Platform for the Inclusion and Protection of Immigrant Workers
Inclusive Roadmap to Citizenship. Immigration reform must include legalization for the most vulnerable: low-wage immigrant workers and families. It must promote civic participation and community and labor organizing rather than suppressing it. It must ensure that immigrants can access and contribute to the safety net instead of being locked out of it. Immigration reform must ensure that immigrant workers and families can participate and contribute to a fair economy, rather than be segregated at the bottom of an economy that is unjust. Our priorities include:
- A roadmap to citizenship for the full 11 million undocumented immigrants.
- Minimization of exits, detours, roadblocks and obstacles to full legalization, such as work requirements, fines and high fees.
- The inclusion of worker organizations as vehicles for the implementation of the legalization and citizenship program.
- Social safety net protections for immigrants during the legalization process.
An End to Cruel Immigration Enforcement. Immigration reform must include a complete reform of our country’s cruel, irrational, and dehumanizing immigration enforcement system. Current U.S. immigration policy and enforcement practices result in employer manipulation and abuse, leaving immigrants and American-born workers to suffer the consequences. We believe that any reform should include access to justice and due process, civil, labor and employment rights, and public safety. Reform must stop deportations that tear apart families. And it must end dangerous programs that intertwine local law enforcement with ICE. Our priorities include:
- Immediate suspension of immigration arrests, deportations and detentions.
- An end to collaborations between police, ICE, and labor enforcement.
- Termination of the Secure Communities Program.
- Protections for workers who expose civil rights violations related to immigration enforcement.
Protection of Civil, Labor, and Human Rights. Immigration reform must protect workers from retaliation for exercising their labor rights. New legislation should strengthen rights of workers, families and communities, and should guard against the erosion of the bedrock rights that we cherish in our country, such as access to justice and due process. Employers must not be able to use enforcement or employer sanctions to block workers’ rights to organize and enforce workplace standards. Our priorities include:
- Protections against retaliation for workers who are defending civil, labor, and human rights, and for their families. These protections must include long-term status, work authorization, and a road to citizenship.
- Protection of workers’ rights during employer compliance activities.
- Protection against workplace discrimination.
- Opposition to any mandatory expansion of E-Verify, the error-ridden electronic verification system which has repeatedly been used as a tool to destroy union organizing campaigns.
- An end to immigration enforcement and ICE intervention in workplaces with ongoing labor or employment disputes, in order to ensure that all workers can fully exercise their labor, employment, and civil rights without fear of adverse immigration consequences.
- Full transparency of the Department of Homeland Security.
- Creation of a “labor law enforcement fund” to help ensure that industries that employ significant numbers of immigrant workers comply with labor laws including the Department of Labor, EEOC, and National Labor Relations Board.
Future Flow: Inclusion and Protections for Future Immigrants. Immigration reform must ensure inclusion and protections for future immigrants. Future flow is complex with serious implications for immigrant workers and their families as well as U.S. workers who work alongside them in the same sectors. These protections must include the right to organize, to join as members of workers’ centers and unions, and to work together with U.S. workers in their sectors to ensure dignified workplace standards. Reform must recognize that families belong together and must create channels for families to be reunited. Our priorities include:
- The right of temporary workers to change employers for any reason—including labor or civil rights disputes—and to remain in the U.S. and continue to work.
- Involvement of workers centers in the process of identifying local workforce availability.
- Protection for temporary workers against employer retaliation, and the right to organize and collectively bargain. This includes preferences and protections against retaliation for returning workers in consecutive years.
- The establishment of wages and workplace rules for temporary workers that will protect both temporary workers and the U.S. labor market
- An increase in the enforcement of labor laws to ensure that industries that use temporary worker programs protect labor standards for all workers
- A humane path to citizenship for temporary workers and their families.
- Freedom from debt; no worker should have to become indentured to come to work in the U.S.
- Prioritization of family unification in all future programs and for all families, and an end to the current backlog for family reunification.
