I had the good fortune to speak with the AFL-CIO’s Ana Avendano before she spoke at Voces de la Frontera’s “Reaching for the American Dream” gala last night.
Avendano is the assistant to the AFL-CIO’s president on immigration and community action, and she possesses a wealth of knowledge on the labor movement and immigration. She called it a “complicated relationship,” since the labor movement was built by immigrants but was often hostile toward new workers coming into the labor market.
But that changed, thanks to globalization and the power of the grassroots. Avendano said workers in California, especially, reached out to immigrant communities and built alliances. That put pressure on labor leaders to support immigration reform. The AFL-CIO created a resolution in 2000 to demand changes that would end exploitation of workers and create a new amnesty program.
That call led to reformers in Congressnamely Sen. John McCain and Sen. Ted Kennedyto try to solve the broken immigration system. But Avendano called their bill “awful,” since, for exampke, its temporary worker programs would have “institutionalized exploitation.”
That, of course, led the far-right wing (like our own Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner) to go bonkers (my term, not Avendano’s). Avendano said conservatives were split into two camps: business (which liked the temporary worker program) and the moralists (who didn’t like illegal immigrants, period). Efforts from this side of the political spectrum favored law enforcement, border protection, turning undocumented residency from a civil violation to a criminal one, and demonization of immigrants, especially Latino immigrants. That “galvanized” the community, Avendano said, leading to the huge marches we’ve been seeing in recent years.
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Congress couldn’t come up with a solution, and Obama hasn’t made immigration reform a priority in his first yearfocusing, instead, on the economy as a whole and health care reform.
However, “we’re in a much better place now,” Avendano said, pointing to changes made in agencies that deal with workers and immigrants. She gave high marks to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who rescinded the Bush-era no-match rule in favor of the E-Verify system, and to Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, saying, “we finally have a real secretary of labor, and one who comes from an immigrant family.”
Avendano said about half of public policy is made through agencies, so even though immigration reform hasn’t been a top priority of the Obama administration’s, progress is being made.
But immigrants have played a role in the debate over health care reform. Avendano was clearly irritated by the efforts to prevent undocumented immigrants from participating in a proposed health insurance exchange, which doesn’t make sense from either an economic or moral viewpoint. Allowing immigrants to buy into the exchange most likely would lower health care costs by increasing the number of people in the exchange (and insurance costs decrease when more people are enrolled) and also by decreasing the amount charities, the government and insured people spend to pay for the health care of those without insurance.
But Avendano said it’s difficult to have a rational debate about the issue, since opponents are reacting emotionally, not logically. She said the only way to overcome barriers is to keep having dialogs about tough issues.
“We have to keep finding common ground,” Avendano said.
