NILC Statement on Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Comprehensive Immigration Reform Should Strengthen the Rights of Immigrant Workers

Both the Senate and the House will reportedly introduce comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) proposals in the coming weeks. To date, the push for “enforcement” measures in CIR has focused solely on immigration enforcement. NILC believes this focus is fundamentally flawed. We believe that enforcement must include strong enforcement of labor and employment law, which also includes ensuring that all workers have equal labor rights. To this end, NILC offers a set of priorities for immigrant workers in CIR which we hope will help change the nature of the debate about enforcement.

Without labor law enforcement, employers have an economic incentive to seek out and exploit immigrant workers whom they believe will be reluctant to hold them accountable for labor law violations. Bad-apple employers then threaten undocumented workers with deportation if they do indeed complain about deplorable working conditions. NILC’s labor priorities seek to address the ways in which current immigration law undermines all workers’ rights. According to a recent report by the Drum Major Institute, “[w]hen immigrants lack rights in the workplace, labor standards are driven down and all working people have less opportunity to enter or remain part of the middle class.” See Principles for an Immigration Policy to Strengthen & Expand the American Middle Class at http://drummajorinstitute.org/immigration/).

NILC’s priorities, Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Legislative Priorities for Immigrant Workers, reflect the collective thinking of a number of immigration organizations and labor unions. We hope that the document will be useful to you as you develop your own set of priorities for CIR. Because these priorities will help improve conditions for all workers, we also hope that this document will be useful in forming alliances with traditional worker advocates and labor unions.

These priorities are a work in progress. We welcome your suggestions on how they can be improved, and would like to hear if you will use them in developing your own agenda.

Please contact Tyler Moran at moran@nilc.org if you have any questions.

Tyler Moran
Employment Policy Director
National Immigration Law Center

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