SEIU Principles for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

SEIU believes in a society that values the contributions of aspiring citizens and recognizes the integral role that new Americans play in our past, present and future. With voters demanding that our broken immigration system be fixed, the time has arrived for President Obama and Congress to enact Common-Sense Immigration Reform.

SEIU calls on Congress to pass in 2013 practical comprehensive immigration reform that comports with our national values; provides a clear roadmap to citizenship for hard-working, taxpaying immigrants; builds the strength and unity of working people; keeps families together; and guarantees the same rights, obligations, and basic fairness for all workers, no matter where they come from. Common-sense immigration reform must include:

Earned Legalization with a Roadmap to Citizenship

A realistic and expeditious mechanism whereby aspiring citizens in America can get right with the law and earn a clear and direct path to citizenship. With 11 million aspiring Americans willing to fully contribute to our nation and economy, it is in our country's best interest to secure a roadmap to citizenship without unreasonable barriers.

Protecting All Working Families

A new immigration system must allow for future workers to come to the U.S. in a safe, legal and orderly manner. Any new worker visa programs must provide for strict compliance with U.S. labor standards; portability of visas; and the ability for workers to petition for permanent status. Our economy and our country as a whole are stronger when all American and future workers are protected from discrimination and exploitation.

America's Future Immigration

A 21st century immigration system must address the backlog of the current visa system while safeguarding fair and reasonable measures to strengthen respect for our laws as we secure family unity and seek to invite new immigrants from diverse sectors of the world. It is our moral imperative to construct a workable and humane immigration system that will cultivate contributions from future immigrants and support family unity.

Safe Borders

The most realistic way to secure our borders and restore respect for law is to provide an opportunity for aspiring citizens to legalize their status and to have safe and orderly channels for future immigrants to enter our nation legally. Internal and border law enforcement should be smart and balanced, focusing on preventing criminals, drug cartels and other bad actors from entering the U.S. or engaging in criminal activities.

SEIU looks forward to the president's leadership on comprehensive immigration reform and on Congress to act in 2013. This is the right thing to do for America, our economy, our communities, and for workers and our families.

Our framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Immigration reform is a component of a shared prosperity agenda that focuses on improving productivity and quality; limiting wage competition; strengthening labor standards, especially the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively; and providing social safety nets and high quality lifelong education and training for workers and their families.

To achieve this goal, immigration reform must fully protect U. S. workers, reduce the exploitation of immigrant workers, and reduce the employers' incentive to hire undocumented workers rather than U.S. workers. The most effective way to do that is for all workers--immigrant and native-born--to have full and complete access to the protection of labor, health and safety and other laws. Comprehensive immigration reform must complement a strong, well resourced and effective labor standards enforcement initiative that prioritizes workers' rights and workplace protections. This approach will ensure that immigration does not depress wages and working conditions or encourage marginal low-wage industries that depend heavily on substandard wages, benefits, and working conditions.

This approach to immigration reform has five major interconnected pieces: (1) an independent commission to assess and manage future flows, based on labor market shortages that are determined on the basis of actual need; (2) a secure and effective worker authorization mechanism; (3) rational operational control of the border; (4) adjustment of status for the current undocumented population; and (5) improvement, not expansion, of temporary worker programs, limited to temporary or seasonal, not permanent, jobs.

Family reunification is an important goal of immigration policy and it is the national interest for it to remain that way. First, families strongly influence individual and national welfare. Families have historically facilitated the assimilation of immigrants into American life. Second, the failure to allow family reunification creates strong pressures for unauthorized immigration, as happened with IRCA's amnesty provisions. Third, families are the most basic learning institutions, teaching children values as well as skills to succeed in school, society, and at work. Finally, families are important economic units that provide valuable sources of entrepreneurship, job training, support for members who are unemployed and information and networking for better labor market information.

The long term solution to uncontrolled immigration is to stop promoting failed globalization policies and encourage just and humane economic integration, which will eliminate the enormous social and economic inequalities at both national and international levels. U.S. immigration policy should consider the effects of immigration reforms on immigrant source countries, especially Mexico. It is in our national interest for Mexico to be a prosperous and democratic country able to provide good jobs for most of its adult population, thereby ameliorating strong pressures for emigration.

Much of the emigration from Mexico in recent years resulted from the disruption caused by NAFTA, which displaced millions of Mexicans from subsistence agriculture and enterprises that could not compete in a global market. Thus, an essential component of the long term solution is a fair trade and globalization model that uplifts all workers, promotes the creation of free trade unions around the world, ensures the enforcement of labor rights, and guarantees all workers core labor protections.

1. Future Flow

One of the great failures of our current employment-based immigration system is that the level of legal work-based immigration is set arbitrarily by Congress as a product of political compromise --without regard to real labor market needs--and it is rarely updated to reflect changing circumstances or conditions. This failure has allowed unscrupulous employers to manipulate the system to the detriment of workers and reputable employers alike. The system for allocating employment visas--both temporary and permanent--should be depoliticized and placed in the hands of an independent commission that can assess labor market needs on an ongoing basis and--based on a methodology approved by Congress-determine the number of foreign workers to be admitted for employment purposes, based on labor market needs. In designing the new system, and establishing the methodology to be used for assessing labor shortages, the Commission will be required to examine the impact of immigration on the economy, wages, the workforce and business.

2. Worker authorization mechanism

The current system of regulating the employment of unauthorized workers is defunct, ineffective and has failed to curtail illegal immigration. A secure and effective worker authorization mechanism is one that determines employment authorization accurately while providing maximum protection for workers, contains sufficient due process and privacy protections, and prevents discrimination. The verification process must be taken out of the hands of employers, and the mechanism must rely on secure identification methodology. Employers who fail to properly use the system must face strict liability including significant fines and penalties regardless of the immigration status of their workers.

3. Rational Operational Control of the Border

A new immigration system must include rational control of our borders. Border security is clearly very important, but not sufficient, since 40 to 45 percent of unauthorized immigrants did not cross the border unlawfully, but overstayed visas. Border controls therefore must be supplemented by effective work authorization and other components of this framework. An "enforcement-only" policy will not work. Practical border controls balance border enforcement with the other components of this framework and with the reality that over 30 million valid visitors cross our borders each year. Enforcement therefore should respect the dignity and rights of our visitors, as well as residents in border communities. In addition, enforcement authorities must understand that they need cooperation from communities along the border. Border enforcement is likely to be most effective when it focuses on criminal elements and engages immigrants and border community residents in the enforcement effort. Similarly, border enforcement is most effective when it is left to trained professional border patrol agents and not vigilantes or local law enforcement officials--who require cooperation from immigrants to enforce state and local laws.

4. Adjustment of Status for the Current Undocumented Population

Immigration reform must include adjustment of status for the current undocumented population. Rounding up and deporting the 12 million or more immigrants who are unlawfully present in the U.S. may make for a good sound bite, but it is not a realistic solution. And if these immigrants are not given adequate incentive to "come out of the shadows" to adjust their status, we will continue to have a large pool of unauthorized workers whom employers will continue to exploit in order to drive down wages and other standards, to the detriment of all workers. Having access to a large undocumented workforce has allowed employers to create an underground economy, without the basic protections afforded to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, and where employers often misclassify workers as independent contractors, thus evading payroll taxes, which deprives federal, state, and local governments of additional revenue. An inclusive, practical and swift adjustment of status program will raise labor standards for all workers. The adjustment process must be rational, reasonable and accessible and it must be designed to ensure that it will not encourage future illegal immigration.

5. Improvement, not Expansion, of Temporary Worker Programs

The United States must improve the administration of existing temporary worker programs, but should not adopt a new "indentured" or "guest worker" initiative. Our country has long recognized that it is not good policy for a democracy to admit large numbers of workers with limited civil and employment rights.

Building worker's strength with Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

• As U.S. workers struggle in today's economy, it is clear that we cannot reclaim the American Dream for workers until we eliminate our two tiered labor force and pass comprehensive reforms that build the strength and unity of all working people. As long as unscrupulous employers have the ability to exploit workers because they lack legal status, the current system will continue to drive down wages and breed divisions in workplaces and in our communities.
• The problem is not immigrants; the problem is our broken immigration system. An immigration system that lacks legal channels for worker to fill available jobs is just like a financial market lacking adequate regulation: a catastrophe waiting to happen. Our economy--indeed our society--has grown dependent on the labor of undocumented immigrant workers who are vulnerable to exploitation and live in constant fear of deportation.

• The only way to ensure that every job in this country is filled by a legal permanent resident is to get undocumented immigrants out of the underground economy, into the system and under the rule of law. A united workforce will rise together: building the strength of working people and guaranteeing civil rights and basic fairness for all workers--no matter where they come from.
• It is unacceptable to live in a country where millions of workers are living in shadows, outside of the rule of law. We must require immigrants to get into the system--pass background checks, pay fines, learn English, get on the tax rolls, and become U.S. citizens. This is not amnesty; it is the only smart, practical way to drain the pool of easily exploited labor and stop big business' high profit, low-wage model.

• One clear lesson emerges from the history of working people in America: workers win when unions are inclusive and use their strength to reach out to the unorganized, and unions loose when they do not.
• Immigrants are not a threat to native workers' wages; the problem is our broken immigration laws allow big business, and its low-wage high profit model, to exploit workers who lack legal status. Once we get undocumented workers into the legal system, we can build a united movement of working people, equipped to fight the corporate greed that has driven down wages for all working people in America.
• Our choice is clear. United we stand; divided we fail. It's time to eliminate the second class workforce, unite all working people, and replace our current regime of employer sanctions with vigorous labor and civil rights protections that will raise living standards for all workers.

Enforcement without reform has been tried for decades with dismal results. Instead of solving problems, it only succeeds in marginalizing immigrant communities and degrading the quality of life for the rest of us.

• At a time of skyrocketing U.S. deficit and while the Department of Homeland Security is more stretched than ever, we are throwing away billions of taxpayer dollars on border and workplace enforcement policies that have failed again and again.
• Estimated to cost well over $200 billion, it is neither desirable nor feasible to deport 12 million people living and working in our communities. These costly policies just breed fear and misery, devastate local communities and distract us from the larger goal of finding a comprehensive and practical solution to immigration reform.
• Throwing More Money at Virtual Border Fence is like Throwing Money in the Trash. Since 1986, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars militarizing the U.S. Mexico border, but our success at apprehensions has gone down.

• Efforts to verify workers' status in the workplace--such as E-verify--will lead to unfair firings, racial profiling, and enormous discrimination of workers, regardless of their lawful status. It will also push workers further into the underground economy, eroding wages for all workers.
• The Social Security Administration's own internal reports suggest that through E-Verify as many as 3.6 million workers a year will be misidentified as not authorized for employment--which could lead to mass layoffs and confusion for U.S. workers at a time when they are already struggling to stay afloat.
• Worksite verification without comprehensive reform will push undocumented immigrants out of the legitimate taxed economy and into the underground cash economy. It will harm those employers that play by the rules and benefit abusive employers who continue to push down wages and working conditions for all workers.
• SEIU encourages Congressional leaders to fix today's flawed worksite enforcement models by scrubbing the database, offering real protections for workers who face discrimination, and prioritizing crack downs on employers who break labor laws. Done alongside comprehensive reforms, an effective employment verification system will ensure that every worker is in the system, paying taxes, and protected by equal labor rights.

• Crude attempts to shut down our border and round up anyone who looks a certain way do not begin to solve our broken immigration system. These policies are driven by nativism, hate, and fear--not the values of pragmatism, fairness, and inclusion that have made America strong.
• Instead of ripping apart families and destroying local economies, our government should focus on fixing the root causes of our broken immigration system. Our immigration problems will not go away until we find a fair and practical way to bring undocumented workers out of the shadows, and create legal channels for much-needed immigrant workers to come here in the future. The alternative - punitive attacks, family destruction, and harassment without hope - is shameful and fundamentally un-American.
• Americans are fair, Americans believe in order, and Americans are pragmatic--we need to bring these values to the table while we develop a comprehensive strategy to fixing our broken immigration system. It's time to replace angry political bickering with real solutions. Immigrants work hard, pay taxes, sacrifice for their families, want to learn English, and believe in the American Dream.