Whereas Cesar Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, in Yuma, Arizona; Whereas, in 1962, Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers, to improve the wages and working conditions for American farmworkers; Whereas Chavez’s union drew on the imagery of civil rights to use nonviolence and mass mobilization to improve the conditions of persecuted and impoverished American workers; Whereas Cesar Chavez believed that preventing illegal immigration was an essential prerequisite to improving the circumstances of American farmworkers; Whereas, in 1969, Chavez led a march to the Mexican border to protest illegal immigration, joined by Senator Walter Mondale and Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph Abernathy; Whereas Chavez noted that it is almost impossible to start some effective program to get these people their jobs back from the braceros once employers replace them; Whereas, in the 1970s, Chavez combined a campaign of identifying and reporting illegal workers with a campaign to boycott nonunionized farms in order to protect the labor of the unionized American worker; Whereas Chavez recognized that flooding the labor market with people from abroad undermines the unionized American worker; Whereas, in 1979, at the National Press Club, Chavez emphatically supported enforcement of immigration laws, stating that people are being hurt and being destroyed, and with the complicity and with the help, of the Federal Government ; and Whereas President Clinton recognized Chavez’s work saying, We can be proud of his enormous accomplishments and in the dignity and comfort he brought to the lives of so many of our country’s least powerful and most dispossessed workers : Now, therefore, be it