People around the world commemorate International Workers’ Day with marches and speeches. In Illinois and across the country, worker rights groups are challenging President Trump’s characterization of undocumented immigrants as criminals. Currently, the Republican-controlled Congress is considering cutting Medicaid and other social safety net programs to fund Trump's mass deportation plan.
Cristobal Cavazos is an NIU alum and the executive director of Solidaridad Inmigrante DuPage, Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, a worker’s rights organization whose members hail from across northwest Illinois. Cavazos said undocumented Mexican and Latino workers historically play an essential role in the U.S. economy.
“It's always been the history of the United States and Mexico border that when there's jobs, people come,” Cavazos said. “When there's no jobs, people go. The U.S.-Mexico border always had a push and a pull.”
“The United States has had an insatiable desire for cheap, low wage workers,” he said, “and it's been the Mexican community [who’ve filled those roles], and in the past 25 years, our Central American brothers and sisters that have been coming over, filling the vast majority of agriculture [jobs].”
In addition to agriculture, the Pew Research Center reports that unauthorized immigrant workers are also concentrated in construction, hospitality and manufacturing.
Cavazos said the lack of progress in providing a legal pathway for undocumented immigrants to work and become citizens is by design.
“I think employers and the capitalist class has determined that it's a lot cheaper to have undocumented workers than documented workers,” he said. “What happens if you have an undocumented worker [gain legal status], you're going to have to pay them more, and you have more rights, and you have more abilities.”
“As we've seen in some instances,” he added, “you have people forming unions, which is completely freaks out a lot of the bosses, in particular the food industry where they like to keep the labor costs low and the profits high.”
A 2024 analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the most recent surge of immigration to the U.S. has spurred economic growth, which was stagnant due to decline in migration during the pandemic.
The authors estimate in a ten-year outlook the GDP will be $8.9 trillion higher, and federal government tax revenues will increase by over $1 trillion with the added immigrant workforce.
Cavazos said the pandemic highlighted the important role undocumented immigrants play in the economy – and the paradox of how they are seen by this country.
“During COVID,” he said, “the vast majority of essential workers, the people in the factories, in the warehouse, what we were seeing were also undocumented workers. How can you be an essential worker and a so-called illegal worker at the same time?”
He says it’s a paradox that the country has been unable or unwilling to resolve.
“It's a huge injustice that there's 12 million people in this country without documents that have been here for years,” Cavazos said. “There's been priorities in wars overseas, priorities in the destruction of Gaza, priorities in foreign policy issues. There's always money for wars, money for tax cuts for the rich, but there never seems to be a priority -- this goes for the Democratic and the Republican Party -- in giving our people, our 12 million brothers, sisters, out there any kind of protection and any kind of legalization.”
He said the challenges faced by undocumented workers also speaks to the growing income inequality in the U.S.
“The transfer of wealth from workers to the one percent has been through the roof the past 25 years,” said Cavazos. “And we know this very well, particularly in the Mexican community, [that] the people creating this wealth, breaking their backs, sweating, 12 hours a day in factories and warehouses and working in the field -- it is the undocumented worker.”
The May Day march comes as the Trump Administration’s deportations have spurred outcries for removing individuals without due process, as happened to Maryland father and sheet metal apprentice Kilmar Ábrego García.
