By James Parks
When Remy Halaby ended her two-week long journey across the nation and saw the Statue of Liberty in New York for the first time last October, the world’s most famous image of freedom represented more than a symbol to her. Since 1984, Halaby has been living the promise of the Statue of Liberty.
“The Statue of Liberty to me is a symbol of all the immigrants who come to this country. When we see that statue, we feel we are a part of the nation, that we helped build this country.”
“I am very happy to be a citizen,” says Halaby, 65, a native of the Philippines. “America means freedom to me. I can pursue my dreams as a citizen and I have a voice. I can say my rights are the same as your rights.”
But not all immigrants to the United States have been so fortunate. And it was for those immigrants across the nation who are struggling to achieve their dreams that Halaby joined more than 1,000 other immigrants and their allies in the nation’s historic Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride last fall.
For two weeks in September and October, the 2003 freedom riders broke new ground in highlighting immigrant workers’ struggle for justice and moved the issue of immigrant rights to the national agenda. Representing dozens of nationalities, workers and their allies traveled more than 20,000 miles and stopped in more than 100 cities across the country as part of a national coalition of unions and community groups.Modeled after the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, which challenged racial segregation in the Deep South, the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride energized workers at every stop. The new Freedom Riders also held more than 120 meetings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to push for citizenship for all immigrant workers and for changes in the laws to allow immigrant workers to reunite their families and to protect immigrants’ civil rights, liberties and workplace rights.
The 2003 Freedom Ride captured the attention of the public and the media from coast to coast. “The Freedom Ride brought to the attention of millions of Americans the situation faced by immigrant workers in this country,” says Lance Compa, senior lecturer at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “Immigrant workers came out of the shadows where they normally are stuck because they lack basic labor protections and civil rights and organized and mobilized for the whole world to see that they are not going to sit back and quietly be exploited.”
“The workers who joined the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride represent the heart and soul of what America is about: a search for freedom and a desire for a better life—the same reasons that immigrants have always come to these shores,”says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson.
Making the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride such a huge success took months of strategic planning, involving hundreds of union members reaching out to immigrant workers, community allies and activists—and ultimately, building lasting coalitions for long-term mutual support.
“Our cause is broader than immigrant rights,” says Maria Elena Durazo, national chairwoman of the Freedom Ride and president of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 11 in Los Angeles. “Immigrants are also fighting for good jobs, access to health care and rights on the job—the same issues all workers are seeking. The Freedom Ride is helping us forge a new unity and consensus with allies on these issues.”
Here’s what made it work.
Reaching out to community allies
In pulling together the elements that catapulted the Freedom Ride into the national news and sparked a renewed examination of the nation’s immigration policies by national leaders, activists in two cities, Houston and Seattle, say their strategies can be replicated any time union activists seek to launch a major mobilization—whether locally or on a national scale. Following the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s endorsement of a Freedom Ride, union leaders around the country began strategizing in fall 2002. The first step: Build support within the union movement for immigrant workers’ rights and for the Freedom Ride as a vehicle to highlight the issue.
In Houston, where the central labor council had a history of working with immigrant groups, many of the local community and union leaders understood the need for immigrant rights, says Richard Shaw, secretary-treasurer of the Harris County (Texas) Central Labor Council. After the central labor council board passed a resolution supporting the ride, Shaw called a meeting of local unions helping immigrant workers win a voice at work to develop some early plans and determine the scope of the project.
Winning trust and sharing power
After local union leaders were on board, the next step was to identify immigrant groups in the community that might lend support and bring resources to the table that could make the Freedom Ride a success. This was the hardest and most important part of the process because of the union movement’s uneven history regarding immigrants, says Steve Williamson, executive secretary- treasurer of the King County (Wash.) Labor Council. Many immigrant groups were skeptical that unions were serious about immigrants’ issues and doubted they would share power in developing plans for the Freedom Ride. For many immigrant groups, it also was the first time they had contact with unions.
Pramila Jayapal was one of those skeptics. “The unions haven’t had a strong history with immigrant workers,” says Jayapal, 38, a native of India who now lives in Seattle. An immigrant rights activist, she says she had some questions about whether she and her organization, Hate Free Zone of Washington, should get involved in the Freedom Ride. “We have a full plate. How was this ride going to benefit us, and, most important, who was going to control the agenda? Would we be part of the decision-making process?”
In Houston, the central labor council held a series of meetings with immigrant groups to allow them to air their concerns about the union movement and to explain how a Freedom Ride would benefit immigrants. “We talked about goals. We shared strategies. We rehashed past problems,” Shaw says. “We had to overcome the fact that many of the groups were not used to working together and some did not share the same goals. We found that all of them were able to agree on the worker protection issue and that’s what we focused on to gain their support.”
But the immigrant groups remained unconvinced until the unions agreed to a true partnership with all parties being involved from the beginning in planning and carrying out the Freedom Ride. “When we agreed to move from a labor-driven event to sharing power, then it picked up,” Williamson says. “Trust is difficult to establish,” says Jayapal, who agreed to serve as co-chair of the Freedom Ride in Seattle. “But once we saw that the unions were willing to share political power, then we knew they were serious about the issue.”
“We all recognized the power of a national mobilization to support immigrant rights.
It was the right time and the right thing to do,” says Maria Jiminez, a Houston activist for nearly 20 years and founder of the Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project, which documents abuses in the enforcement of immigration laws and helps border area immigrant residents exercise their rights.
After establishing a steering committee of union and immigrant groups, the Seattle and Houston coalitions reached out to the NAACP and local civil rights groups, the religious community and other community activists by inviting the groups’ leaders to join the steering committee and by meeting with them to air differences, just as they had with the immigrant groups. The size of the committee was not important, Williamson says, but the key was to be as inclusive as possible—some 25 different community groups were represented on the Seattle committee.
Organizing and assigning responsibilities
The steering committees divided the work of mobilizing people to support the Freedom Ride. They set up committees to raise funds, recruit bus riders, handle legal problems that might arise on the rides and promote news coverage. The legal committee, which included local immigration lawyers, held workshops to train the Freedom Riders and staff on what to do if a bus was stopped and boarded by immigration officials along the route. The media committee developed a plan to publicize the Freedom Ride locally and to train workers in techniques to present their story to the media. The efforts of the legal and media committees burst through the local markets and gained nationwide attention. The next step involved raising money for the Freedom Ride. The Houston coalition solicited funds from unions, community organizations, immigration lawyers, political action groups and employers that hire immigrant workers. The Houston chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, an AFL-CIO constituency group, held several fund-raising barbecues. Bus riders also had to agree to raise $500 each.
Recruiting riders
To recruit riders, the Houston coalition sent out sign-up forms to unions, immigrant workers’ rights groups and anyone who donated money for the Freedom Ride or agreed to sponsor a rider. The recruitment committee reviewed the applications and selected riders with an eye toward gaining a broad representation of nationalities. In Seattle, the coalition steering committee hired a staff person to reach out to local faith institutions and community groups to recruit, interview and select riders.
When word got out about the Freedom Ride, many immigrant workers were anxious to tell their stories and came in on their own to apply to ride. Workers like José Carerra, a 24-year-old Seattle waiter from Paraguay who attends college, pays taxes and seeks to become a U.S. citizen. “The civil rights movement is the inspiration for my freedom. I want America to know and learn about our problems. We are human beings. We’re all equal and deserve dignity.”
Coalition partners in both cities also developed a strategy to keep the Freedom Ride moving smoothly after the buses were boarded and left town. Each bus from Seattle had a staff person and two coalition representatives on board. Each had assigned duties for the two-week trip. One person was responsible for ensuring all riders were back on the bus after every stop. Others were in charge of starting and developing chants. Someone else kept up with the banners and another was in charge of purchasing snacks along the way.
Building lasting alliances
For many of the organizers and participants in the Freedom Ride, the key achievement of the Freedom Ride was forging new alliances with immigrant and community groups. The next task will be to create a movement for immigration reform, modeled after the civil rights movement, says Dave Glaser, national coordinator of the Freedom Ride and a HERE organizer. The movement will build on the alliances formed during the Freedom Ride by establishing permanent organizations to lobby for legislation, hold actions and rallies and mobilize immigrants to fight for their rights. At the same time, unions and their immigration coalition partners have continued the collaboration and mutual decision-making process of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride by addressing local concerns such as organizing immigrant workers and other community issues.
“The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, following on the heels of the AFL-CIO’s historic new policy on immigration, showed the power that immigrant workers, the union movement and community activists can achieve when they come together,” says HERE President John Wilhelm, chair of the AFL-CIO Executive Council’s Committee on Immigration.
“We will continue to fight for justice for immigrant workers and all workers at the bargaining table, in new organizing drives and in the halls of Congress.” @
