Sanders and immigration? It's complicated

Running as a presidential hopeful in 2016, Bernie Sanders has touted his support for immigration reform and the need to find a solution to a problem that has long vexed Washington.

But in 2007, Sanders was part of the charge from the left to kill an immigration overhaul bill.


Back then, the Vermont independent warned that the immigration bill — a product from then-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — would drive down wages for lower-income workers, an argument that’s been used by hard-liner reform opponents. He paired with conservative Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on a restrictive immigration amendment. And Sanders backed provisions characterized as poison pills to unravel the bill, while voting to block the final measure in June 2007.

Sanders’ history on immigration that year is complicated. But his overall record has come under renewed attention after criticism that the senator was being too quiet on the issue during his long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

He plans to address immigration when he appears before a conference of Latino officials on Friday in Las Vegas.

Sanders, more comfortable speaking in the language of income inequality and economic populism, has largely skipped over immigration while campaigning — a silence that prompted Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) to muse in a television interview last week: “I don’t know if he likes immigrants because he doesn’t seem to talk about immigrants.”

“He’s running for the nomination of my party, and my party has made pretty clear that immigration is a top-tier issue,” Gutierrez said, explaining why he pushed Sanders on the topic. Still, Gutierrez added: “I have no reason to doubt his authenticity and sincerity.”

For all his rhetoric in 2007, Sanders didn’t oppose a pathway to citizenship or efforts to boost border security. That chapter in Sanders’ immigration record reflects less on his support for the issue and more on his alliance to labor — and key unions also opposed the 2007 legislation.

“Sanders was basically one of our only allies … especially for low-skilled workers” in 2007, said Ana Avendano, a former top immigration official at the AFL-CIO. “He adamantly put his foot down and said these kinds of programs [allow] employers to bring in more and more vulnerable workers.”

For some overhaul supporters, Sanders’ stance was a blow in 2007.

“I wasn’t happy when he voted against the bill and I wasn’t happy we lost. It hurt,” said Frank Sharry, a longtime veteran of Washington’s immigration battles. “In retrospect, we realized that the only way we can proceed is that progressive forces are united behind the bill, and then you negotiate from strength with the business community and conservatives on employment and business immigration.”

Fast forwarding to today, Sanders’ immigration stance is still notable, though more for how muted it has been compared to his competitors’ views. Democratic rivals Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have aggressively tackled the issue. Clinton has pledged to go further than President Barack Obama has on shielding immigrants here illegally from deportations, while O’Malley vowed to take on reform within the first 100 days as chief executive.

After Gutierrez’s comments last week, Sanders inserted new remarks in his stump speech in Des Moines, calling for a “rational immigration process” that differed from the “Republican alternatives of self-deportation or some other draconian non-solution.”

In a brief interview, Sanders said Gutierrez’s criticism didn’t influence his decision to include immigration in his stump speech. The senator also said he would speak on the issue during his Friday Las Vegas event.

“We’ll have a very strong statement on the need for comprehensive immigration reform,” Sanders said, previewing his remarks at the gathering of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. “It’s an issue that I’ve been involved in.”

The son of Polish immigrants, Sanders has a record on immigration that’s broadly praised by advocates.

In December 2010, Sanders voted for the Dream Act — legislation that would have legalized immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. It passed the Democratic-led House, but blocked in the Senate. Sanders voted with all Senate Democrats to support the so-called Gang of Eight bill in 2013.

And last year, when Sanders began flirting with a presidential run, he pressed Obama on taking executive action for millions of undocumented immigrants at a time when moderate Senate Democrats up for reelection fretted over the White House acting on its own on deportations.

But in 2007, Sanders was far from a reliable vote for immigration reform in the Senate.

The problem for Sanders was a guest-worker program that some immigration advocates and Democratic lawmakers begrudgingly accepted as part of a comprehensive deal — but was abhorred by labor unions and their allies on Capitol Hill.

“What concerns me are provisions in the bill that would bring low-wage workers into this country in order to depress the already declining wages of American workers,” Sanders said in May 2007. “With poverty increasing and the middle-class shrinking, we must not force American workers into even more economic distress.”

The guest-worker program proposed in the 2007 bill would bring in foreign workers for two years at a time, but force them to leave the United States for a year in between each renewal. It also offered few protections for those workers, labor advocates said.

In early June of that year, Sanders proposed an amendment with Grassley that would ban companies that have laid off workers en masse from being approved for new worker visas.

Then-Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) pitched an amendment to end that guest-worker program after five years, which passed by one vote and has since been called a poison pill that helped scuttle the bill. Sanders voted in favor of Dorgan’s amendment, as did Clinton.

“Sanders was very active in trying to reduce the guest-worker parts of the ‘07 bill,” said Roy Beck, the executive director of Numbers USA, a group that calls for stricter immigration laws. “It was remarkable that Sanders went along with that in 2013.”

The 2007 measure splintered both parties in the Senate — as a coalition of conservative Republicans, union-friendly liberals and centrist Democrats banded together to block the legislation and effectively killed immigration reform under President George W. Bush.

Other labor-backed Senate Democrats, such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Tom Harkin of Iowa, sided with Sanders. But Clinton voted to advance it, as did then-Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Joe Biden of Delaware.

In contrast to the failed 2007 push, labor and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2013 struck an agreement for lower-skilled immigrant workers — a landmark deal that was key to the Senate proposing and passing its comprehensive bill in June that year.

But even though he ultimately voted for it, Sanders wasn’t too keen on guest-worker plan in 2013, either.

The new program, Sanders argued, would “allow large corporations to import hundreds of thousands of blue-collar and white-collar workers from overseas.” And for good measure, Sanders also ripped a section in the sweeping bill that would have bolstered the number of high-skilled immigrant workers into the country — a less contentious provision.

Sanders ultimately secured a sweetener in the final days of the 2013 immigration battle: a $1.5 billion youth jobs program that, on its face, appeared to have little to do with immigration.

It would dole out that money to states to help 16- to 24-year-olds in the United States become employed, which Sanders proclaimed would help more than 400,000 young people. He argued that his youth jobs program was necessary to offset the immigrants coming here to do jobs that Sanders said the young Americans would otherwise do.

“Like any piece of complicated legislation, there are aspects of this bill which I strongly support and others I disagree with,” Sanders after he voted to pass the 2013 bill. “One of the areas I have serious concerns about and want to see improved as the bill progresses is the huge increase in guest-worker programs. At a time when unemployment remains extremely high, these programs bring hundreds of thousands of skilled and unskilled workers into our economy making it harder for U.S. citizens to find jobs.”

That wasn’t too far off from Sanders in 2007 — except that back then, he voted against the bill.

“At a time when the middle class is shrinking, poverty is increasing and millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages it makes no sense to me to have an immigration bill which, over a period of years, would bring millions of ‘guest workers’ into this country who are prepared to work for lower wages than American workers,” Sanders said after that year’s bill died. “We need to increase wages in this country, not lower them.”