It was nightfall in an orange grove at harvest time in the winter of 1977. I was squatting around a campfire under the trees, talking, or trying to talk in my halting Spanish, to men from Guerrero and Queretaro—illegal immigrant farm workers. After years of hard work, they had just achieved a silent victory unprecedented in American labor history. Even though undocumented, they and others like them at the campfires around us had successfully negotiated an employment contract with their employer, the man on whose land we dined so casually, the largest landowner in Maricopa County, Arizona—Barry Goldwater. The contract bore terms on a par with or above those of indigenous farm workers organized by the United Farm Workers. 

How could this all have happened? How could men with no legal standing in the United States have entered as equals into a contract with our nation’s then most prominent conservative and former Republican Presidential candidate, the Arizona Senator himself? The answers were many, of course, but the heart of the issue was that they had been organized before they crossed the border into the United States by staff of the Maricopa County Organizing Project (and funded in part by the grants program of a small San Francisco foundation I was evaluating). They had overcome the opposition of Mexicans such as the large agribusiness mogul Manny Chavez, and his brother Cesar Chavez, who were also opposed to the organizing of illegal immigrants. These campesinos had crossed the border, helped by some decent coyotes, and avoided the blackmail and criminality of others, to regroup again on the Goldwater ranch. They all told me their goal was to work, to earn a decent living under tolerable conditions, with toilets and water and shelter in the fields, to avoid abuse and exploitation, and to return themselves and their earnings at the end of the harvest season to their families in Mexico.

Almost 30 years later, we have advanced in some ways and regressed in others in acknowledging that we are largely a nation of immigrants. But the world is very different now. We have a national security interest in secure immigration that we hardly had then. We also have a national political interest in welcoming as new citizens those who have come, not only for economic reasons, but also with a respect and appreciation for the history and reasoning embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. But in some ways we continue to refuse to acknowledge that we have a deep-seated economic, cultural, and political interest in the relatively free flow of immigrants. Likewise, we tend to overlook the work, intellectual capital, and creativity that an immigrant population has always, and somewhat uniquely, provided this country.

The American economy is growing at a healthy clip today. Much of its recent growth has been artificially funded by the government’s deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s easy money, as well as a burst of productivity. We know from economic history, however, that the primary reason for America’s long-term economic primacy, and its greatest strength relative to other developed countries, has been its ability to attract extraordinarily talented and highly motivated immigrants, legal and not. Collectively, it is our human capital that is the most essential component of our growth. Not inconsequently, our immigrants will help build the “safety net” for the giant population cohort about to retire.

America’s character has always been shaped by its immigrants, and it is the richer for it. In a recent issue of The Boston Globe, the front page of the City and Region section displayed a stunning matrix of 38 portraits of each of the valedictorians of all of Boston’s high schools, along with their names, personal goals, places of birth, and school affiliations (both chartered and public). Eighteen were born outside of the United States. All but a half dozen were children of color. The largest portion was native born Americans of African descent. Others were from all over the globe, Albania, China, Bangladesh, Uganda, Cape Verde, Haiti, and Venezuela, to name a few.

Globalization generally requires the free, if regulated, flow of goods and services, capital, and labor. For the fruits of globalization to be realized and sustainable, however, the freedom of trade must be accompanied by the freedom to move and to organize, the civil liberties that we assume and that our ancestors fought for. Today an estimated 34 million people in the United States were born outside its borders. Of those, an estimated 11 million people have come here to work without permission or visas, as did most of our ancestors, whether they came by force or in search of a better life.

Of course, the success 30 years ago on that Maricopa land was a consequence of many forces, not the least of which was that the land on which I and the undocumented farm workers were trespassing belonged to Senator Goldwater. Not only was he the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party he was also a man of good will. So the initial success of the precedent-setting contract of the Maricopa County Organizing Project and the farm workers probably depended in part on Senator Goldwater’s vulnerability as a national figure. It contains one lesson for the nation’s acerbic debate on immigration, however. We will have to accompany our deliberations around immigration and trade with respect and assistance for protecting the economic and human (and environmental) rights for which we have so long fought. The rights and freedom and economic well being of the compadres from Guerrero, and others in our own immigrant population, are intrinsically the rights, freedoms, and economic well being of us all.

—S. Moody