This is great news.
New York Times - February 17, 2000
Labor Urges Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants By STEVEN GREENHOUSE N EW ORLEANS, Feb. 16 -- Adopting a sharp change in policy, the American labor movement today called for blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants and an end to most sanctions against employers who hire them.
In decades past, labor unions often saw immigrant workers as the enemy, accusing them of depressing wages and breaking strikes. But the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations adopted a more sympathetic approach today, contending that too often the nation's immigration rules had enabled employers to exploit illegal immigrants.
The new policy comes as business groups are pushing for similar legislative changes to help industry cope with a shortage of workers.
Immigrants comprise an ever-larger part of the nation's work force, and labor leaders are stepping up efforts to unionize hundreds of thousands of immigrants who work in farms, hotels, construction, meat packing and many other industries. Labor leaders complain that unscrupulous employers often fight off unionization drives by threatening to fire employees who are illegal immigrants and support unions, and by calling immigration officials to deport them.
"The present system doesn't work and is used as a weapon against workers," said John Wilhelm, chairman of the labor federation's Committee on Immigration Policy and president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union. "The only reason a lot of employers want to hire a large number of illegal aliens is so they can exploit them."
Labor leaders said they hoped their new policy would help persuade Congress to pass an amnesty law that would enable immigrant workers to stand up for their rights. "I think the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s decision is going to be a shot heard round Washington," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrants' advocacy group. "You have a variety of employer groups saying, 'We need more immigrant workers and we want our workers to be legal,' and you have the A.F.L.-C.I.O. saying, 'We want more immigrant workers to be legal and we're willing to talk to employers about their legitimate needs.' You have the makings of a business-labor compact that could draw new immigration policies for the next decade."
The labor federation's resolution calls for blanket amnesty for the estimated six million illegal immigrants in the United States. At the same time the federation, which is holding its annual winter meeting here, called on the federal government to maintain efforts to keep illegal immigrants out of the country.
Just 15 years ago, the federation's support helped in passing legislation creating sanctions for employers who hire illegal immigrants. At the time, unions said such sanctions were needed to keep illegal immigrants from flooding the labor market and undermining union wages.
But union officials said today that a new policy was needed because employer sanctions had failed to stem the tide of immigration and because immigrants represented such a large part of the work force in dozens of industries.
"It's a very dramatic change in policy that follows a very dramatic change in our world," Mr. Wilhelm said.
Many immigrants have had an ambivalent attitude toward the labor movement because some unions sought to keep out immigrant workers and because of labor's past support of employer sanctions. But union officials view the new policy as a way to make it easier to unionize businesses that employ illegal immigrants by making it harder for employers to intimidate them.
"We, the labor movement, have to put ourselves in a leadership position in immigrant rights," said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers. "This is a way to help low-wage immigrant workers."
The federation's resolution calls for tougher sanctions against any company that uses advertisements or recruiters in other countries to encourage illegal immigrants to come to the United States to work for them. In support of this measure, the United Food and Commercial Workers distributed copies of a want ad, placed in a newspaper in Juarez, Mexico, on behalf of a chicken-processing plant in Tennessee.
Randy Johnson, vice president of labor policy for the United States Chamber of Commerce, welcomed labor's new policy. "It's certainly a departure from organized labor's traditional position, which was an increased number of immigrant workers is bad for domestic workers," he said. "I think this is an area where the business community and organized labor can work together."
But some advocacy groups criticized labor's change on immigration. Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has taken a hard line against increased immigration, maintained that the call for amnesty, coming after the amnesty granted in 1986, would inevitably encourage more illegal immigration. "These pronouncements send signals around the world that this country should continue to be flooded with illegal workers," Mr. Stein said.
The labor federation opposed proposals made by some business groups to expand guest worker programs in which tens of thousands of foreigners are allowed into the United States temporarily to work. Union officials said that many guest workers had been exploited and that the best way to deal with any shortage of workers would be to expand job-training programs.