored the picket lines in front of the National Dollar stores where they worked, shutting down their workplaces and resulting in union recognition and a contract for the striking workers. Sue Ko Lee recalled years later, “The strike was the best thing that ever happened. It changed our lives.”
Also life-changing was the struggle for fair-employment practices in the 1950s, when racial discrimination in the workplace was perfectly legal. Almost forgotten today in the shadows of more famous struggles for integration of public spaces like schools and lunch counters, this aspect of the civil rights movement motivated thousands of activists who petitioned, leafleted, engaged in civil disobedience for nearly two decades, and eventually forced employers to create a more colorblind playing field in hiring and promotion. Not all unions participated, but the ones that did provided foot soldiers alongside civil rights groups. Carpenters were part of the financial backbone of the movement, and the Jewish Labor Committee coordinated the campaign for legislation. The policies were signed into law by then-Gov. Pat Brown in 1959 as the Fair Employment Practices Act.
If these moments from the Golden State’s labor history have something to tell us, it’s that working people always have a choice: inclusive or exclusionary. In insecure times, it remains tempting for some workers to identify with a politician who channels economic anxiety into hatred of a caricatured “other.” Although it’s uncanny to see Trump’s old-school demagoguery erupting like the return of the repressed in our supposedly more enlightened time, it’s also an archaic story that still performs its dark separating magic.
The other recurrent message, succinctly put by mid-20th century labor leader Harry Bridges, makes more sense: “The most important word in the language of the working class is “solidarity.”
Fred Glass is the author of “From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement,” (University of California Press, 2016).