Tuesday, November 16, 2004
10th Annual David N. Dinkins Leadership & Public Policy Forum
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Remarks by John J. Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO

After the bruising Presidential election we have just been through, I know there are many here today who feel battered and hopeless, especially those of us who call this wonderful city home - but I remind you that there is some essential dignity in finishing a fight black and blue. I also remind you of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he admonished us that the darkest hour always comes just before the dawn - and judging by the degree of darkness we now find ourselves engulfed by, I must assume we are looking forward to a particularly brilliant sunrise.

Let me assure you that the American labor movement is in fighting form - not only ready to defend our fundamental values and beliefs, but ready to fight to advance our beliefs despite the hostile environment in which we find ourselves. And I have no doubt that if we work together as never before, we will do exactly that.

Brothers and sisters, the issue before us this afternoon is complicated and there are no easy answers. But the questions that jump out at us are simple and straightforward. What should be done to make our national immigration policy fairer? What are the rational and effective ways of securing our borders without destroying the essential rights and principles that define us? What rights and protections should be extended to men and women who labor in our fields and factories? Should rights be different for different classes and categories of workers? What safety nets should be available to our families? Should they be different for different classes and categories of families? I really appreciate the opportunity to present some views from the union movement on these questions to this particular audience.

The Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs is a unique laboratory for testing solutions to these issues - an institution made even more special because it is located in a city where 140 languages are spoken, but where we speak with one voice when it comes to human concerns.

The Dinkins Forum is a unique venue within Columbia University for the discussion of the most important issues facing the urban areas of our country, because the man who inspires it is himself such a clarion voice on behalf of the poor and the working poor. And this occasion is made even more meaningful for all of us because of the announcement just made by Dean [Lisa] Anderson and my friend Jack Rudin.

There is no doubt in my mind that the David N. Dinkins Professorship in the Practice of Urban Affairs will lift the standards, performance and involvement of every part of Columbia University - every school and every department - and I'm proud of the role our unions played in its creation.

We support everything David Dinkins believes in - we support his continuing quest for solutions to the problems facing urban America, and we especially appreciate his support for the right of all workers to form and join unions, including the graduate teaching and research assistants at Columbia University.

In this post-election period, we're hearing a lot these days about the suburbs and the ex-urbs and their influence on our culture and our values. But for working families, I can assure you that the values formed in cities like New York and championed by leaders like David Dinkins are still preeminent.

Those values include the convictions that people have the right to a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, every child has the right to health care coverage and a decent education. They include the idea that citizens as well as visitors to our country should be free to worship or not worship as they please, should be free from bigotry and discrimination, should be free to speak their mind without recrimination or persecution, should be free to form and join unions without interference from their employers.

And chief among our values is the uniquely American concept that these rights and freedoms aren't reserved just for a few, but extended to the many - regardless of where you were born, the color of your skin, your gender, your religious beliefs, the gender of your partner, whether you toil for a private- or a public-sector university, or whether your immigration status is documented -those are our values.

The American labor movement came too slowly to the last of the convictions I just mentioned - for many years, we favored a restrictive immigration policy, with no quarter given to workers who entered our country illegally. Even though many union members and many union leaders were first and second generation immigrants ourselves, many were fearful that immigrants legal as well as illegal would take jobs away from American workers.

In the year 2000, the AFL-CIO decided that a new century deserved a new and more enlightened and progressive view from the only organizations in our country dedicated exclusively to standing up for working people and their families. Our AFL-CIO Executive Council came to the conclusion that our historic position on immigration was unfair and self-defeating. Historically, immigrant workers played a major role in building the strongest economy and the most vibrant democracy in the world. And immigrant workers played an even more important part in creating a strong union movement that lifted millions of families into the biggest middle class in history.

But at the turn of the new century, it became obvious that efforts to improve immigration enforcement, while failing to stop the flow of undocumented people into the United States, had resulted in a system that was fostering discrimination, abuse and exploitation of documented as well as undocumented workers by unscrupulous employers. It became apparent that immigrant workers - legal or illegal - were no threat to take the jobs of so-called "American" workers and that they were essential to the prosperity of many American businesses.

Our starting points were simple. We agreed among ourselves that regulated legal immigration is better than unregulated illegal immigration, but that the current system of enforcement needed to be fixed. We concluded that our government had, in practice, outsourced the enforcement of our immigration laws to employers. And many of those employers were using their power to retaliate against workers who tried to improve their wages, benefits and working conditions by joining unions or otherwise asserting their rights.

At our AFL-CIO convention in July 2001, we passed a resolution calling for a new national immigration policy based on five principles:

First, employer sanctions and the I-9 system should be replaced with a system that criminalizes business behavior that exploits workers for commercial gain;

Then, immigrant workers should have full workplace rights, including protections for whistle blowers and the right to form and join unions;

In addition, labor and business should design mechanisms to meet legitimate needs for workers without compromising the rights and opportunities of workers already in this country;

Guestworker programs should be reformed, but not expanded;

Finally, undocumented workers already in this country and their families should be provided permanent legal status through a new legalization program.

In addition to these five principles, we also called upon the federal immigration program to address the shameful delays facing immigrants already eligible to adjust their status through the current Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Since our convention in 2001, we've been working to marshal public opinion behind a national demand for immigration reform along the lines of the principles we set forth.

Our Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride - co-sponsored by many, many organizations represented in this room - helped us educate the public and tell the story of immigrant workers and the contributions they make. After traveling more than 20,000 miles and stopping in 100 cities, the Freedom Riders converged on Washington, D.C., last October and held more than 120 meetings with lawmakers to advance our principles and to lobby for comprehensive immigration reform.

It's a cruel fact that immigrant workers - legal as well as illegal - are disproportionately represented in dangerous industries such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture. It is shameful that in 2002, foreign-born workers suffered 69 percent of the workplace fatalities in our country, even though they make up just 15 percent of our workforce. Mexican workers, for instance, are 80 percent more likely to die in a workplace accident than native-born workers. And undocumented workers in particular are concentrated in low-wage industries that are known for low wages, unsafe working conditions and their anti-union fervor.

A U.S. Department of Labor survey found that 100 percent of all poultry processing plants in our country were non-compliant with federal wage and hour laws. Another DOL survey found that half of all the garment manufacturing businesses here in New York City are sweatshops in every dimension of the word. Another found that in agriculture, compliance with workplace health and safety standards as well as wage and hour regulations is unacceptably low.

When immigrant workers try to join or form unions to correct these injustices, they are cruelly harassed, intimidated, discriminated against and terminated for their actions - and our courts have determined they have no rights, no recourse, no reinstatement available to them. When all else fails to break a union drive, employers simply call in the immigration authorities and everyone gets deported for the temerity of standing up for basic rights.

Comprehensive immigration reform is, of course, now threatened by the re-election of George W. Bush and the resurrection of his ugly agenda for America. Last January, President Bush announced his principles for immigration reform, which are anchored by a provision to allow immigrants to come to the United States to work for a specific period of time and then return home without a chance to become permanent citizens.

We are very troubled that his proposal - which is very much with us today - allows undocumented workers already in this country to re-apply for the jobs they already hold and to remain in them for a specific period of time before returning home.

Rep. Ciro D. Rodriguiz, one of the few Democrats left in the Texas House Delegation and chair of the Congressional Caucus, rightly described the President's plan as a "21st century bracero program - a modern day rewrite of the 1940s bracero program that tore families apart and stripped laborers of their earnings and their future." I call it a license for letting thousands of right-wing bounty hunters do their dirty work.

Our duty in the coming months and years is to reject the President's heartless, cheap labor initiative and to continue building at the grass roots for an idea whose time will come. Our task is to ride out the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that has grown to tidal size because of national security-mongering by the Bush Administration.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the AFL-CIO publicly restated our principles in the hope that the attacks would not jeopardize the status of millions of good people who've come to our country with hopes in their hearts. Or strip away the protections afforded our most basic civil liberties.

Sadly, our great national tragedy resulted in the birth or rebirth of many ugly anti-immigrant forces who want to curtail the rights of immigrants and even stop immigration altogether. The re-registration of immigrants under the Patriot Act was conducted with little regard for personal rights or human dignity, and the persecution of immigrants has increased across our nation -- even here on the streets of New York.

In an article in last week's New York Times magazine, an immigration lawyer dramatized one of the ways in which we're solving our "immigrant problem." The story he told was one of wholesale deportations for minor criminal offenses such as shoplifting and jumping subway turnstiles. He pointed out that in 1986, we deported just under 2,000 immigrants per year for criminal offenses, and that last year that number jumped to 79,000.

Brothers and sisters, this city is my home, just as it is your home, and I still pray for the souls and for the families of the 3,000 people who were killed on Sept. 11, 2001. But I also pray that the murderous actions of a handful of ultimately selfish individuals will not be used to destroy 250 years of unselfish tradition.

Later this afternoon, I'm meeting with the leaders of GSEU - Graduate Student Employees United, Local 2110 of the UAW - to discuss preservation of another unselfish tradition - the tradition of one of the richest universities in our country championing the rights of those who struggle daily for survival. We'll be discussing not only collective bargaining rights and recognition delays for teaching assistants and research assistants, but civil rights and visa delays for international students that have been created by the Patriot Act.

When I visited Columbia last year, I asked President Bollinger to meet with me on these matters. I repeat that request here this afternoon, and I hope that in the spirit of the Dinkins Forum, we can move forward - we've put it off far too long. When it comes to immigration reform, the challenge to our country is great.

We need a rational and fair immigration policy that respects the rights of all workers; we need a path to full citizenship for workers who've been contributing so much to our nation; and we need employers to come forward and work with labor to satisfy their legitimate needs as well as to guarantee the rights of workers.

This city has been the gateway to America for generations of immigrants - and America has been a gateway to a better life for them and their families, my family among them. In return, those immigrants - my parents among them - built a better New York City and a better United States of America, better than any of the founders of our Republic could have ever imagined.

Thanks to generations of immigrants and their families, we live in a society that not only tolerates diversity, we revel in it.

Thanks to millions of immigrant workers and the strengths and talents they brought with them, we've built a nation that is big enough to carry our world responsibilities on one shoulder - while hefting our duties here at home on the other.

Thanks to the courage and commitment of yesterday's immigrant hearts and immigrant souls, we've created a government that is strong enough to defend our shores with one arm and to reach down with the other to lift up the poor, the dispossessed and the disadvantaged among us.

Let's join together now and thank the immigrants of yesterday by standing up for the immigrants of today and tomorrow. Let's honor our immigrant heritage with a little commitment and courage of our own.

Thank you and God bless all of you and your families and God bless America.