Dolores Huerta talks to Ray Suarez

Ray Suarez: Let's take a closer look at immigration reform. It seems [to be] in a zone that's more than stuck because there are political interests at stake, economic interests at stake, some old allies who are now looking daggers at each other because they can't see eye to eye on this. What's the case that you make to America that we have to change the way people are allowed to stay and allowed to come?

Dolores Huerta: I think we have to remind people that unless you're Native American that your people came from somewhere, and remind people that this country was built by immigrants, that immigrants are still doing all of the heavy lifting in our country right now; working construction and restaurants, taking care of children, taking care of elders in nursing homes and working in our restaurants and picking our food — every single day — that we eat. And kind of educate them on why it is that so many people come from Mexico and Central America to the United States, and it's because of our free-trade agreements. Our free-trade agreements that allow American companies to go into Mexico and Central America and put their businesses there; taking the profits out of the country, instead of letting the profits stay there.

We have so many millions of campesinos, of corn farmers, that have been displaced because of the subsidized corn that we, in the United States, send to Mexico. So all of these small farmers, they can't compete with agribusiness here in the United States, so they're displaced. When we talk about 11 million undocumented, many of them are rural farmers — they're not able to compete with the U.S. and they have to leave. And nobody wants to leave their homes. 

We have to do like we did with Japan and Germany after World War II. We had the Marshall Plan and we gave them jillions of American tax dollars so that they could rebuild their economies. And then we said, you know, "You don't have to pay us back." So if we can use kind of the Marshall Plan mentality to help these other countries, instead of colonizing or economically colonizing all these other countries, I think we would have better partners, people would like us more, and we could really help. People are never going to stop coming to the United States until we can erase some of these inequities that we have.

People who sometimes say emotional things about this issue underestimate how difficult it is to leave your home and everything you know and come here. And what you talk about, I think, makes a lot of sense; that a healthier Mexico would be a place where more people would be able to stay. But what we do about the 11 million that are already here is a tough domestic debate and a tough policy riddle. How do you solve this in a way that's fair to everybody?

I think we do what we've always done because it has always been the policy of the United States of America, from day one, that all immigrants that have come here have been able to acquire their residency and their citizenship. And we can see that the 11 million that are here are contributing. It's not like they're living off of the dole of the United States. They contribute trillions of dollars to the economy with the consumption, by the spending. And then they also contribute because of their labor — you know, another few trillion dollars to the economy. They deserve to be able to have their place in the sun. They deserve to be able to be granted residency — and eventually citizenship — in the United States. They've worked for it. They've earned it.

There's a lot of emotional reaction on the spending side when it comes to what local governments spend on people who are not supposed to be in the country. And it's almost invisible, the contributions that these very same people make, to making places more profitable, to keeping restaurant meals cheap, to keeping the food we buy very affordable.  How do you square those two things?

I work with a lot of immigrants, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which is my organization, where we do community organizing. I can assure you what they contribute is so much more than what they take out of the economy. When we think about it, before we had the Affordable Care Act, if you didn't have a health care plan you probably didn't get very quality medical care. But we know right now, even with the Affordable Care Act — as it's been passed — that people who are undocumented are excluded from the Affordable Care Act. So when you think of what they contribute and what they take out of the economy, I mean, you talk about the equation, what they contribute is so much more than anything that they take out.

Take us back to those days in the '60s and the conditions, then, in the fields. Farmworkers, the people who were making the food that fed Americans, were hungry. How could that happen?

Well, unfortunately, I think it's still a situation today. With the income inequality that we have in our country right now that not only farmworkers but many other people still do not have enough food to eat. And because everything has been going up and yet our wages for workers have remained stagnant. I mean, actually, if the minimum wage today had kept up with the cost of living, our minimum wage would be over $25 an hour. People don't think about that. So this is what's happened. Of course with the farmworkers — luckily, in California we were able to get the right to organize. And so in the areas where the United Farm Workers has union contracts, the wages are higher than, say, than the minimum wage. But we know that through other parts of the country, unfortunately, we have a lower minimum wage and farmworkers do not have union contracts. 

But agricultural labor, the nature of it, is such that if one group of workers wants you to negotiate and you don't want to do it, it's not that hard — or it hasn't been in the past — to just find other workers somewhere else who will accept even lower wages and worse conditions, and demand very little in return. That was the situation in the fields in the '60s. It's remarkable the degree to which it's still the situation today.

In California, at least the workers have the protections of the Agricultural Labor Relations Law, which means that they are protected. They are protected if they try to organize and the employer tries to break their organization or fire someone — that they can actually file a complaint against the employer for doing that.

And even if they don't have a union contract, that law protects the farmworkers. Unfortunately, we only have that law in the state of California. We don't have it in the rest of the country. But California, of course, employs more farmworkers than any other state. So, and I think the whole thing of the immigration debate has also really hurt farmworkers because so many of these raids that the INS has done have been in the farmworker communities. And it's really interesting, the hypocrisy or the schizophrenia of the employers in the INS immigration service, because when they want to deport workers that are here already, working, but yet they want to bring in contact workers under these foreign worker programs called H2A, and when they bring in these workers from Mexico or other places, these workers have less protections than other workers have. The employers don't pay Social Security for those workers. They don't pay unemployment insurance or disability or any of these other laws that workers are protected for.

They want this workforce that's from outside because that means that the workers can't settle down. They can't become citizens.  

Your partner in the struggle, Caesar Chavez, who you mentioned earlier, famously said, "I'm not a Mexican leader, I'm a labor leader." A lot of people don't realize how much opposition the very young UFW had toward bringing new workers across the border. The growers were able to play off the immigrant workers against the workers already here, and that led to some pretty tough struggles of UFW members trying to keep people on the Mexican side of the border, didn't it?

We were against the foreign worker program, and we worked very hard to defeat that program — Public Law 78 — way back in the day. But they still have it. They still have it today; it's called the H2A program. One of the reasons that we did that, No. 1, is because there was a surplus of workers, and the local workers, their wages fell. But the other thing is the foreign workers were exploited terribly. I can remember fighting for workers who had worked two weeks and had a $15 paycheck for two weeks of work. They were injured and they wouldn't give them any kind of medical care, although they were entitled to it. There was just an abuse of this.

What we're saying is workers — these are immigrant workers that we're talking about. These immigrant workers are here right now. Let's give them legal status so that they can stay here and they can work; they can bring in their families or keep their families here.

Is it tough to engage Americans about the plight of undocumented people in this country, when American families are feeling so pressed? When there are so many people who can't get enough work — citizens who can't get enough work to cover their obligations? Is it a tough time, when other Americans are suffering, to talk to them about people who want to come here?

Well, that's an interesting argument, but when you look right down to it, most people don't want to do the work that immigrants do. I'm not saying that they can't. But the wages are so low and the work is so hard. I think that if we could get the wages of farmworkers up to $25 an hour — as I said, the minimum wage should be $25 an hour — people might go in there and learn how to do farmwork. Because farmwork is not easy. It's almost like being in sports. In the United Farm Workers contracts that I used to negotiate, I always put in there, "Workers will only work at a reasonable pace."

That kind of oppression that you're talking about, that kind of exploitation that you have described, one of the ways it can go on is because when we sit down to eat we don't connect what we're about to do to the struggles of those working people. A lot of people may not realize that you were one of the brains behind the boycott movements of lettuce and grapes in the 1960s and '70s. That was a movement that connected the table to the field. Can you do that again?

I think that we are going to have to do that again. I think one of the things that, in our society, we have to remind people that we are all connected. That the undocumented worker who is out there picking your lettuce — and that lettuce is going to come straight to your table, you know — we want that worker to be in a safe condition. We want that lettuce to be clean. We want to make sure that there's bathrooms out there in the field with soap and paper towels — water so that they can wash their hands. We want that worker to be healthy. We don't want your food to be contaminated. So every time we sit down we should think about the worker that picked the food and the people that processed the food.

I think we're kind of spoiled in the United States of America because we're not really taught to respect the people that work with their hands. People that work with their hands, they're the ones that build the wealth of the country, whether it's making our clothes or making our furniture, building our automobiles; whatever it may be. We are so dependent. But we're not taught to honor people.

It's kind of interesting how on every election cycle, we find some politician who's anti-immigrant, [we find] out that there's people who are undocumented working maybe in their horse stables or working as their gardeners or working as nannies. And of course they try to separate themselves from that. But — but it — it comes out in every single election cycle that somebody — every — We're all dependent on each other. And we've gotta realize that.

During these years of intense struggle, travel, work on the picket lines, work at the negotiating tables, you had 11 children. How did you do that? 

Well, actually, when we started the union I already had my first seven children. Some of my older children helped me with the younger ones. But what really helped me was just a lot of people that came forward to help me with my children. I dragged them around the country with me.

And at one point in United Farm Workers — in 1965 and '66, when we had the big march at Sacramento — we actually set up the first day care for farmworker children in Delano, California. And we had people to come and show us how to set that up.

And that's a big problem for women today because we have a lot of women — day care is extremely expensive for women. They have to pay half of their salary — or more, sometimes — just to get somebody to have adequate, safe care for their children. We're talking about day care, we want like what we did in the union, we actually set up a school for the kids.

President [Barack] Obama has actually stated we need to have early childhood education for all of our children. It's been proven that children can get learning at a very early stage, that it really helps them, in terms of their abilities, and to learn, and even to go to college. I think this is a mandate. We are the only developed country in the world that does not have this kind of care for our kids and this kind of education.

If you're picking cherries in Wisconsin or apples in Michigan or peaches in South Carolina, what about those kids? I mean, are they protected in any way?

No, I don't believe that they are. In fact, Lucille Roybal[-Allard] has had a bill in the Congress since the last Congress to try to equate at the national level what we have in California, in terms of the wages and the ages the children can work in the fields. And again her bill hasn't been able to pass. A lot has to do with who we elect to office. And in order to get some of this progressive legislation passed that will protect workers, we can't do it if we have people in the Congress that don't really care about working people, whether they're farmworkers or any other kind of workers.

We've got to understand that if we do not vote, and we do not engage, and we do not learn, and study who's running for office, we're not going to get good government. Some of these laws that could protect us, they're not passed because the people that we elect to office are against them. You know, we have 60 percent of the people in the Congress are millionaires, and many of these millionaires are not going to care about what happens to working people. They're not all like the Kennedys or the Clintons. I think our country's at a crisis right now — which way we're going to go. If we don't have a strong middle class, which means higher wages for people, then we're not going to have a democracy. This fight against labor unions is also going to destroy our democracy because labor unions are the ones that are able to lift the wages of working people.

It was groups of voters who had been less active in previous elections who helped make Barack Obama president; youth, Latinos, Asians. You're helping to register them. You're helping to engage them in the political process. They helped make Barack Obama president. Are you disappointed that this president hasn't done more for these communities that you represent?

Well, I think the President has done a good job. When we think about the Affordable Care Act, that was huge. And we have to remember that only passed the Congress, the House of Representatives, by five or six votes. I mean, in our area, we fought very hard and we got at least two votes of those five or six votes that passed. So he's had a really hard time in working with the Congress. And a lot of people, they criticize the President but they forget that he cannot make the laws. He can only sign the laws that pass in the U.S. Congress. He had the Jobs Act, that they needed more money to put people to work. Now we hear the Republicans saying, "Jobs, jobs, jobs." OK, why wouldn't they vote on the jobs program that the President tried to pass, right?  

Early on, during the president's time as a national candidate, he began to pick up the slogan from the fields, "Si se puede." Should you be getting royalties for this?

Well, when I met the president, he did say, "I borrowed your slogan." I told him, "Yes, you did." And a lot of people don't know that I'm the one that coined "Si se puede." A lot of people think it was Cesar, but it was actually me.

This interview has been edited and condensed.