Both of My Grandfathers Were Illegal Immigrants (and Lou Dobbs' Would Be Today)

Both my grandfathers were illegal immigrants.

Morris Passoff, my mother's father, came here from what is now Belarus in 1910, when he was 14. As he was by himself, he got a woman on the ship to pretend she was his aunt so he wouldn't be turned back at Ellis Island as an unaccompanied minor.

Avram Wishnia and Hinde Greenberg Wishnia, my father's parents, came here from Paris around 1929, about five years after they had emigrated there from Poland. My grandmother was able to enter the country as an immigrant, as her father was already a U.S. citizen, but my grandfather had to come in as a tourist. In early 1932, he was expelled because his visa had expired -- even though he had an 8-month-old Brooklyn-born son, my father. My grandmother went to work in an overcoat factory while her parents took care of my father -- who was what the contemporary anti-immigrant movement calls an "anchor baby."

My family history belies the central beliefs of that anti-immigrant movement: the argument that "our ancestors all came here legally"; the racist attitudes that immigrants are alien scum; and the idea that immigrants, especially illegal ones, drive down wages. Both my grandfathers became union activists, part of the movement that ushered in the greatest period of working-class prosperity in the history of the industrialized world. "In our organizing, we talk about the work immigrants did in the 1930s to create the good jobs we have today," says Annemarie Strassel, a Chicago-based organizer for UNITE HERE. "We want to revive that for the 21st century."

Morris Passoff got a job as a copy boy for the New York World, driving a horse cart to deliver stories from reporters in the field. On March 25, 1911, when he was 15, he was at work when a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. He watched as screaming workers jumped from ninth-floor windows with their hair and clothing ablaze, as the World reported. He moved up to the mailroom, bundling and mailing the newspapers, and eventually worked at two Yiddish-language dailies. He served on the executive board of Mailers Local 6 of the International Typographers Union.

"He had a real sense of himself as working-class," my mother recalls. "He always said, 'I am a worker.' Not 'middle class,' like they say today."

Avram Wishnia returned to Brooklyn in 1934 and worked as a presser in a clothing factory. He also served on the executive board of his International Ladies Garment Workers Union local. He stood up to Murder Inc. goons and corrupt business agents but was purged at the beginning of the Cold War for his communist sympathies.

Union wages and security, affordable (rent-controlled) housing and cheap college tuition were the tripod that supported my parents' generation as they moved into the middle class and beyond. But there are formidable obstacles to the current generation of immigrants doing the same. Changes in our immigration laws mean that most of the Ellis Island generation would not now be able to enter the country legally. The union movement is much weaker than it was in the post-World War II period. The post-Reagan economy has redistributed wealth from America to Richistan to the point that if Manhattan were an independent nation, it would have the most unequal economy in the world. And the illegal status of many immigrant workers is another weapon employers can use to intimidate them when they try to organize.

War on Workers

"Employers violate workers' rights every time we try to organize," says Eddie Acosta, worker center coordinator for the AFL-CIO. "It's the fear of being deported that makes people afraid."

Two of the largest recent roundups of illegal immigrants -- in which the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement charged hundreds of workers with identity theft for using false Social Security numbers -- took place at companies with histories of union-management conflict. The United Food and Commercial Workers were trying to organize at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, where 389 people were arrested and 270 jailed in an ICE raid May 12. And the United Steelworkers were beginning a drive to expand the union at the Chattanooga chicken factory that was one of five Pilgrim's Pride plants raided in April, with more than 300 people arrested.