Immigrant workers in hospitals, grocery stores, and farms have been heralded for their service on the front lines of the pandemic. Yet many have been left feeling alienated and fearful at work; some have been economically devastated; many have been deprived of protective equipment, threatened with termination for demanding safe conditions, or just paid much too little for a job that could cost them their lives.
“We’ll have to wait between four and eight years to be able to get citizenship. And that means working in one of the most dangerous industries in the country for up to [eight] years, backbreaking labor.”
“While performing backbreaking work to feed the nation, we are exposed to extreme heat, pesticides, to the risk of getting COVID-19, and more recently, to air that’s dangerous to breathe because of the wildfires,” Vicente Reyes, a young farmworker and college student, testified at a House committee hearing last year. “We are at the core of the food supply chain and we’re also its first responders when extreme weather threatens to devastate the harvest, yet we lack many basic protections and many of us live with the daily fear of deportation.”
Now immigrant rights groups hope the struggles these workers faced amid the crisis might translate into political leverage as they push for legal status and labor protections.
The clearest illustration of how the pandemic has changed the political conversation on immigraton reform is the Citizenship for Essential Workers Act, introduced earlier this year by Senator Alex Padilla and Elizabeth Warren and Representatives Joaquin Castro and Ted Lieu. The bill would make millions of workers in several key industries eligible for permanent legal status, or a green card, if they performed work in an “essential” category between the start of the COVID-19 public health emergency on January 27 to ninety days after it is declared over. “Essential,” in the bill’s definition, includes workers in health services, agriculture, domestic work, manufacturing, restaurants, meat processing, and construction.
In addition to granting eligible immigrants the ability to live and work legally in the country, the proposed bill would also reform deportation policies. It would prevent families of the applicants from being split up or subjected to draconian restrictions that bar re-entry for many people found to have previously entered the country illegally.
The bill would cover roughly five million undocumented essential workers—a significant portion of the undocumented workforce of roughly seven million, or about 4.4 percent of the total workforce. These workers are heavily concentrated in occupations like construction, housekeeping, and food service. Generally, undocumented immigrants have been excluded from federal stimulus legislation and unemployment insurance.
Though the legislation is a welcome, if tragically overdue, recognition of essential workers’ labor and sacrifice, some immigrant rights activists chafe at the elevation of some categories of workers—those in hospitals and warehouses, for example—but not extending the same grace to hairdressers or retail workers who got laid off, or people who cannot work due to illness or disability, or simply those working odd jobs off the books, without the formal proof of employment they would need to qualify.
Nadia Marin-Molina, co-executive director of National Day Laborer Organizing Network, says the bill “highlights the way that . . . workers have basically been sacrificed through the pandemic, forced to work in horrific conditions and have died by the thousands.” However, she adds, it divides workers based on their perceived “worth” to the economy.
“Unfortunately, the situation that we’re in now is trying to convince policymakers or elected officials that workers are essential enough to be included, to be given legalization, to be given a path to citizenship,” Marin-Molina tells The Progressive.
Moreover, the bill’s “pathway to citizenship” contains some familiar roadblocks that trouble immigrant rights advocates. Potential “grounds for inadmissibility” for essential workers include convictions for a felony conviction as well as “three or more misdemeanor offenses,” with some exceptions such as cannabis possession and other minor offenses. There are provisions for waiving the criminal bar, with consideration of other factors such as “evidence of rehabilitation” or the potential negative impact on family members.
But many immigrant rights advocates see the ban as a cruel entanglement of criminal policy and immigration law. Historically, immigrants have been detained and threatened with deportation after being arrested or convicted on charges ranging from drug offenses to driving while intoxicated.
Marin-Molina says the criminal provision of the legislation “doesn’t recognize the way in which the criminal justice system is used against our own communities, so that immigrant workers can be arrested for standing on a street corner.”
Jonathan Jayes Green, vice president of Programs at Marguerite E Casey Foundation and former co-founder of Undocublack, which represents Black undocumented immigrants, says the criminal bar revealed how immigration barriers were reinforced by criminal policies, and both were highly racialized.
Though he supports the bill as the first step in a broader reform process, he notes the context of structural racism: “When we look at all of the victims of police violence and state violence, thinking about George Floyd and so many other people, I do think there is a larger conversation about how much protection does citizenship actually confer to communities of color and black people in particular. But at the very least, we should be able to have access to it.”
Besides undocumented workers, other categories of migrants are seeking to adjust their temporary legal protections to permanent access to citizenship. A more comprehensive bill, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 would provide a path to citizenship for the broader undocumented population of millions of people, as well as more than 600,000 beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and for others who have a temporary humanitarian reprieve known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The bill would also expand legal migration routes such as asylum, work visas, and migrants who are victims of labor violations.
Another key immigration reform proposal, the Farmworker Modernization Act, has passed the House, with the backing of agricultural industry groups. It would enable immigrant farmworkers, which currently include both undocumented and temporary visa workers—to adjust their status within eight years of work, or four years for people who have held agricultural jobs for a decade or more. It would also expand temporary agricultural work visas and impose mandatory screening for employment eligibility among farmworkers.
Like the Essential Workers bill, the Citizenship and Farmworker Modernization Acts contain various bars for noncitizens who have been convicted of certain crimes.
The farmworker bill has additionally been criticized for, in effect, demanding years of indentured servitude in exchange for a green card. The Food Chain Workers Alliance warns it would essentially press farmworkers into four to eight years of “backbreaking labor,” which could in turn harm the labor movement as a whole. Labor visa programs in general have been criticized for creating a “two-tier” workforce that leaves immigrants systematically abused and exploited.
Fabiola Ortiz Valdez, an organizer with Food Chain Workers Alliance, “we’ll have to wait between four and eight years to be able to get citizenship. And that means working in one of the most dangerous industries in the country for up to [eight] years, backbreaking labor. And what does that mean for farm workers organizing in the workplace? They have to, quote unquote, suck it up for four to eight years [or else], they get fired because they have very few protections.”
While the farmworker bill has passed the House, the Citizenship Act and essential workers bill have so far stalled in Congress. Given that standalone immigration reform bills are unlikely to garner enough votes for a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, Democrats plan to incorporate relief for people on DACA and TPS as well as farm and other essential workers into the pending infrastructure bill, which could pass with a simple majority in the budget reconciliation process, though immigration measures may be restricted by Senate rules.
The Biden Administration could limit deportations through executive actions, as it has with the extension of TPS for various nationality groups and increase in annual refugee admissions. But to actually stabilize the status of the undocumented and other noncitizens, Congressional action is still needed. In the meantime, the legal limbo surrounding DACA is growing, with a recent federal court ruling that deemed the program illegal and effectively shut down new applications for the program.
Yaritza Mendez, associate director of organizing with Make the Road New York—part of a coalition that held a recent rally for essential workers demanding a path to citizenship—rejected the idea of legislation that would “only provide support or coverage to some and leave out others.”
When educating immigrant workers and families about the prospects for reform, she says, “it is our job to ensure that we’re providing a full picture of the good and the bad, and ensure that we’re still advocating for those that continue to be left out.”
Some labor advocates have moved beyond the Congressional impasse and focused on state and local-level reforms.
New York State recently passed the NY HERO Act, which establishes a statewide safety standard for airborne infectious diseases and industry-specific guidelines, including provisions for personal protective equipment and daily health screenings. While it does not target immigrants per se, it supports the labor rights of immigrant essential workers by shielding them from retaliation for refusing dangerous work.
Earlier this year, after months of campaigning—culminating in a hunger strike by immigrant workers in New York City—the state legislature passed a $2.1 billion “excluded worker” fund, providing undocumented workers and other marginalized workers with relief payments that partially compensate for the lack of federal pandemic assistance.
Many workers are not waiting for legislation at all.
In May of 2020, immigrant packinghouse workers at several apple farms in Yakima County, Washington went on strike, demanding a $2 “hazard pay” raise and more safety protections at work, with support from the local farmworker union Familias Unidas por la Justicia.
That July of 2020, dozens of workers at a JBS USA beef processing plant walked off the job—a wildcat strike organized by higher-ranking “Black hat” workers, independent of the workers’ union United Food and Commercial Workers. One Spanish-speaking employee told the Greeley Tribune, “Before, there were many Latinos who were fearful and there was a lot of separation between the people. Today, what we showed is it doesn’t matter where you’re from, if you’re Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Mexican, El Salvadoran, we’re all united today. And we all left together.”
Immigrant movements have always been driven by unity and collective action, so they are wary of letting Congress divide their communities further by granting selective relief for some while potentially disenfranchising or endangering their coworkers, family members or neighbors. The central demand of this movement centers not on piecemeal legislative solutions, but on a vision of equal rights and dignity.
“No matter what kind of relief, there are always workers who are left out,” says Marin-Molina. “There’s no bill that covers everybody. There’s always more workers who are coming in and all of these workers need to be able to be protected somehow.”
This article was updated on July 30 to include new information.