Labor Secretary Tom Perez quoted a famous anti-Nazi famous poem Thursday as he called on voters to reject the “demons of fear and isolation” and “build bridges and not walls in this country.”
“History will soon ask where we were in the face of unrelenting attacks on immigrants, unrelenting attacks on our Muslim brothers and sisters, unrelenting attacks on voting rights. History will ask if you spoke up for the rights of people who didn’t look like you,” Perez said to applause at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Official conference in Washington.
Perez quoted Pastor Martin Niemöller, who he described as opposing “Nazi Germany and Hitler,” and said the poem, entitled “First They Came …,” “sings to the challenges of today.”
“‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. And then they came for me. And there was nobody left to speak.’ We must always speak out against any injustice anywhere,” Perez said to applause.
It was a fiery speech for a popular Hispanic politician who has recently been a topic of conversation as a potential vice presidential pick for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His call to “build bridges, not walls” echoed Clinton’s typical stump speech as she has railed against Donald Trump’s immigrations policies, including his push to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Perez compared the current political climate to other moments in American history when he said prejudice and politics infringed on civil rights.
“We have seen this movie before, my friends, and that is why I have so much optimism. The know-nothing movement of the mid-19th century was fundamentally an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement and it failed because it was fundamentally un-American,” Perez said. “In the 1880s, we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, we interned Japanese Americans during WWII, and you know what? Those were wrong. And we have to beat these things back, and you know, we have indeed beaten these things back, these forces back, every time.”
Perez also cited Republican support for voter ID laws, which he said makes it harder for Latinos to vote, as well as Thursday’s blow to President Barack Obama’s effort to use executive actions to shield some 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. With the Supreme Court dead-locked on the issue, Obama’s actions will remain blocked from going into effect.
“I have no doubt that we may have fallen down today on (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents), but that fall is brief, because we will get up, we will get up stronger,” Perez said. “I have no doubt about that on immigration reform, I have no doubt about that on so many other issues of critical importance.”
In a nod to House Democrats’ recent efforts to pass gun legislation by staging a sit-in on the House floor overnight, Perez also quoted civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, who has praised getting in “good trouble” when it means fighting injustice.
“Don’t ever get down. Get up. Do what John Lewis told you, what John Lewis does every day — day in and out — cause ‘good trouble,'” Perez said. “That’s what we have to do, that’s the secret to our success as a nation.”