Challenges

How do we meet today's challenges?

First, immigration policy must face reality. Employers actively recruit and import undocumented workers for the sole purpose of exploitation. They advertise for workers outside U.S. borders. They utilize labor contractors. They use current workers to recruit more workers.

These employers effectively exempt themselves from U.S. workplace laws. We can have a law that says workers must have a safe workplace, but the law is useless if workers can take no action under the law without fear of deportation.

We must criminalize employer recruitment and importation of undocumented labor.

Second, we must break the exploitation incentive for employers. Employers should face greater scrutiny from OSHA and the wage and hour enforcement division of the Labor Department. INS must suspend any workplace enforcement action for those workplaces where there is action to enforce labor laws. INS must not be an employer weapon to silence workers.

Third, workers must have the right to organize. Unions are the best way----day-to-day----to stop the exploitation of labor. Joined together, workers can break the exploitation incentive. Finally, the UFCW does not support "open borders" without regard to labor standards, as we do not support so- called "free trade" without regard to labor standards.

We must have fair, consistent enforcement of immigration laws, and an orderly process of legal immigration.

We do not, however, support the massive deportation of current workers in the U.S. They are an integral part of the economy and their communities. They have earned a place at the table and we must have a legalization process.

We have seen thousands of immigrant workers killed, injured and maimed on the job. We have seen immigrant workers crammed into substandard housing. We have seen millions of immigrant workers underpaid and overworked---used up and then dumped----without rights or regard for their well- being.

It must stop. This is America---and that still means something to us in the labor movement. We must challenge our country to be the America that has been the hope of immigrants for more than two centuries.