Immigration

One in five workers in America wasn’t born here. Immigrants are America’s workers, vital to the fabric of our communities, our economy and our labor movement.

The labor movement supports comprehensive immigration reform that fully protects America’s workers, reduces the exploitation of immigrant workers and reduces employers’ incentive to hire undocumented workers rather than U.S. workers. But stoking fear about immigrants, raiding schools and hospitals, and mass deporting people whose labor makes our country prosper is not only a betrayal of our values—it’s also a recipe for economic disaster.

The agenda of mass deportations is a deeply anti-worker agenda:

• Without immigrants, the size of America’s workforce is shrinking. A shrinking workforce is bad for the economy, resulting in lower productivity, slower economic growth, decreased tax revenue and higher inflation. Deporting millions of workers will accelerate these trends and drive up the costs for food, housing, and many basic services because there aren't enough workers in those industries to produce the goods and services to meet the demand.
• Immigrants pay hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and support our social safety net. Despite efforts to portray immigrants as a drain on resources, immigrants paid $524.7 billion in taxes in 2021, money needed to fund our public schools, hospitals, emergency response services, highways, and other essential services. And undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion into the Social Security fund in 2022 and $6.4 billion into Medicare, even though they were unable to access the very benefits they helped keep afloat.
• A climate of fear makes our workplaces and communities less safe. Mass deportation policies threaten civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, separate families, and cause massive economic and emotional hardship for millions of working people across the country. The terror instilled by raids and targeting means that fewer people report crimes, visit a doctor, or send their kids to school—all of which undermine the health, well-being and safety of our communities.
• The real threat workers face is corporate greed, not immigrants. The far-right media wants working people to focus on the border and immigration so we’ll be too distracted to notice as the Trump administration rolls out massive tax breaks for billionaires and giant corporations, cuts Social Security and Medicare, cuts funding from our public schools, and threatens our right to vote or to join a union. It is a classic move to keep us divided and poor. Unity is the source of our strength, and the only path we have to prevent the corporate capture of our economy.
   

Our labor movement is committed to taking action to ensure that all working people, regardless of status, are protected at work and at home. We will hold employers and the politicians who do their bidding accountable by doing what we do best—organizing. Front-line solidarity helps us build power and prevent division as we keep up the long-term fight to secure a future where all people can live and work with dignity.