In a resolution adopted by IUF’s 27th Congress on Defending and Organizing Migrant Workers it was noted that migrant workers – an estimated 244 million people who have moved from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions – are particularly vulnerable to labour and other human rights abuses. Despite the existence of an international treaty affirming their rights, migrant workers are trafficked, discriminated against, constrained to work under hazardous and debilitating conditions, locked in isolated, unhealthy and dangerous living quarters, enslaved as domestic workers, jailed and periodically interned in mass detention centres (such as the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centres) before being forcibly repatriated.
This same Congress resolution also urged IUF’s affiliates to continue organizing migrant workers, provide education on migrant workers’ rights, and strengthen governmental regulations where necessary to ensure that migrant workers can access the same rights as other workers.
Today, in the United States, while the nation debates nonsensical rhetoric on immigration, we should revisit actions taken by former Republican U.S. President Ronald Reagan. He argued and enacted the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform and Control Act – better known as the Reagan Amnesty of 1986 – which granted amnesty to some 3 million then undocumented immigrants (or migrants) in the United States. Reagan had argued for an orderly and fair process, for people to come out of the shadows and contribute to society with all obligations, for humanitarian legal protection from abuses, and for regaining control of the border. We must propose long-term plans to address the root causes of migration – much of which stems from foreign policy and trade agreements – and plans which seek to strengthen labour and social protections to ensure that migrant workers can access the same rights as other workers.
In moving forward:
Be it resolved: Support the need for a new Amnesty in the United States including for the practical purpose of maintaining a needed workforce whose only violation is an unauthorized presence. These are essential workers who pick and pack our food and feed our country. They contribute to our economy and our communities and are our neighbours, colleagues and friends.
Further be resolved: Consider the United States – Mexico – Canada Agreement (USMCA) and related trade agreements amid the current tensions around trade tariffs and advocate for more sustainable trade agreements throughout Latin America which would minimize the displacement of workers, include more stringent labour provisions, and halt support of repressive governments that deny or fail to protect workers access to their fundamental rights to Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining and that attack trade union movements and peasant organizations in their quest for self-determination. As part of this, a hemispheric minimum wage could also be considered, and which would aim to further prevent a “race to the bottom” in labour costs by reducing wage competition across countries.
Further be it resolved: To expand labour rights for workers using temporary and short-term employment work visas, with special attention to H-2A and H-28 visa workers in the United States and halt independent contractors from using these visas for trafficking migrants.
Lastly be it resolved: To reverse the dismantling of the U.S. immigration judicial system by expanding and hiring more adjudicators for upholding due process of refugees, asylees, protective status, parolees, and trafficking victims.
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