The economic course our nation started on in 1980-- the effort to have a low-wage, high-consumption society that imports more and more of what it consumes-- has hit the wall. We cannot afford to stay this course-- of letting the private sector and the financial markets run amok, of outsourcing everything that's not nailed to the floor, and of pushing down workers every chance we get. And last night's vote by Republicans in the United States Senate to block a simple extension of unemployment benefits for the most hard-pressed people without jobs is just the latest shame. At some point, there is nobody left to buy the junk that we import from everywhere but here.



We now face a future of prolonged high unemployment and stagnant or falling wages—unless we do something different.



Today I am going to talk about doing something different.



We need a new national economic strategy for a global economy.



At the heart of our strategy must be a workforce with world class skills and world class rights and trade policies that serve the interests of the American people. But today I also want to talk to you about what may seem like a strange subject-- immigration-- because it is patently clear that we cannot talk about our national workforce strategy unless we face head-on our own contradictions, hypocrisy and history on immigration.



The truth is that in a dynamic global economy in the 21st century, we simply cannot afford to have millions of hard-working people without legal protections, without meaningful access to higher education, shut off from the high-wage, high-productivity economy. It is just too costly to waste all that talent and strength and drive.



But immigration reform is not just an economic issue. The way we as a nation treat the immigrants among us is about more than economic strategy-- it is about who we are as a nation.



I grew up in a small town in Southwestern Pennsylvania, not that far from here. The immigrant path led from the coalmines to Pittsburgh to Cleveland.



And if you look around Cleveland at the ethnic clubs and the churches, you see a city that immigrants built-- Hungarians and Poles, Irish and Italians, Serbs and Croats and Jews, as well as African Americans. Cleveland is a city where the traditions of the places we came from are the very foundation of our community.



It was not easy when my family came to this country. My parents fled poverty and war from different corners of Europe. When I was a kid, there was an ugly name for every one of us in all twelve languages spoken in Nemacolin, PA-- wop and hunkie and polack and kike. We were the last hired and first fired, the people who did the hardest and most dangerous work, the people whose pay got shorted because we didn't know the language and were afraid to complain.



We got to the mines and the mills, and the people already there said we were taking their jobs, ruining their country. Yet in the end the immigrants of my parents' and grandparents' generation prevailed, and built America. This is the history of my family, and this is the story of Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Chicago and Baltimore and a thousand cities and towns across America.



And yet today I hear from working people who should know better, some in my own family-- that those immigrants are taking our jobs, ruining our country. Haven't we been here before?



When I hear that kind of talk, I want to say, did an immigrant move your plant overseas? Did an immigrant take away your pension? Or cut your health care? Did an immigrant destroy American workers' right to organize? Or crash the financial system? Did immigrant workers write the trade laws that have done so much harm to Ohio?



My friends, we are most of us the children of immigrants.



But there was no labor movement in America until workers learned to look at each other and see not immigrants and native born, not white and black, not different last names, but our common fate as workers.



The labor movement believes that our goal as a nation should be a future of shared prosperity-- not stubborn unemployment and a lost generation. That our economic strategy must bring us together instead of driving us apart. Our strategy must help us be the kind of country we want our children to thrive in-- the country our history tells us we can be. The home of the American Dream.



So exactly what is the American Dream? Some will tell you the American Dream is the idea that in America anyone can become rich. And the fact that the upper reaches of our society are relatively open is a good thing about our country-- but it is not the American Dream.



The American Dream is not that a few of us will get to be rich, but that all of us will have a fair portion of the good things in life. Time to be with our families. The chance for our children to get an education and the opportunity to make their own way in the world. Laws that protect us, not oppress us.



The American labor movement is all about the pursuit and the defense of this idea of America. And we have learned through our history that it is only when working people stand together-- in the workplace and at the polling place-- that the American Dream is secure.



Recently, the American Dream brought a man my age named Elvino and his son Ramon to America from Mexico. They are experienced bricklayers and were hired to work on a large mixed-use housing development-- a public project. They and thirty others worked for five weeks, and the contractor just never paid them.



For too many immigrants seeking the American Dream, this is the American reality. Hard work rewarded with ripoffs. And then no way to seek justice. That's why I am so proud to be able to say that Elvino, Ramon and their co-workers are taking this injustice to the U.S. Department of Labor, thanks to the efforts of Bricklayers Union Local 18 in Cincinnati and the Interfaith Worker Rights Center-- whose members understand that truly an injury to one is an injury to all.



Immigration to the United States is part of a larger picture-- the picture of how we are getting globalization wrong. There is no better way to understand that than to look at what has happened between the United States and Mexico since NAFTA was implemented in 1994.



NAFTA was sold to the American public on the idea that increasing trade with Mexico would create good jobs in both countries and slow the flow of undocumented workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico.



Instead, inequality has grown and workers' rights have eroded in both the U.S. and Mexico since NAFTA's passage. And illegal immigration flows have tripled.



Today we treat our relationship with Mexico as if it were a national security problem-- solvable with military aid and a militarized border. And that is a dangerous mistake. The failures of our relationship with Mexico represent a failed economic strategy. They cannot be solved with guns and soldiers and fences. They must be addressed through an economic strategy for shared prosperity based on rising wages in both countries.



Instead, at the heart of the failure of our immigration policy is an unpleasant fact, one that you almost never hear talked about openly: Too many U.S. employers actually like the current state of the immigration system-- a system where immigrants are both plentiful and undocumented-- afraid and available. Too many employers like a system where our borders are closed and open at the same time-- closed enough to turn immigrants into second-class citizens, open enough to ensure an endless supply of socially and legally powerless cheap labor.



Our immigration system makes a mockery of the American dream. The people doing the hardest work for the least money have no legal protections, no ability to send their children to college, no real right to form a union, no economic or legal security-- no way to turn their contributions-- their years of hard work-- into the most fundamental right of all, the right to vote. That is intolerable for a democracy.



Recently, I met a young woman named Fabiola, who came to the United States when she was two years old. Her parents have worked in the United States for twenty-two years. Fifteen years ago, her father became a U.S. citizen, so all her younger siblings who were born here also are citizens. But Fabiola fell through the legal cracks and is now too old to become a citizen under current immigration law.



But that has not stopped her from working hard to live the American Dream. Recently, she graduated from the University of California with a degree in international development. But she cannot find a job in her field because she is undocumented.



How does Fabiola's story make any sense in economic or human terms? Her talents and her education are being squandered because our immigration system is simply not working.



That is why the AFL-CIO is fighting to fix this broken immigration system as a crucial element of our broader economic strategy. Because we stand for the American Dream for all who work in our country. Because we are for ending our two-tiered workforce and our two-tiered society. And because an underclass of disenfranchised workers ends up hurting all workers.



But we are not for any kind of immigration reform. We will not support the return to outdated guest worker programs that give immigrants no security, no future here in the United States, no rights and no hope of being part of the American Dream.



Immigration reform must begin with the principle that workers in the United States deserve to enjoy a fair share of the wealth we create-- that wages should move up with productivity. The labor movement and a broad coalition of faith-based and immigrants' rights groups have worked with former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall to put together such a program for comprehensive immigration reform.



The AFL-CIO is for a fair path toward legalization for all undocumented workers who are working to realize the American Dream. We are for the DREAM Act, that gives young people like Fabiola a future in the only country they know.



We need an independent commission to determine our society's genuine need for more immigrants, and then we need to build a pathway that allows immigrants to be securely part of our country from day one-- able to assert their legal rights, including the right to organize, without fear of retaliation.

And together with this commission, going forward we are for establishing real penalties for employers who break the law. We must focus enforcement not on those who come here seeking the American Dream, but on those who would exploit them.



This is the reform the labor movement is fighting for.



But instead, we see today a dangerous drift toward a politics of hate. Last month, I went to Arizona to stand with working people who were the target of a hate campaign-- a campaign for racial profiling waged by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor. A campaign to make anyone who might look like an immigrant live in fear of the police. All of us should fear such a system: In the end, don't all of us who aren't Native Americans look like the immigrants and children of immigrants that we are?



As President of the AFL-CIO, my message to working people is that we all are bound together by our lives as workers, our dreams for our families, and our hopes for this country's future. The labor movement stands for giving all workers in America the right to dream the American Dream.



Unfortunately, the American Dream is slipping away.



Today, as in any economic crisis, there are people who offer hatred and divisiveness as the solution to the crisis. If our political leaders do not lead, if they do not offer help in the present and a clear strategy for prosperity in the future-- starting with good jobs-- those voices of hate will grow, they will become more powerful, and they will feed on the public's anger and pain and desperation.



President Obama has laid out in broad terms the approach we need to take. He has spoken out for creating good jobs, rebuilding manufacturing, taking on the challenge of climate change and energy independence, growing exports and investing in our infrastructure, including our education infrastructure.



If we are truly going to build a world class workforce, we need to restore workers' fundamental human right to organize and bargain with their employers. And we need to make sure every worker in America-- documented or undocumented-- is protected by our labor laws. That is why it is so urgent that we reform our immigration system.



The President's strategy also requires that we invest in rebuilding our country. Consider this fact-- as a result of the economic recovery act, we are now in the process of planning approximately 500 miles of high-speed rail, including lines here in Ohio. Sounds good, until you realize that China, a country about the same size as the United States, is in the process of constructing 5,000 miles of high-speed rail.



Restoring workers' rights and building workers' skills. Creating the infrastructure of the 21st century. Thinking strategically when it comes to trade policy. These are the strategies for making the American Dream as real for our children as it was for my parents.



But that will not be enough. We as a nation must be true to our better selves-- employers must not make a buck on the backs of workers who live in fear of deportation, and workers must stand together in the workplace for good jobs, safe jobs, health care for all, and retirement security we can count on. And so when we talk about making the American Dream real, the labor movement stands for making it real for all of us who do the work of our country. All of us-- no matter what we look like, who we choose to love, or where we come from. Surely there we can find common ground.

Earlier this week, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) caused a stir when he was quoted saying that President Obama personally told him the administration will not support stricter border enforcement until Republicans back broad immigration reform. The White House denied the claim. Now Kyl is saying that's not what he meant.



Kyl was quoted: "The president said the problem is if we secure the border, then you all won't have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform. In other words, they're holding it hostage."



In an interview with National Review, Kyl explained:

Kyl tells us that the comments were "taken a bit out of context," and that the "they" he was referring to was the Left, "the president's base," and not the administration. "I did not try to start a fight. This meeting happened a month ago and we were talking in the context of his political problems. He was talking about how they think that if we secure the border, you guys [Republicans] won't have the incentive to work on comprehensive immigration reform."

At the time, a spokesman for Kyl forcefully defended the story.

"There were two people in that meeting, and [White House spokesperson] Dan Pfieffer was not one of them," Patmintra said. "Senator Kyl stands by his remarks, and the White House spokesman's pushback that you must have comprehensive immigration reform to secure the border only confirms Senator Kyl's account."

I guess no one discriminated against the British who came to America-- other than maybe the rich parasites lording it over everyone else... as they were-- and still are -- wont to do. But everyone else who came to these shores had a time when they were treated like garbage. Africans, who were dragged here against their wills and in chains, are in a separate category, but certainly the Irish, the Germans, the Slavs, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese all wound up here in America and made to feel unwelcome by conservative shit heads for at least a few decades before they melted in. The Know Nothings-- direct political antecedents of today's nativist teabaggers (i.e., the grassroots of the Republican Party)-- were a force to be reckoned with in the 1840s and '50s and the hated villains in their narrow world: German immigrants and Catholics, especially German Catholics, although in many areas their hatred of Irish Catholics was even greater. Their bogeyman man was Pope Pius IX.Their main platform: stopping immigration and curbing naturalization. Although they eventually proudly ran candidates on the Know Nothing line, they started out, in 1843, as the American Republican Party and later the Native American Party-- although Indians were as unwelcome as Catholics or Jews. Historian James McPherson, wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Battle Cry of Freedom that "[i]mmigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati's crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston's expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period. Know Nothing candidates, running on a virulently anti-immigrant platform, won elections all over Massachusetts, won the governorship of California (J. Neely Johnson) and mayors races in Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Chicago (where all immigrants were then barred from city jobs), and San Francisco (where there was widespread hated of immigrants from China and Chile). Two prominent Know Nothings, Schuyler Colfax (IN) and Henry Wilson (MA) went on to be elected Vice Presidents a s Republicans.As you might guess, the Know Nothings, like today's teabaggers, idolized violence and, in fact a Know Nothing riot in Louisville killed 22 people in 1855 and accomplished exactly what the Know Nothings wanted-- driving 10,000 mostly German immigrant families to pack up and move to St. Louis, Chicago and Milwaukee.A few years ago right wing icon William Kristol wrote an editorial in thewarning Republican activists of the dangers the party would face by "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party." Apparently no one was listening.My pal Roland is a teacher in Compton. Most of his students were either born in Mexico or have at least one parent who was. He's been telling me for years that these people are the most respectful of education-- and educators-- of anyone. The parents are very much into making sure their children are well educated and the children come to school everyday prepared to become all-American. This week he's visiting his family in Lewiston, Maine. He keeps calling and telling me how well-assimilated the Somali immigrants there are compared to just 4 or 5 years ago. No doubt the sociopath and teabagger the GOP has nominated for governor, Lewiston resident Paul LePage, will do his best to stir up racial, religious and cultural animosities. Despite his first hand experience and his personal predisposition in favor of immigrants, over the years Roland has sometimes fallen prey to right wing propaganda painting immigrants as... well you know; I'm not going to repeat the nonsense. He blames Democrats and never seems to understand that goaded by unions wanting to keep the price of labor high, Democrats have traditionally been somewhat cool towards immigration. Republicans, I always tell him, want cheap labor for their financial supporters' factories, farms and service industries.Republicans would prefer slaves or some arrangement as close to slavery than can arrive at. Democrats insist on a humane approach to immigration. Friday AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka articulated labor's evolving attitude towards immigrants at an event in Cleveland. It's a remarkable speech for a labor leader and well worth reading. Here's a major excerpt:Watch a current Know Nothing, Jon Kyl of Arizona, stirring up racial hatred in Arizona Friday. He senses he can use the issue to push his party's partisan agenda.If you watched the video above, there were only two possible conclusions: Obama is insane for taking a viciously partisan scumbag like Kyl into his confidence or Kyl, a viciously partisan scumbag, was lying. It's one week later and we find out the definitive answer: Kyl, as he is wont to do, was lying his ass off There were also recording devices.

Labels: immigration, Know Nothing Party, Richard Trumka