The Loss of Kent Wong and the Future of Labor and Immigrant Rights in California

When Kent Wong died on Oct. 8, labor and immigrants’ rights leaders across the country mourned the loss of a giant. For decades, Wong’s calm presence and iron will spurred significant advances in protections for immigrants and workers, especially those who were undocumented.

In Los Angeles, where the activist, organizer and educator was born and lived, the sense of grief among Wong’s friends and his longtime colleagues has been palpable. But the immigrant and labor movements are also wrestling with a different issue: What will happen to the myriad projects throughout California of which Wong was such a driving force?

“I worry about what the future’s going to be like without him,” said David Sickler, the former longtime regional director of the AFL-CIO, who was among the earliest organizers of immigrant labor in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and worked extensively with Wong on the issue over the ensuing years. Noting such Wong-led efforts as UCLA’s Dream Resource Center to support undocumented youth, Sickler added, “I am concerned for the many movements that he’s been a part of.”

By one friend’s count, Wong was actively involved in 14 different labor- and immigrant-related projects when he died at 69 from cardiopulmonary failure. Among his most recent achievements was guiding and supporting the 2023 creation of new labor research centers at five University of California campuses: UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside and UC San Diego. Those join existing labor research facilities at UC Merced, UC Berkeley and Wong’s longtime professional home, the UCLA Labor Center.

“Those (new) centers are in their infancy,” Sickler said. “Without seasoned, guiding hands like Kent’s, they can stumble and fail, and universities can just get rid of them” — a concern that feels all too valid amid the Trump administration’s multipronged ongoing attack on university funding.

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A fifth-generation Chinese American, Wong spent his career building a case for such initially unpopular ideas as protections for immigrant workers. He was a staff attorney for the Service Employees International Union, then led a seemingly endless series of initiatives – all of which had labor and immigration justice at their heart. (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Vice president of the California Federation of Teachers. Founder of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. Board chair for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. And, for more than 30 years, director of the UCLA Labor Center and a lecturer at the university. (Disclosure: CFT is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Wong’s tenure at UCLA’s labor center saw the expansion of staff from three members to 42. With the support of State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles), a longtime colleague, Wong led an effort that secured $15 million in one-time state funding to establish a permanent home for the center in L.A.’s MacArthur Park neighborhood, within walking distance of nearly two dozen labor union offices.

“At the heart of everything Kent did was his unwavering commitment to protecting and uplifting immigrant workers, whose struggles he understood deeply and whose dignity he fought to defend,” Durazo said in a statement upon Wong’s passing.

Wong’s father was a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, his mother a psychiatric social worker. He graduated from the now-shuttered People’s College of Law, a four-year, unaccredited public interest law school in Los Angeles whose aim was to train legal advocates who would address inequities in the law and society.

Wong’s locus of activity was L.A., but his work took him all over California, across the country and around the world. Nearly 20 years ago, he spearheaded the process that led to the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor signing sister-city agreements with labor councils in both Shanghai and Beijing. These efforts led to the sharing of information and perspectives on labor standards, working conditions and multinational corporations that operated in both countries.

He was working on setting up a meeting of U.S. and Palestinian labor academics on many of the same issues earlier this summer. And in July, in the face of ICE and Homeland Security raids on workers and businesses in his home city, Wong facilitated a nonviolence training session for an estimated 1,400 people at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

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Nonviolent resistance was at the heart of Wong’s work, but that concept is hardly as passive as the words might make it appear.

“To some people, nonviolence means doing a peaceful protest — but nonviolent resistance is a much more profound concept,” said Larry Frank, a longtime colleague of Wong’s at the UCLA Labor Center and a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles. “Nonviolent resistance means being able to create a moral force that publicly challenges what leadership is doing, and what is necessary in terms of resistance.”

Wong understood such principles well. He was mentored by the Rev. James Lawson Jr., a lion of the Civil Rights Movement. For years, Wong and Lawson, who died in 2024, co-taught the course “Nonviolence and Social Movements” at UCLA.

Wong’s greatest professional gifts may prove the most difficult to replicate. Friends remembered him for his unique ability to quickly identify someone’s strengths and see where and how those might best be integrated into a specific labor or justice project.

“He’d spend a few minutes with somebody, and then his instincts would tell him what they’d be good at,” Sickler said. “He seemed to understand the talent they possessed — and whether they were genuine or not. He could read ‘phony’ pretty quick.”

Wong also maintained a respectful posture toward those who disagreed with him, a disarming and effective approach that feels increasingly rare in 2025. But Wong’s even demeanor was never to be mistaken for a lack of conviction.

“It wasn’t so much like, ‘We’re fighting on an issue and I’m going to craft a middle ground.’ That was not his vibe,” said Roxana Tynan, executive director emerita of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. “It was more like, ‘I’m helping to show you the moral pole here. You should come over here with me and my pals. It’s way more fun.’”

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Wong loved good food, and he and his wife, the community organizer and activist Jai Lee Wong, hosted friends for many a Chinese meal for which he hand-selected the ingredients from local markets and cooked everything himself. He was a jazz fan who’d go out of his way to find a good club on the road. He was a devoted husband and father. But he was fundamentally a person who felt called to a purpose that could, at times, be all encompassing.

“He was, for me, the most strategic thinker and strategic actor I’ve ever worked with,” Frank said. “He had put in this work to establish relationships with labor, but also with businesses, with management. All the pieces that made him so effective, he had built over many, many years, thoughtfully, strategically. And then he was able to move so many pieces of work forward in this town — a huge force in the movement.”

The movements for labor and social justice will continue, albeit in extremely challenging circumstances. The Trump administration’s threats and harassment have spooked immigrant workers and businesses alike, and Los Angeles has at times felt like the epicenter of that tumult.

Wong’s mass training session on nonviolent resistance in L.A. this summer, designed to instruct activists and organizers on how to effectively respond to such emergencies, was a direct response to the Trump-directed incursion into his city. It was the kind of cause that animated his life and work — and his absence from these battles, to which he constantly brought both resolve and respectfulness, is still difficult for colleagues to imagine.

“I’ve never known a finer human being,” Sickler said. “Kent could be an opponent’s toughest enemy — but it’s hard to attack a guy who smiles at you and treats you respectfully.”

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