Labor leaders meet to discuss Mexican immigrant workers' rights

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-ime_24met.ART.West.Edition1.46743be.html

07:40 AM CDT on Thursday, April 24, 2008

By DIANNE SOLÍS / The Dallas Morning News
[e-mail]

It's a critical time in the U.S. with an enthusiasm for politics unseen in decades, and that's given muscle to the Latino vote, said a U.S. labor leader Wednesday at a conference of Mexican immigrant leaders.

"In over 40 years of organizing, I've never seen this level of interest and it will be good for this democracy," said Eliseo Medina, the executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest labor groups in the U.S.

Mr. Medina urged the advisory council of the Mexican government's Institute for Mexicans Abroad to organize, to vote and to push for an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, as the conference moved into its second day.

"We can't have two classes of workers here," Mr. Medina said in Spanish.

Then, Mr. Medina, 62, shared his own immigrant story: His family immigrated to the U.S. legally to Delano, Calif., when he was 10, because like so many Mexican families today, they were tired of being separated from their farm worker father, the family's breadwinner.

In Delano, he met César Chávez, the founder of the United Farm Workers, and became an organizer.

FULL story at link.

[GetTheRightVote]

1. The real facts are that during WWII there was an agree between Mex and Us

but the workers were to return to Mex when the soldiers came home and they did not breaking the agreement and have attempted to make themselves legal ever since. Hoover made many of them go back to Mexico but they keep coming back hoping we will let them get away with it someday. Learn the history of the real story.

[Omaha Steve]

2. Many never got paid

That is part of it too.