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Netroots Nation: Immigration Reform’s Strange Bedfellows
Earlier this week in Washington, D.C., AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka joined Labor Secretary Hilda Solis for a remarkable discussion on the importance of immigration reform. On Thursday, panelists speaking on ”Immigration Reform’s Strange Bedfellows” at the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas amplified President Trumka and Secretary Solis’ call to action.
Moderating the discussion at Netroots Nation was Mark Lauritsen, UFCW international vice president and director of Food Processing, Packing and Manufacturing Division, who opened with an emotional recounting of both the positive and negative sides of immigration, particularly in the meatpacking industry and how employers use immigration as a tool to oppress workers.
What America needs is an immigration system that works for all America’s workers.
Lauritsen first turned to state Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) who gave her take on S.B. 1070, Arizona’s anti-immigration law. Sinema described it as misguided. The lesson Sinema takes from Arizona is that if Congress doesn’t act, those who want comprehensive immigration reform must respond proactively with localized legislation rather than waiting for federal action. Immigration reform is a problem that needs a federal solution, but Sinema argues that we cannot wait.
Giving a perspective from the law enforcement side, Arturo Venegas, an immigrant, Vietnam veteran and former chief of police for the city of Sacramento, laid out the risks of legally codified racial profling and how enforcement-only tactics are insufficient. Law enforcement officers like Chief Venegas are some of the most powerful voices on immigration reform and we all owe a great debt to all the brave officers who have spoken out against racial profiling as an enforcement tactic.
Looking beyond enforcement, Adam Luna, political director at America’s Voice, described the political implications of immigration reform, particularly how popular comprehensive immigration reform is, and how candidates and activists can talk about immigration.
Rounding out the panel discussion, Think Progress blogger, former UFCW communications specialist and immigrant from Guatemala, Andrea Nill, addressed the coordinated opposition to immigration reform and outlined who’s funding it and how they operate. Scary stuff. To read more work from Nill, click here.
Taking a step back, I was encouraged by the overall hopefulness expressed by all the panelists, each with a different perspective and set of life experiences. Comprehensive immigration reform: Sí, se puede.
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14 Comments
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Strange bedfellows indeed,the AFL-CIO now backs the same SCABS that put thousand of union meatpackers out of work,have cost millions in the construction industry and have better than halved wages for nearly everyone.Let’s give them all AMNESTY and Union Cards that should fix the problem until their cousins arrive from across the same open border they crossed with no penalty just rewards for doing it.What a bunch of FOOLS you are.
Dr,
Can you post some studies or any references that show illegal immigration in the United States has halved wages for everyone in the US? Same for the millions out of work in the construction industry (more like the housing bubble caused by predatory lending and greedy banks)? I may give you meatpacking considering a study I read, but consider the meatpacking companies that recruited and paid for illegals to come to this country to undermine native workers. If I’m desperately poor in Mexico I would of came too. Any reform must fix the border so the cousins can’t come. I’m starting to think a counterfeit proof national id card so business doesen’t have an excuse to hire them is the way to go.
When did the UNIONS support illegal immigrants? Unions use to have illegal immigrants DEPORTED, and AS A UNION BROTHER I WANT illegal immigrants DEPORTED and MY UNION BROTHERS WANT illegal immigrants DEPORTED!! CONTRACT coming up in November and My Union Brothers/Sisters are Wanting E-VERIFY in the Contract. DEPORT ALL illegal immigrants.
Titan,
I’ve heard everify is a joke. Have you heard whether it is a capable tool? Also, what industry are you in?
E-Verify is 96% accurate. My Union Brothers are going to have E-Verify in our Contract this November. http://www.numbersUSA.com another Great Source for Information. Economist’s New Study: Immigration Is A Factor In Jobless Recovery
By Roy Beck, Monday, July 26, 2010, 10:39 AM EDT – posted on NumbersUSA
One of the key factors cited by Northwestern University Economist Robert J. Gordon for why our economic recovery isn’t lowering the unemployment rate is the competition from immigrant workers. His new study is being referenced in the weekly column by Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson. But no sign yet that political leaders in Washington might try to help unemployed Americans by reducing immigrant labor competition.
Samuelson notes that corporations are sitting on vast piles of money but aren’t investing the money in ways to put 25 million U-6 unemployed Americans back to work. He suggests that the biggest reason is that corporate executives draw a much larger percentage of their compensation through stock options than through direct pay, relative to the past.
But he further describes the results of Prof. Gordon’s new study:
“Gordon cites weaker unions and more competition from both imports and immigrants as subverting workers’ bargaining power.
The United States currently has about 40 million foreign born living here. That is a huge amount of imported job competition.
And your U.S. Congress has insisted during two years of jobs depression that the federal government continued to import 75,000 permanent working-age immigrants EVERY MONTH.
The 40 million includes 8 million illegal workers which the Obama Administration has made clear it will fight in almost any court to ensure that they keep their jobs.
All of these facts, according to Gordon and Samuelson, add to the conditions that make it unlikely that the 25 million Americans who can’t find a full-time job will be successful any time soon.
ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA
NumbersUSA’s blogs are copyrighted and may be republished or reposted only if they are copied in their entirety, including this paragraph, and provide proper credit to NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA bears no responsibility for where our blogs may be republished or reposted
To all the frustrated union workers who rail against “illegal immigrants”, I try to understand your feelings and frustration but we need to remember that these are human beings. Their only crime is coming here without going through all the loops that many of them are not even aware exist. Some years ago American employers encouraged people from south of the border and other lands to come here and helped smuggle people in to the USA. We need to fix this mess and there is plenty of blame in all sorts of places.
Hooray for those Brothers and Sisters wise and smart enough to speak out against illegal immigration. The question remains, “Who got control of the labor movement to be so confident as to believe that Americans will buy this amnesty baloney?”
My daughter, who lost her $60+ a year job more than a year ago tells me that e-verify is the only, the absolute only, way to go. She says it is not difficult to accomplish and protects American jobs as no other single activity has ever been able to do. Of course, it has some flaws and mistakes will be made, but for the unions not to be behind it makes me wonder who is behind union leadership?
It’s not the little guy struggling for a decent wage and a full 40-hour week which she no longer enjoys. And, oh, by the way, she doesn’t have health insurance and is not certain that she will have as a part-time worker, but her son is covered by Medicaid and just recently had more than $10,000 worth of emergency dental work to save his teeth. Pretty darned steep for a seven-year-old, wouldn’t you say? But thanks to former union activities she had been able to enroll him in Medicaid when he had some health problems and school officials helped this single mom.
(Incidentally, where, o’ where, are these absentee fathers? They are never arrested for abandoning a child, but let a mother do that and instead of struggling alone trying to make the house payment and put food on the table, if there were a table to sit down to, she’d be struggling alone in jail with daddy blowing his weekly wages on a beer bust and refusing to recognize his share of the obligation of making a child. From eons back, we have allowed men to “improve” the racial strain of a conquered country and to promise unsuspecting and designing women with promises of raising their lot in life in exchange for sexual favors and if a child just happens to be born as a result, no problem. That child is a victim of “friendly fire.”
It is outrageous that any official of the UFCW would be in favor of illegal immigration since that is what has driven wages down from about $19/hr to about $9/hr. I remember the P-9 strike which the leaders of that union fought against their own members to drive DOWN their wages. That is what CIR means and the last people who should talk about it are the traitors of that union!
I also remember when ICE raided the Swift pland in Denver and took out almost 200 illegals. The day after that happened the company put out an ad for more workers and RAISED the wages by $3/hr. Not only did the existing workers get a pay raise, but the company had people lined up around the block with American workers waiting to apply for those jobs! THAT was a UNION shop TOO! So what did the UFWC do?
They protested the raid! It is time for those workers to get rid of that union and vote in an independent one since the UFWC could not get a decent wages raise,yet ICE DID get one for them. Under CIR, those union workers would have remained at an even LOWER wage scale.
The AFL-CIO needs to return to its traditional position of fighting AGAINST immigration as they did for ALL of their history.
All I know is that Mr. Trumka seems to be more involved in getting illegal immigrants their rights here than he is getting E.F.C.A. passed. Doesn’t he know that if he keeps pushing this the dems will be booted out and E.F.C.A. will be a thing of the past.
Randyjet you are on target about the U.F.C.W. and it sickens me to death how they put their members jobs on the line by doing their best to take care of those who are not citizens of this country and with the possiblity of those non-citizens crossing a picket line and hijacking any union persons job.
i wonder if it is a global plan to bring these illegal immigrants in to get cheap labor and the union leaders,business community and Wall St. make out like bandits. It appears that it will be in cycles.
Go to Mexico for cheap labor,then go to China,then to India,then back to the U.S.A and round up another 12 million illegals to drive to labor costs. Cycle starts again and again and again.
We will never advance work place rights and ourselves with the leaders we have today.
atcman,Are you living under a rock google a few places and find out for yourself what it has cost you.I didn’t mean millions of constuction workers i meant millions of dollars not paid to them.These people are SCABS in every since of the word and they do not care anything at all about UNIONS they don’t come here to become UNION MEMBERS or CITIZENS.They come here thinking they can take back a country that is no longer theirs.This is an invasion they are stealing our country and you and the AFL-CIO are helping them do it.
Dr, Google it? Really? If you do you find most studies, certainly not all, say illegal immigration has very little effect on wages on a national basis. Do they have an effect on local industries and wages, absolutely in my opinion. I’m looking for facts on the issue, not hyperbole such as “halved wages for everyone.” Your comment “they do not care anything at all about unions” is more hyperbole. It is hard to care about a union when the reason you have been hired is because employers know you will be docile because you don’t want to get deported. This is way to important an issue to be yelling silly things, especially “they can take back a country that is no longer theirs.” Like these people care or know anything about geopolitics.
The problem is, no one knows what ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ actually means. Is it like the 1986 reform?
Both sides of the immigration issue and those in-between are ready to let the employers off the hook for past actions (instant amnesty), before anything else is even started.
We will then provide legalization for the undocumented immigrant workers. This only seems fair because the employers, who profited most, just got instant amnesty.
Then we can actually start the process of “fixing” the “broken system”, which may or may not ever be done, if the 1986 immigration reform bill is the template.
Will we then allow a flood of new undocumented immigrant workers in or will we establish a flood of new legal immigrant workers that employers will exploit and use against American workers.
I have doubts the AFL-CIO will have the skills to organize the newly legalized immigrant workers or the political expertise to get congress and the federal government to enforce legislation that stops the exploitation and over-use of cheap immigrant labor by employers.
What I see at the end of the “comprehensive immigration reform” trail is a clean slate for employers of undocumented workers, undocumented workers and politicians with the American worker in the same situation as before, basically. We just rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak.
‘I’ve heard everify is a joke. Have you heard whether it is a capable tool?’
It is a very effective tool when used across the board. Our problem is that an illegal alien who fails verification can simply go to another employer who doesn’t use E-Verify. We have to make it universal. I’ve actually had a person who uses E-Verify in his job (a construction company in CA) demonstrate to me how it works.
Earlier this month I had an op-ed in the ‘Roanoke Times’ regarding employment related identity theft (link below). In it I outline what we need to do to rein it in. I point out that E-Verify will not work if someone has stolen your entire ID, that is name, SSN, birth date, etc. One remedy for this is no-match letters. The AFL-CIO in conjunction with that well-known employee-rights organization the National Chamber of Commerce sued DHS to stop no-match letters.
Talk about strange bed-fellows!
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/252250
Here ya go atcman
Immigration Issue Centers : Labor & Economics
Lower Wages for American Workers
High-immigration cheerleaders claim that we need immigration for our economy. But they ignore the detrimental effect that importing workers has on American workers, particularly low-skilled natives. In a supply and demand economy like ours, the more there is of something, the less value it has. By artificially inflating the number of workers in our country, immigration lowers the value of workers, and wages are depressed. As George Washington University economics professor Robert Dunn notes, “I know business people who tell me they’re not interested in hiring Americans because the people who come from outside are cheaper. But … if there’s an unlimited supply of labor facing this country from outside, from the South or wherever, at five dollars an hour, I don’t care how fast this economy grows, the wage rate for such people is going to be five dollars an hour!”1
The Skill Levels of Most Immigrants Are Low.
Thanks to immigration laws that favor relatives instead of skilled workers, most of the immigrants being admitted are low-skilled. Out of all the adult immigrants admitted in 2000, 69 percent had no reported profession, occupation, or job at all.2 The average adult immigrant has only a ninth-grade education; more than a third of immigrants over 25 are not high school graduates.3
Claims That We Need Low-Skilled Workers Are False.
Some employers claim that they need to import low-skilled workers to compete in the world market, where wages are very low. But those employers have simply become dependent on cheap foreign labor to the detriment of American workers: “Network recruitment [of immigrants] not only excludes American workers from certain jobs; it also builds a dependency relationship between U.S. employers and Mexican sources that requires a constant infusion of new workers,” says economist Philip Martin.4 Such a strategy for our economy is doomed to failure anyway: “The low-wage strategy may work in the short run, but in the long run it’s a loser. In the long run, we are not going to win a wage-cutting contest with the Third World,” notes economist Vernon Briggs.5
Besides, the United States already has plenty of low-skilled native workers: “No technologically advanced industrial nation that has 27 million illiterate adults … need have any fear about a shortage of unskilled workers in its foreseeable future.”6
The effects are most pronounced in the cities where immigrants go. High immigration cities have twice as much unemployment as low immigration cities.7 Because too much immigration keeps wages low, wage increases in low-immigration cities have been 48 percent higher than in high-immigration cities.8 Thus, immigration contributes to the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in this country9 and the shrinking of the middle class.10 But the damage is not confined to high-immigration locales. The harm is carried to other cities when poor Americans whose wages have been depressed or who have been displaced from their jobs by immigration move to low-immigration areas in search of greener pastures.11
Wages Are Lowered By Competition From Immigrants.
The effect of immigration on those low-skilled Americans is profound, and the government knows it: “Undoubtedly access to lower-wage foreign workers has a depressing effect [on wages],” says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.12 Research suggests that between 40 and 50 percent of wage-loss among low-skilled Americans is due to the immigration of low-skilled workers.13 Some native workers lose not just wages but their jobs through immigrant competition. An estimated 1,880,000 American workers are displaced from their jobs every year by immigration; the cost for providing welfare and assistance to these Americans is over $15 billion a year.14
This wage depressing effect of illegal immigrant workers was documented in 2008 by researchers working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
“…the authors find that average wages among documented [legal] workers are lower in industries that employ undocumented [illegal] workers and that a greater share of undocumented workers in those industries further lowers wages.”15
Large-Scale Immigration of Low-Skilled Workers Must Be Stopped.
In short, the mass importation of low-skilled workers through immigration damages the job market for Americans, depresses wages for low-skilled natives, and costs the taxpayer billions a year-all for the benefit of businesses that have become dependent on cheap, foreign labor. An immigration system that admits too many people, without regard to their skill levels or impact on the labor force, is to blame. We must reform the immigration laws to lower the level of annual immigration and to ensure that those immigrants who are admitted complement, not compete, with our native labor force.
Economics Professor Robert Dunn, George Washington University, BorderLine, May 29, 1996.
INS Statistics Division.
U.S. Census Bureau, 1995.
“Network Recruitment and Labor Displacement,” Immigration 2000, Philip Martin, 1992.
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, New Perspectives Quarterly, Volume 7, No. 4, Fall 1990.
“Immigration Policy and Work Force Preparedness,” Vernon Briggs, ILR Report, Fall 1990.
A Tale of Ten Cities, Scipio Garling and Leon Bouvier, 1995.
“Linked Migration Systems: Immigration and Internal Labor Flows in the United States,” Economic Geography, July 1992, Richard Wright.
Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisors, U.S. GPO, 1994.
What is the Relationship Between Income Inequality and Immigration? John Martin, October 1996.
Immigration and Internal Migration, William Frey, Population Studies Center, University of Mich 1994.
U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, November 1995.
National Academy of Sciences estimates that approximately 44 percent of wage depression among low-skilled Americans during 1980-1994 was due to immigration.
The Net Costs of Immigration, Donald Huddle, Rice University, October 1996.
Julie Hotchkiss & Myriam Quispe-Agnoli, “The Labor Market Experience and Impact of Undocumented Workers,” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (Working Paper 2008-7c), June 2008.
Updated 8/08
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