Our vision of reform includes immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens working shoulder to shoulder to achieve better wages, working conditions, and labor protections. That’s our vision for a stronger America -- for families, for workers, for businesses, and for security.
For America’s Families:
The family is the basic unit of our society, and immigrants who have the support of strong families are more likely to contribute to society, pay taxes, and start businesses that create jobs. But our broken immigration system divides families and keeps loved ones apart for years and even decades, which discourages them from following the rules and working within the system.
It doesn’t make sense to spend billions of dollars rounding people up, breaking up families, shutting down businesses, and deporting people who are working, learning English, and putting down roots here. For immigrants who don’t have legal status, we should require them to come out of the shadows and register, pay taxes, and start working toward becoming Americans, while keeping their families together.
For America’s Workers:
Reforming immigration will help protect all workers from exploitation and unfair competition. Currently, millions of workers -- one in twenty in the U.S. workforce -- are vulnerable to employers who seek unfair advantage over their competitors by not paying workers minimum wage or by ignoring labor rights protected by law. Bringing undocumented workers into the system will allow them to stand up for their rights and to unionize. When they are on equal footing with other workers, unscrupulous employers will not easily be able to pit one group of workers against another, driving down wages for all Americans.
America should not settle for a downwardly spiraling competition for lower wage jobs. America needs more jobs, more rights for workers, and better wages, not more laws to keep workers out or keep workers down.
Reforming immigration is an important part of fixing the ailing economy. The federal government has an obligation to reform immigration for all American workers.
For America’s Economy:
Today, almost every American company needs smart planning, to navigate through hard times and be ready for growth when the economy recovers. Unfortunately, for too many American businesses, the unreliable and obsolete immigration system makes planning for the future more difficult.
Industries like agriculture that require a large workforce ready, willing, and able to work long and physically demanding days have been unable to plan their business strategies around a stable workforce. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, such sectors have relied on immigrant workers to do those jobs. The hospitality, restaurant, business services, and manufacturing sectors face similar problems.
One of the challenges American businesses face today is the aging American workforce, the rapid retirement of the large Baby Boomer generation. To maintain a balanced and a stable workforce, American businesses must find younger workers, especially in manual labor jobs. With more and more US citizen youth earning high school and college degrees, the trend is making the prospects of adequately filling jobs in certain sectors extremely difficult, even in this tough economy.
Businesses across many industries—agriculture, hospitality, restaurant, business services, manufacturing, and others—want a stable workforce. They want their current immigrant workers to be authorized and legal to help their businesses to succeed.
For America’s Security:
The immigration system we have today makes little sense in terms of America’s security. With few legal options to come in through the system, many seek ways to go around it. The broken system has spawned a thriving market for smugglers and has generated chaos on the border. A seemingly random enforcement regime targets ordinary immigrant workers and families, diverting resources away from protecting against genuine threats. Millions of immigrants are unknown to the government. Unscrupulous...