When Governor Greg Abbott first started busing migrants to liberal strongholds around the country in 2022, Democratic leaders shot back, calling his political stunt racist and inhumane. New York City Mayor Eric Adams wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Greg Abbott used innocent people as political pawns to manufacture a crisis. New Yorkers are stepping up to fix it — that’s our city’s values.”
But in the past few months, Adams and some other Democratic leaders have sounded more like Abbott and other Republican leaders. In September, Adams said during a town hall meeting, “[The migrant crisis] will destroy New York City,” and after that traveled to Mexico to personally dissuade migrants from coming to the United States. Now, President Joe Biden, who had campaigned in 2020 to reverse Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, is expanding Trump’s border wall and embracing other Trump policies, including the expedited removal of migrants at the border without a hearing, making it harder for migrants to get asylum, making permanent pandemic-era border restrictions, and mandating detention for immigrants waiting for a court date.
As leaders from both sides of the aisle converge on policies and rhetoric around the migrant crisis, fueling divisions in communities, we spoke with organizers from immigrant worker’s centers in both El Paso and New York City who are challenging these narratives to unite workers in their communities. Carlos Marentes is the founder and director of the El Paso organization Border Agricultural Workers Project, which was formed in 1980 to address the diverse needs of farmworkers based in the city and to call for equal rights for them to organize. Joann Lum is the director of the New York City Workers Center National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, which has organized workers across various trades since 1995.
