What's Labor's Role in Immigration Reform?

By Tiffany Ten Eyck, Labor Notes. Posted July 7, 2009.

And the answer to that is that we are only going to get what we are able and willing to fight for. And we have to fight for what we really want, not for what we think employers are going to give us. When we go into contract bargaining, we don’t start by offering employers what we think they are likely to agree to. We fight for what we need.

That’s exactly the same thing as what’s going on here—if we want immigration reform based on human rights.

LN: My sense is that it’s a hard time to talk about immigration among native-born union members because of the economic crisis. How could labor deal with them together?

DB: We can’t win the right of undocumented people to work without saying everybody in this country needs to be able to have a job. Because the way they defeat us is they say, there aren’t enough jobs. Why should someone from Mexico who crossed the border without a visa have a job, and I can’t get one?

The answer to job competition isn’t for us to fight over the crumbs.

The response to the plant closures crisis in the 1980s was that when employers said, “we have the right to close plants and we determine whether there are jobs there or not,” we said, “no, we have the right to a job. And if the private sector is not willing or capable of providing employment, then the federal government has to do it.” That’s what the New Deal said.

The answer is to force the federal government to guarantee the right of all workers to be able to work—and to fight against things like the GM bankruptcy that are leading to the unemployment of tens of thousands of workers. Undocumented workers did not steal the jobs of those 14 plants that GM is going to close. GM took those jobs, with the Obama administration.

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston is saying that there is a common ground. She authored a bill that said, have an amnesty for people who are here without papers, and then let’s take the fees that those workers are paying for the normalization of their status and use them to set up job creation and job training programs in communities with high unemployment.

If we fight for jobs programs at the same time that we are fighting for the legal status and legal rights of immigrant workers, we can have a program that unemployed African American workers and Latino and Asian workers can benefit from.

It’s the same thing in talking about rights at work. The lesson at Smithfield Foods was that when the employer and ICE were able to use raids against the workers when they were trying to organize the union, everyone in that plant suffered. Not just the workers who got picked up, not just the immigrants. The Black workers at Smithfield suffered, too, because so long as they could terrorize the workforce, they could stop that union drive from succeeding. It was only when workers could say to each other, “everybody in this plant has a right to be here,” that they were able to get enough strength that they finally beat the company.

But if we say that there are not enough jobs for everybody, some people have the right to put bread on the table and other people should go hungry, all we’re doing is helping our employers beat us over the head.

LN: So how do activists get unions to do the right thing on immigration?

DB: We have to look for a rational immigration policy that reflects what’s actually happening to us. In LA at Overhill Farms 254 people are fired and then replaced with part-time employees with no benefits. It makes no sense for us to have a policy that allows employers to do this and then to go to Congress and lobby for a bill that says we want a “secure and effective worker authorization mechanism.” We are lobbying for the same thing that’s being used against us!

We need a reality check and an immigration position that helps us, not our employers, and we have to look for the things that bring us together.

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Tiffany Ten Eyck, a veteran of the successful Taco Bell Boycott campaign, is Promotions Coordinator for Labor Notes, where this piece originally appeared.

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