Are Democrats heading over a cliff?

Having used Latino and labor votes to recapture control of the US Congress, some influential Democratic Party power brokers now seem intent on attacking the very base that produced their victory. According to the William Velasquez Institute, seven of ten Latino voters chose Democratic candidates. A large percentage of Latino households have family members born outside the US, and millions of Democratic votes came from families where both documented and undocumented members live together. Union families voted for Democrats by about the same margin–seven of ten. Democrats cannot win elections without Latinos and labor, yet conservative party leaders want to cooperate with Republicans on an immigration enforcement program that targets them both. At issue is the enforcement of employer sanctions, a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Sanctions bar employers from hiring workers who don't have proper immigration documents. They don't really penalize employers, but they do make holding a job a federal crime for an undocumented worker. Sanctions enforcement has led to the firings of thousands of immigrant workers, including many this year. Newly appointed House Intelligence Committee head Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), a former Border Patrol agent, wants this wave of firings to grow. Behind him is the party's eminence grise, Rahm Emanuel (D-IL). According to an interview earlier this year with the Hill Magazine, Emanuel thinks it's the key to winning support among voters who view immigrants as a threat. Even leading Washington lobbyist Frank Sharry, head of the National Immigration Forum, recently advised immigrant rights groups that Democrats, having just won the election, should agree to this enforcement scheme in order to placate Republicans. Rahm, Reyes and their Republican colleagues say sanctions have never been enforced on employers. "There has been almost zero enforcement," Rahm told the Hill. Rahm is wrong. When the Clinton administration mounted its highly publicized Operation Vanguard program in the meat packing industry in 1998, more than 3,000 workers were forced from their jobs in just one enforcement action, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Democratic administration mounted other workplace raids as well. In Washington state's apple packing sheds, more than 600 people were fired in the middle of a union organizing drive the same year. Needless to say, with its leaders gone, the union lost. That's why the AFL-CIO, in 1999, began calling for the repeal of sanctions and for giving the undocumented legal status. Under Bush, the firings continue. Today, most enforcement is based on letters sent to employers by the Social Security Administration, listing the names of workers whose numbers don't match its database. Although the letters caution employers not to assume that discrepancies indicate a lack of legal immigration status, thousands of workers have been terminated anyway. Many firings target immigrant workers trying to organize unions or enforce legal wages and working conditions. At the Cintas laundry chain, more than 400 were terminated in November alone, as a result of no-match letters. Cintas is the target of the national organizing drive by UNITE HERE, the hotel and garment workers union. Also in November, hundreds walked out of the huge Smithfield pork processing plant in Tarheel, NC, after the company fired 60 workers for Social Security discrepancies. That non-union plant is not just the national organizing target for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Smithfield has also been found guilty repeatedly of firing its employees for union activity and threatening to use their immigration status against them. When workers at Woodfin Suites in Emeryville, CA, tried to enforce the city's new living-wage law, Measure C, they too were suddenly hit with a no-match check. To Rahm, Reyes, and their fellow sanctions supporters, these casualties don't count. When they say sanctions haven't been enforced, they mean that the government hasn't collected many fines against employers who violate the prohibition. That's news? The government has a lousy record collecting fines against employers for violating overtime laws, mine safety laws, health laws, anti-discrimination laws, or pretty much any laws that protect workers. But unlike these other laws, sanctions don't protect workers. The true victims are the fired workers themselves, who pay with lost jobs by the tens of thousands. Unions also lose because their drives are busted when their supporters are driven from the workplace. Predictably, the government collects no statistics on no-match firings. To appeal to right-wing Republicans, this fall the Bush administration proposed a new regulation, which would require employers to fire workers listed in a no-match letter if they can't resolve the discrepancy. Reyes and fellow Texan Charles Gonzalez (D-TX) introduced a similar proposal this year, in cooperation with one of California's most anti-labor, anti-immigrant Republicans, Rep. David Drier (R-CA). Employers now claim anti-union firings are simply an effort to comply with Bush's new regulation, although it hasn't even been issued. If it is enacted, and if the Democrats support the administration in enforcing it, thousands more will lose their jobs. Rather than leaving the country, as proponents hope, workers will simply go underground, accepting pretty much any job at any wage, under any conditions. And if they try to organize unions and lift wages, companies will have a ready-made excuse for the same kinds of firings. Last month, 5,300 Houston janitors won their first union contract. Men and women earning minimum wage, working only 20 hours per week, got on the road to a better life. When Social Security sends its next no-match letter to their employers, hundreds will lose their jobs–a punishment for organizing. Their coworkers, whether white, black, or greencard-holding immigrants, will also suffer, because the terminations will tear their union apart. The Democratic Party could fight this. It could defend its growing union base. It could propose a bill in Congress, as did Houston's Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) last year, to give green cards to those undocumented janitors and their families, and set them on the road to citizenship and voting rights. Or it could follow Rahm Emanuel and Silvestre Reyes over a cliff. David Bacon is a California photojournalist who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book Communities Without Borders was just published by Cornell University/ILR Press.