What's Labor's Role in Immigration Reform?

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

And that was the architecture for the “comprehensive immigration reform” bills we saw in Congress over the last few years: big guest worker programs, increases in enforcement of employer sanctions, and some degree of legalization. But the legalization proposals were actually more pro-corporate: they proposed things like 18-year waiting periods, but they would immunize employers from punishment under employer sanctions. In other words, they would grandfather in the existing workforce while guest worker programs were getting up and running.

So we’ve had the labor movement divided in the last few years on immigration reform, with AFL-CIO continuing to support the position that we won in 1999 and SEIU, UNITE HERE, and other unions in CTW basically changing positions and supporting those comprehensive immigration reform bills instead. The irony is that these are the unions that fought the hardest in 1999 for a repeal of sanctions!

So the new joint position between the AFL-CIO and CTW is an effort to overcome that division. I think it’s actually an effort to bring the CTW and AFL-CIO back together, period. If you can do it on immigration reform, then you can do it pretty much on everything else, because this is one of the places where there was the sharpest conflict between CTW and AFL-CIO.

A joint position on immigration reform is a good idea if it’s a good position. It’s not a good idea if it’s not. We have to look at what it actually says.

There’s one good piece to this position that is worth trying to get the labor movement to live up to it. It says a long-term solution to uncontrolled immigration is to encourage just economic integration, which will eliminate enormous economic inequalities. An essential component of that is a fair trade globalization model that promotes the creation of free trade unions for all workers.

There was an even better statement that Sweeney and Ken Georgetti of the Canadian Labour Congress wrote to Obama about NAFTA. They talked about the displacement of people, that NAFTA caused migration by increasing poverty.

So here we look at the connection of immigration policy to trade policy. We can’t support a free trade agreement with Colombia if it is going to lead to the displacement of millions of Colombians, which it will. Same thing with Panama, with Peru, all these agreements and the economic model they are part of are displacing millions of people. So we have to not only oppose the trade agreements but also call for a new economic relationship with other countries. That is a very profound thing to say, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get our labor movement to live up to those words.

Because what we are really saying is that we demand a fundamental change in the foreign policy of this country, economic, political, military. That’s going to bring us into confrontation with the Obama administration.

LN: It’s great on paper but how do we make it real?

DB: It represents a basic increase in understanding by our labor movement and by workers. NAFTA educated us, with some very painful costs. It taught us not just that corporations would be more than willing to take our jobs and move them to Mexico but that those same trade agreements were no good for the people in those countries either.

They impoverished people, they eliminated their jobs, they tore up their union contracts, they dumped agricultural products on their markets so that farmers couldn’t survive, all of these things that produce migration.

In other words, working people in this country and working people in those countries, Mexico, specifically, we have a common interest in opposing these agreements.

That’s an important realization for us. We’re on the same side here. Those Mexican workers that are crossing the border into the U.S., we have the same problem.

So if it’s true that the reason that people are coming here is NAFTA and unfair economic and trade policies, then we need to make sure that those people, as they come into our workforce, have the same rights as we do. They’re not somebody else, they’re us.

So the question is, does the rest of this statement live up to that, is it consistent? It’s not.

It says that those people who are displaced and coming here should not be allowed to work. In fact, they should really go home.

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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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