Building
Immigrant Working People Power
Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President
A year ago President Obama announced a series of executive actions on immigration. Today is a fitting time
to honor those who compelled him to act.
Around the country,
courageous working people demanded an end to the deportation regime that was
tearing communities, families and workplaces apart.
They shut down detention
centers, turned around buses, and spoke truth to power — all at great personal
risk.
They banded together to prevent the deportation of community members and
loved ones who were in removal proceedings, and they won many cases.
These
brave actions and the determined clamor for #Not1More deportation led to the
announcement of the historic deferred action program that will allow millions
of parents to live and work without fear.
They
had important discussions about due process and constitutional protections.
Over time, more than 300 jurisdictions enacted ordinances declaring that they
would focus their resources on effective community policing and place
reasonable limits on their cooperation with the U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE).
This groundswell thoroughly discredited the Secure
Communities program, a federally run program launched in 2008, and resulted in
its termination in 2014.
These examples inspire us,
and they also show us the playbook for how you make change in the nation’s
capital— you force it from the ground up. Today as we confront legal and
legislative obstruction and the rebranding of failed enforcement policies, the
question we should all be asking is what do we push for next?
For the labor movement,
the answer is simple. We know that every worker in our country has rights, and
we want each worker to be able to exercise those rights, regardless of
immigration status.
While this may sound like a
simple idea, we are a long way from that reality now. The sad truth is that
employers routinely hire undocumented workers with a wink and a nod and then
fire them when they seek to organize a union or complain about unpaid wages or
unsafe working conditions.
And when new immigrants muster the courage to stand
in a picket line, join a boycott, or negotiate for fair compensation, employers
are still able to retaliate in ways that can set deportation proceedings in
motion.
This is just not right;
it’s an #Injury2All and the wages and
standards for all working people in our country suffer as a result of these
efforts to keep immigrant workers scared and silent. Here in Washington, we
have been talking for years to Congress and the administration about the need to
fix these problems, but we have yet to see the concrete changes that our
nation’s workers so urgently need.
So we see this anniversary
as an important opportunity to sound a new call to action. We intend to take
our demands for basic worker protections to every community and every
immigration office in the country.
Our unions and allies will raise workers’
cases from many sectors of our economy and make clear that we cannot reasonably
expect to end wage theft and exploitation without protecting those workers with
the courage to take a stand.
From Chicago to Los Angeles to Austin and everywhere in between, our
movement reaffirms what we have long understood, that an injury to one worker
is an injury to all.
Our federal agencies have the discretion to provide
concrete protections to workers who exercise their most fundamental rights, but
it is up to us to make them act.
Polite conversations in
Washington aren’t working. These changes will only come if we demand them, from
the ground up. Working people are ready for this fight, and it will be coming
soon to a community near you.
We will keep pushing
forward to demand what is just. Please join us.
