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What the Trump/MAGA/Murdoch narrative about immigrants gets totally wrong concerns the role they play in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami; in towns like Peoria and Paducah; and in the fields of the Central Valley and the Nebraska plains. Far from disrupting these cities and farms, immigrants keep them running. That’s why, in Los Angeles, the Chamber of Commerce has deplored the ICE arrests. That’s why Rick Caruso, the leading conservative vying to win L.A.’s next mayoral election, has deplored the ICE arrests.
Latinos and Asians constitute more than half the population of California, by far our largest state. The great majority of them are either immigrants or their children or grandchildren. They’re central to the state’s political culture, too. In the mid-1990s, a new generation of Southern California labor leaders began ambitious efforts to naturalize and politically mobilize the state’s huge and growing Latino immigrant population. Miguel Contreras, the visionary leader of the L.A. County AFL-CIO, sought to task what had been a fairly dormant local labor movement to walk previously untrod precincts and staff previously silent phone banks. There then were roughly 320 local unions affiliated with the L.A. AFL-CIO, and he tallied each local’s mobilizations (how many afternoon or evening precinct walks their members took, how many afternoon or evening phone banks they worked). As the political editor of the L.A. Weekly, I went along for some of those walks and sat in at some of those phone banks.
From the mid-1990s through the following decade, what Contreras’s tally showed was the local unions that ranked first and second out of the 320 doing election work were SEIU’s janitors local, and the local of hotel housekeepers, kitchen staff, and servers. At the time, these two locals consisted overwhelmingly of immigrants, probably most of them undocumented. Their members, whom I accompanied on their walks through the city’s working-class Latino neighborhoods, weren’t seeking to vote themselves, as Republicans have falsely been asserting for decades. They were seeking to turn out votes for candidates who favored workers’ rights, as well as immigrants’ rights. (And by no means were all those candidates Latinos, as their support for candidates like Jackie Goldberg, a Jewish lesbian schoolteacher, over Latino opponents made clear.)
Their involvement in grassroots politics was both properly self-interested and in the best traditions of American democracy. Once elected, many of the candidates for whom they’d stumped would show up on their picket lines and even alongside them when they bargained across the table with management.
The core of Los Angeles County had been voting Democratic since the New Deal, but within a few years after these initiatives began, newly naturalized and mobilized voters turned the county’s peripheries, and then most of Southern California, from Republican representation to Democratic. They turned California from a purple state to a blue state. And they are every bit as distinctly and deeply Californian as the Beach Boys of Brian Wilson’s blessed memory.
Today, that California is under partisan, xenophobic, and bigoted assault from Donald Trump’s redcoats. “No Kings” is a slogan, a template, that rightly associates Trump’s rule with the monarchial system against which the patriots of 1775 rebelled, but that’s no longer the only aspect of 1775 that Saturday’s demonstrations should call to mind. June 14, 1775 was the day America created an army to defend itself against an alien force seizing Americans to suppress their right to home rule and to security in their own homes and workplaces. On June 14, 2025, Americans will be demonstrating across this country against not just our wannabe king, but against his decision to deploy our own armed forces to seize community members, suppress home rule, and trash the constitutional rights which Americans fought long and hard to secure. They’ll be demonstrating against Trump’s decision to turn our army into a domestic army of occupation, into neo-redcoats.
Trump is right that there’s an invasion going on. But he’s the invader, the barbarian at the gates.
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