BY SETH GALINSKY
FT. LAUDERDALE, Florida - More than 250 people attended
an immigrant rights conference here August 5. Initiated by
the Miami-based Committee for Dignity and Justice for
Immigrants, the gathering brought together a wide variety
of organizations and activists from southern Florida.
Among the resolutions adopted in the final plenary session was a call for a state-wide march in Miami in October. Petitions are being circulated in the state seeking to get two propositions modeled after California's Proposition 187 on the ballot in Florida in 1996. The measures would deny health care and education to undocumented workers.
Two busloads of Haitian refugee activists from Veye-Yo attended the conference, along with dozens of members of the Florida Farm Workers Association. Endorsers and participants in the event included the American Friends Service Committee, Cambio Cubano, Catholic Community Services, the Colombian Liberal Directorate of Florida, the garment workers union UNITE, Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, the Puerto Rican Democratic Committee of Broward County, the Salvadoran Community Center, and the Socialist Workers Party.
Eugenio Torres, from the League of Hispanic Voters, opened the conference. "Our main purpose is to form a united front to defeat attempts to pass a Proposition 187- type law in Florida," he said. "The hard part is still ahead."
"All you have to do is visit farms around the United States," stated Angel Dominguez, director of the Workers' Center, a project set up by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. "Who does the work? Immigrants."
Dominguez pointed out that immigrant workers helped build the textile unions in the United States.
Joe Peña, representing Florida governor Lawton Chiles, also spoke at the opening event. Chiles is opposed to any Proposition 187-type laws, Peña said, but he is for the federal government "more effectively enforcing the laws to ensure controlled immigration."
In a series of workshops during the day-long meeting, participants exchanged ideas on how to fight anti-immigrant propositions and how to advance the rights of undocumented workers.
One workshop focused on lessons from California. Keynote speaker María Jimenez, director of the Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Program out of Houston helped spark a debate. She stated that the large number of Mexican flags carried by young people who marched against Proposition 187 in Los Angeles "was an issue." Carrying the Mexican flag was "a reaffirmation of dignity," Jimenez said, but marchers should have also carried American flags.
This reporter, speaking as a representative of the Socialist Workers Party, said, "The campaign against immigrant rights is an attack on the working class as a whole. The ruling class wants to divide working people and convince us to blame immigrants for the problems we face, instead of the real source of the problem - the system that puts profits before human needs. Workers must see ourselves not as Americans, but as citizens of the world in order to fight effectively."
At the final plenary, María Hernández from the Florida Farm Workers Association motivated the proposal for a march through downtown Miami in October. "We should stop saying `American' when we mean people from the United States," Hernández said. "We are all Americans, whether we are from South, Central, or North America."
Seth Galinsky is a member of the United Transportation Union in Miami. Rachele Fruit, a member of the International Association of Machinists in Miami, contributed to this article.