Chavez was an icon among liberal progressives. According to Tucker Carlson in his book Ship of Fools there are six libraries, eleven parks, half a dozen major roads and at least twenty five public schools in California all named for him.
Chavez's UFW union was comprised of Latino farm laborers, in this country legally, who saw illegal immigrants as a threat to their economic livelihood, which of course they were. Carlson writes:
Chavez understood that new arrivals from poor countries will always work for less than Americans. Immigration hurt the members of his union, undercutting their wages and weakening their leverage in negotiations with management...When government refused to protect them (from illegal aliens) Chavez did it himself....In 1969 Chavez led a march down the agricultural spine of California to protest the hiring of illegal workers by growers.The union set up a "wet line" along the border, a picket line of tents, each tent manned by five or six men whose task it was to catch illegals and beat them to a pulp.
Marching alongside him were future presidential candidate Walter Mondale and Rev. Ralph Abernathy...
When the U.S. government failed to secure the border...in 1979, UFW members, almost all of them Hispanic, began intercepting Mexican nationals as they crossed the border and assaulted them in the desert. Their tactics were brutal: Chavez's men beat immigrants with chains, clubs, and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses bombed and cars burned...
During these years the Democrat party was firmly anti-illegal immigration. In 1975 California governor Jerry Brown (the same Jerry Brown who is again California's governor today, remarkably) opposed the admission of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Vietnam. His reason was that California already had too many unemployed people.
Senator Joe Biden introduced legislation to curb the arrival of the Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, accusing the Gerald Ford administration of not being honest about how many refugees would be coming to our shores.
Senator George McGovern, the leftmost progressive in the Democratic Party, opposed letting them in, saying, "I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam."
In 1994 Barbara Jordan, an African American congresswoman from Texas, demanded that immigrants assimilate into American society, learn English and become "Americanized." Those immigrants who refused she insisted be deported.
In 1995 Democrat President Bill Clinton intoned in his State of the Union address that, "All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by U.S. citizens or immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers."
He went on: "It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that we've seen in recent years. We must do more to stop it." He was given a standing ovation by Democrats and Republicans alike.
As recently as 2006, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and twenty three other senate Democrats voted to build a fence on the Mexican border.
And then suddenly they had an epiphany. They began to ask themselves, "What are we doing? These immigrants will almost certainly vote for us Democrats if we get them citizenship," and overnight their attitude toward illegal immigration flipped.
Once the Democrats realized that a huge influx of Hispanic migrants could turn Texas blue, thereby guaranteeing that Democrats would achieve political hegemony in this country for the next three generations, they quite abruptly forgot all the speeches they had made in the 90s and 2000s, they kicked American workers to the curb and stumbled all over themselves to do everything they could to get as many aliens into the country as possible.
Barack Obama even adopted Cesar Chavez's slogan, "Yes, we can" for his 2008 presidential campaign, oblivious, perhaps, of Chavez's actual attitude toward illegals.
Democrats today are willing to open our borders to almost anyone who wants to come in, they want to abolish ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, and declare every large city in America a sanctuary where illegal immigrants will be safe from enforcement of the laws they themselves fought to enact scarcely more than a decade ago.
This all suggests a thought experiment. Let's imagine that the tens of thousands of migrants wending their way across Mexico and arriving now at American points of entry were all sporting MAGA hats and were reliably expected to vote Republican when perchance they eventually were granted citizenship. Given those circumstances how many of those who are today championing open borders and sanctuary cities would continue to support those policies?
Not very many, I'd bet.
The left's concern for these migrants is largely specious and based almost completely on a political calculation. After all, what has changed for Democrats to cause them to abandon their hostility to mass immigration of a decade or two ago?
Given the history, it seems quite reasonable to assume that very few of those who advocate for the migrants today care much about them as human beings. Rather, they care about them primarily as potential Democrat voters.
They also see themselves in a win/win situation. If the migrants get into the U.S. they'll be here to stay, and a path to citizenship and the right to vote is probably in their future. If, on the other hand, they get discouraged and go home, the Democrats can blame their plight on heartless Republicans in general and that evil President Trump in particular.
In either eventuality, the migrants are pawns, they're a means to an end for the Democrats and their political aspirations.