by James Parks, Apr 8, 2007

With the immigration debate heating up in Congress, experts say current U.S. immigration policy is broken and Congress needs to heed the lessons of the past to make the right choices today.

The nation’s main immigration law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, was fatally flawed from the beginning, says former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall.

Our flawed immigration policy encourages poor workers to come to the United States seeking a better life, Marshall says, and exposes them to exploitation by unscrupulous employers who use immigrant workers to lower wages and push up their bottom line in a global economy.

Marshall, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, was a panelist at a forum last month on immigration sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute as part of its Agenda for Shared Prosperity policy initiative.

The real solutions to making our immigration system work for everyone, Marshall says, involve creating new policies that protect immigrant workers’ rights in the United States and expand opportunities in their home countries.

For example, he says, we need new policies that help Mexico—where the bulk of undocumented immigrants come from—to promote job growth and create trade, investment and aid programs that reduce the country’s poverty, help workers form unions and give workers opportunities that some now find only in the United States.

A recent EPI study shows that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was promoted as the way to bring prosperity to Mexico, has actually hurt Mexican workers and encouraged massive migration to the United States.

Since NAFTA took effect in 1994, according to EPI, employment in Mexico has increased in the low-wage “maquiladora” industries, with the benefits flowing mainly to large companies, the financial sector and a small number of administrative and professional workers earning high salaries.

But rather than address the real problems caused by our immigration and trade policies, President Bush is pushing hard for an expanded guest worker program that includes no worker protections—and that will “hurt labor standards in the U.S.,” says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

Expanding the H1B guest worker program would be a serious mistake, Ron Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told the EPI conference. In late March, legislation was introduced to enhance protections for skilled guest workers.  For more information on the legislation, click here.

Low-skill guest workers are exploited even more than those with high-level skills, according to Mary Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center released a report this month that documents widespread abuse of workers in the current H2B guest worker programs. The report, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, relates experiences of workers who take on heavy debt to come to the United States for promised work opportunities only to find the jobs pay very little—or doesn’t even exist. Worse, employers often hold workers’ identification papers, putting them at the mercy of the employers even if they want to return to their home country.

As Bauer says:

This is a modern-day system of indentured servitude. When their visas expire, these workers leave here and become disposable workers of the U.S. economy.

Unfortunately, this program is the model that legislators and pro-immigration groups are using in developing a new guest worker program as part of comprehensive immigration reform.  This report should give pause to those who want to create a new massive guest worker program.

The AFL-CIO backs strong protections for immigrant workers’ freedoms and rights and opposes current guest worker programs. In policy statements, the AFL-CIO Executive Council has said:

• The current system of immigration enforcement is broken and needs to be reformed to allow undocumented workers to work lawfully in the United States, thus taking away employers’ ability to exploit them based on their undocumented status.
• Future workers should come to this country with full rights, not as temporary workers.
• Immigration laws should be enforced in a manner that complements labor law enforcement. Raids and employer sanctions are powerful tools that employers have to diminish workers’ rights.

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