Immigrants and refugees helped to build our nation and our labor movement and are essential to our past, present and future.
Unions advocate on the premise that we can build a welcoming immigration system that helps spur inclusive growth, lift standards in our industries, and close pernicious gaps in income and opportunity.
Real pro-worker immigration reform that centers a broad pathway to citizenship is an essential part of the larger structural change we need to create an economy that respects and protects all working people and supports our fundamental right to organize.
However, escalating and cruel attacks on our communities and immigrant working families are causing immense human suffering, separating families, and increasing fear and exploitation in our workplaces and communities.
The administration is using immigration as a ploy to distract from ongoing policy changes favoring corporations over workers and other direct challenges to our democratic system and core constitutional rights, including our most foundational rights of freedom of speech and association.
Many state legislatures across the country are advancing measures that seek to roll back access to essential services and civic participation for immigrant communities and newly naturalized citizens, including efforts affecting public education, health care and voting rights. These proposals undermine longstanding legal protections and threaten equal access to opportunities that are fundamental to the health, stability and democratic participation of all our communities.
In addition to dramatic escalation of immigration raids and operations, the administration has taken the unprecedented step of activating the military against civilian populations, sending troops into our cities, armed agents into sensitive locations like schools, hospitals and courthouses, and threatening to send troops to polling places. Instead of working to bring down prices and raise wages, the administration is using our tax dollars to attack immigrant workers.
Hundreds of union members, including many lawful permanent residents and even citizens, have been arrested based on the color of their skin, the language that they speak or the work that they do, and detained in deplorable conditions or even deported without due process.
The mass deportation agenda and termination of status and licensure for millions of workers is a job killer, estimated to eliminate 6 million jobs from our economy—with nearly half of those put out of work being U.S. citizens.
An injury to one is an injury to all. Mass detention, deportation and termination of status combined with out-of-control ICE operations create a deeply anti-worker environment, and the labor movement has been fighting back in workplaces and communities around the country.
The need to advance our shared vision for immigration reform that lifts up all workers is more clear now than ever. We will continue to push policymakers at all levels of government to support positions that create a level playing field where all workers have equal and enforceable rights and are able to join together to hold employers accountable and raise standards in our industries. To that end, we demand:
- A pathway to citizenship for all those whose labor and other contributions help our country to prosper. After 35 years of enforcement-only immigration approaches, our nation is in dire need of a course correction. America’s unions renew, with urgency, our call for a broad and swift path to citizenship and will pursue a concerted campaign to secure long-overdue protections for millions of valued members of our workforce, our communities and our unions.
- An end to employer control over workers’ status. Mass deportations and the needless termination of work authorization for millions of workers have caused immense and needless workforce disruptions. Addressing this created crisis through expansion of exploitative temporary work visas would exacerbate the harm by establishing a massive captive workforce highly vulnerable to exploitation. Rather than expanding guestworker programs, Congress must prioritize citizenship and family unity, and any temporary visas must be fundamentally reformed to ensure that all workers in affected industries are aware of and can exercise their full rights, including freedom of association and collective bargaining.
- Enforcement and spending priorities that put people ahead of profits and promote rights rather than repression. The federal budget now invests a shocking 91 times more in immigration enforcement than to enforce our labor laws, creating an environment of impunity for abusive employers. Lawmakers must rein in this out-of-control immigration spending and enact meaningful guardrails to prevent enforcement practices that put the lives, livelihoods and rights of working families at unacceptable risk.
We call on Congress to:
- Rescind funding for the mass deportation agenda and reallocate federal budget resources to fund urgent priorities that create good union jobs and lift working and living standards for working families.
Codify into law protections that prohibit enforcement actions at sensitive locations, including schools, hospitals, places of worship, courthouses, polling stations and demonstrations. - End racial profiling stops, warrantless arrests and other due process violations that stem from enforcement strategies that target people based solely on race, ethnicity, language, accent or type of work.
- Prevent the Department of Homeland Security from forcing local or state agencies to do the work of federal immigration enforcement, and support policies that promote authentic community safety and trust.
- Require federal agents to show their faces and wear body cameras with guardrails preventing surveillance and restrictions on invasion of privacy.
- End child and family detention and prevent any new private detention contracts or repurposing of warehouses or similar structures as massive new detention facilities.
- Investigate the use of force by federal officials and the growing list of deaths that have occurred as a result, including our union brother Alex Pretti, and hold all responsible parties accountable.
To finally win a more just immigration system, we must reject divide-and-rule tactics and continue building unified worker power from the ground up. To that end, we will:
- Broaden and deepen our efforts to equip our movement for readiness, rapid response, and resistance through training and tools to support front-line activists and organizers.
- Build labor movement capacity and structure to lead through crisis in every city and state as we fight back against escalating attacks on our workplaces, communities and rights by federal forces.
- Promote authentic multiracial working-class solidarity through messaging, education and organizing that effectively counters the false narratives that have sown division among workers.
- Strive to ensure that no worker is denied due process or left to navigate our immigration, legal or detention system without support or representation.
- Fight back against voter suppression efforts that use the false narrative of noncitizen voter fraud to advance restrictive policies that would undermine the power of workers’ votes.
- Challenge policies that threaten the rights and livelihoods of union and community members and defend the established legal doctrine that constitutional protections extend to all people in our country, including immigrants. In particular, we will defend in the courts the core principles of birthright citizenship, universal access to public education, freedom of speech and assembly, and protections against warrantless searches.
- Fight for policies at the federal, state and local level that protect all working families and reject efforts to exclude immigrants from workforce participation and accessing vital public benefits.
- Demand that companies and investors oppose overzealous immigration enforcement efforts that harm workers, consumers, business and the economy.
- Leverage our collective power as workers, consumers and community members through organizing, employer engagement and corporate campaigns that disrupt the mass deportation agenda and expose those who profit from it.
- Deepen our collaboration with community allies, including faith leaders who are ready to condemn the escalating government violence and sound a moral call for peace and welcome.
- Continue to elevate and advance our affirmative alternative vision, which would promote citizenship, equality and shared prosperity, and guarantee the right of every worker to speak out, organize, and bargain to lift working and living standards for all.
[SUBMITTED BY THE AFL-CIO EXECUTIVE COUNCIL]