There is a widespread consensus across party lines in the United States about an urgent need for immigration reform. Yet, discussions on the topic often occur in a vacuum, lacking an acknowledgment of how U.S. foreign policy perpetuates migration and the larger impact policy has on communities in the United States.
Baldemar Velasquez, the founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO, a union of migrant farmworkers in the eastern United States, will address this topic in a free, public lecture titled “Organizing the Unorganizable: Labor, Migration and Human Rights” on Tuesday, Feb. 20, at noon in the McQuade Law Auditorium at the Law Center as part of the Cannon Lecture Series.
Baldemar Velasquez will lecture at noon Feb. 20 in a free, public event at the McQuade Law Auditorium at the Law Center.
Velasquez will specifically discuss the intersections of labor, migration, and human rights, examining the current immigration system in the country and how it exacerbates vulnerabilities in immigrant populations, looking specifically at migrant workers and undocumented workers in informal labor spaces and their families.
Velasquez’s Farm Labor Organizing Committee has become a grass-roots leader in the immigrant rights movement, organizing the immigrant community to defend their rights, building a broad network in the larger society to support immigrants in realizing their rights, and advocating policies to ensure the human, civil, and working rights of immigrants. FLOC started a change in the agricultural industry’s structure through three-way negotiations among the major parties involved in agricultural production.
He has decades of experience in organizing farm workers and immigrant communities to create systemic change. He is a highly respected national and international leader not only in the farm labor movement but also in the Latino and immigrant rights movements. He has been recognized by many labor, government, academic and progressive organizations, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, an Aguila Azteca Award by the Government of México, and an Honorary Doctor of Social Science by Bowling Green State University and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by The University of Toledo.
This free, public lecture is part of the Cannon Lecture Series that was established in 1980 to honor former Toledo attorney Joseph A. Cannon. The series hosts nationally known individuals who explore both the humanistic dimensions and limitations of our legal system.
For more information, visit the Cannon Lecture website.
