Though the debates over healthcare and the economy are dominating Capitol Hill, immigrant rights activists are fighting to keep the question of immigration reform alive. Business interests, meanwhile, are trying to steer the discussion in their direction.
An Independent Task Force of the Council on Foreign Relations has published a report outlining recommendations for immigration reform. Drawing on other proposals floated by politicians over the years, the central aim is to regulate the flow of immigrant labor in order to serve U.S. economic interests.
The Task Force—which includes former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; several prominent attorneys; Eliseo Medina, international executive vice president of SEIU; and Raul H. Yzaguirre, former head of the National Council of La Raza — envisions a “grand bargain.”
Emphasizing immigration as a vehicle for economic development, the report calls for a policy that “enhances U.S. competitiveness” and “an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system.”
The proposed reforms are designed to ensure a durable and docile workforce that is tethered to fluctuating demands for low-wage labor and firmly under the government’s grasp. Policies would be continually tweaked by a “standing commission” of experts, who would advise Washington on calibrating the flow of legal immigration according to economic needs.
The model stems from an earlier report by the centrist Migration Policy Institute, (PDF link) that proposed creating a commission of demographic and economic experts to analyze immigration patterns and “[p]rovide annual recommendations for adjustments to employment-based immigration levels that would take effect unless, within a specified timeframe, Congress voted to change them.”
The Institute compares the system to the consultation process that the government has used when devising (often controversial) admission policies for refugees.
The AFL-CIO and Change to Win have both endorsed the standing commission framework. But should labor advocates be worried about letting an appointed body run a market-driven immigration system, which in effect ties workers legally and economically to employers?
In an interview with Labor Notes, David Bacon sees the approach as a glorified guest worker program and part of the private sector’s long-term political strategy:
Employers have been proposing guest worker programs since going back a long way.
But we now have 10 percent unemployment. So proposals for allowing employers to recruit 400,000 or 500,000 workers a year under work visas and bring them to the U.S. are not politically realistic. Congress is not going to pass them.
So what employers have proposed is to kick the ball down the road: if in the future employers want to claim there are labor shortages, they can go to a commission and if the commission agrees, then the commission will allow them to bring people in on temporary work visas.
By lining up with employers on the question of employment-driven immigration policy, Bacon warns, major unions are pursuing “political realism” at the expense of civil and social rights:
[W]e have to fight for what we really want, not for what we think employers are going to give us. When we go into contract bargaining, we don’t start by offering employers what we think they are likely to agree to. We fight for what we need.
That’s exactly the same thing as what’s going on here — if we want immigration reform based on human rights.
The history of guest-worker policies, from the Bracero system of the 1940s to the current seasonal farmwork program, attests to how a two-tier workforce could codify exploitation and wage slavery (PDF link).
An independent advisory body might purport to incorporate both community and business perspectives, but since current immigration policy is dictated by employers’ interests, what would keep a “bipartisan” commission from being co-opted by the same agenda?
As labor advocates work toward a politically viable reform platform, they’ll have to ask themselves what a standing commission would really stand for: the dollar value of cheap labor, or the dignity of immigrant workers and communities.
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Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
