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#  Contact: Esmeralda Aguilar (202) 637-5018

**Remarks by AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard L. Trumka on**

**on Senate Immigration Bill (S. 1348)**

# June 20, 2007

I would like to thank Sen. Bernie Sanders for focusing the attention of
the Senate and our nation on the need to place workers' rights at the
forefront of immigration reform. Although he's only been in the Senate a
few months, Senator Sanders has already made his mark as a fighter for
America's working families. I'm also happy to be joined by my colleagues
Ed Sullivan from the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades unions and
Joe Hansen, President of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

The AFL-CIO has been involved in the struggle for immigrant workers'
rights for many decades. In 2000, we called for a real path to
citizenship for workers already in this country, contributing to our
communities, and we welcomed immigrants, regardless of immigration
status, into the labor movement.

Since then, we have continually supported comprehensive immigration
reform. The current system is unworkable -- it has become a blueprint
for exploitation of all workers, both U.S. and foreign-born. As long as
this broken system persists, ALL workers will suffer because employers
will be able to turn to a ready pool of exploitable workers to drive
down wages, benefits, health and safety protections and other workplace
standards for ALL workers.

While we continue to believe we need comprehensive immigration reform,
it must be done in a way that upholds workers' most basic rights and
removes economic incentives for exploitation.

The immigration bill currently pending in the Senate does neither.

Number one: it is anti-family and anti-worker. It abandons long-standing
U.S. policy favoring the reunification of families by eliminating whole
categories of family preferences.

Number two: muddled by an absurd and mean-spirited "touch back"
provision and unreasonable fines, the bill fails to provide a realistic
path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here, working
hard and contributing to our economy.

Number three, despite numerous independent and government-sponsored
studies documenting the horrific abuses suffered by workers in guest
worker programs, this bill continues to rely on this deeply flawed
model.

Since their inception, guest worker programs have served only to provide
greedy employers with a steady stream of vulnerable, indentured workers
they exploit for commercial gain. Because workers are wholly dependent
on their host employers for both their livelihoods and temporary legal
status, it is virtually impossible for them to exercise what few rights
they have. Employers play on this vulnerability to downgrade wages and
working conditions for guest workers while lowering standards for all
other workers.

It's no wonder corporate America has made an expanded guest worker
program the cornerstone of its preferred brand of immigration reform.

The bill before the Senate will give employers even greater control over
the lives of temporary workers. It will add hundreds of thousands
workers to existing seasonal categories and creates a new "Y" guest
worker visa that will allow employers to fill hundreds of thousands of
permanent jobs throughout our economy with temporary workers. It creates
a situation ripe for exploitation.

It's ironic -- and sad - that the very bill that seeks to restore the
rights and legal protections of undocumented workers already here fails
to provide these most basic standards to future foreign workers,
treating them instead as nothing more than fungible units of production.

The best way to guarantee the rights and wages of all workers in this
country is to give every immigrant the opportunity to become a citizen,
with all the rights and duties that entails. At the same time, Congress
must revise our immigration system so that when faced with labor
shortages, future foreign workers may enter this country not as
disposable "guests" but as permanent residents with the same rights and
protections as all other U.S. workers.

The bottom line is that this bill is far from the kind of comprehensive
immigration reform that would improve the status quo for either U.S.
born or immigrant workers or their families and , in fact, it is likely
to make matters much worse.

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