There were loud, violent, disruptive protests across America yesterday for International Workers’ Day, but American workers’ issues were barely discussed as they took a back seat to the Left’s current mania for illegal aliens and open borders.
This May Day comes after R. Alexander Acosta, 48, was sworn in as the 27th Secretary of Labor by Vice President Mike Pence last week. Acosta, whose nomination was endorsed by the Laborers’ International Union of North America and other unions, was a U.S. Attorney and dean of Florida International University College of Law. He was easily confirmed by the Senate on April 27 by a vote of 60 to 38.
In America, May Day is typically a violent observance. Its purpose is to serve as a rallying point for communists and socialists. Despite that, it hasn’t been that difficult to take the focus off the plight of American workers on May 1 over the years. Perhaps this is because America has never been a left-of-center country perpetually boiling over with class resentment. Americans don’t care much about labor issues or the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them.
Like every president since Dwight Eisenhower, President Trump declared May 1 Loyalty Day. In his proclamation, Trump said Loyalty Day is meant “to express our country’s loyalty to individual liberties, to limited government, and to the inherent dignity of every human being.” Last year President Obama used his Loyalty Day proclamation to blather on about “our diversity” and about the importance of delivering a “fairer Nation to the next generation.”
In the late 19th century, the Left hijacked May Day, a perfectly good ancient celebration of spring and fertility in the British Isles and elsewhere. It used to be a day of dancing around the maypole, singing, and eating cake.
May Day was celebrated in early America but today it is largely forgotten in this country. And so it was easy for the Left to fill this cultural vacuum and co-opt May Day for its own anti-American purposes.
And with Democrats and the rest of the Left in disarray after Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in November, radical immigration activists were seemingly able to wrest May Day away from organized labor this year.
This year’s May Day observances ranged from indifferent to conspicuously hostile to American workers as organizers used May 1 to largely ignore the plight of native workers pushed out of their jobs by cheaper illegal alien labor. The so-called rights of illegal alien workers took center stage yesterday.
On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Carlson mocked leftist campaigners for sounding like agents of the pro-open borders, pro-immigration amnesty U.S. Chamber of Commerce and for refusing to condemn illegal alien workers for driving wages down and leaving legally present workers unemployed or underemployed.
Steven Choi, executive director of the George Soros-funded New York Immigration Coalition, wasted a valuable prime time spot on Carlson’s Fox News Channel show ducking questions about how immigrants put downward pressure on wages.