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May 5, 2005

Yawu Miller

Mayor Thomas Menino called for driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants Sunday during a rally organized by the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.

“It’s a public safety issue,” Menino told a crowd of an estimated 500 activists during the rally, which was held in Copley Square.

Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Bob Haynes called for fair and transparent immigration policies that protect undocumented workers.

In the audience Cape Verdeans, Haitians, Asians, Brazilians and other Latin Americans cheered at the support from the city’s top elected official and top labor leader — support that a decade ago would have been unthinkable.

The presence of Haynes and Menino at the rally underscores the increased importance of immigrants in the city’s political and labor spheres. As Menino pointed out in his remarks, one quarter of Boston’s population is now made up of people born outside of the United States.

And as Haynes pointed out, many of those people work cleaning the city’s office buildings, staffing its nursing homes and garment factories. Increasingly, unions are looking at immigrants — documented and undocumented — as an important constituency.

“As the workforce is increasingly immigrant, the unions have to represent large numbers of immigrant workers,” said Russ Davis, director of Massachusetts Jobs With Justice. “They see that when the workers are undocumented, they don’t have rights. That makes them much harder to unionize.”

Locally the Service Employees Industrial Union has undertaken efforts to unionize janitors, most of whom are Latino, and nursing home workers, most of whom are Haitian. The union’s efforts with those workers has translated into gains for the union movement.

“I think the janitors strike really galvanized people in Boston,” Davis said. “They were standing up for their rights, marching in downtown Boston every day. The janitors’ strike was a kind of watershed where immigrants really stepped forward and made themselves heard.”

While the conditions for janitors has improved — they won health benefits and raises — immigrants in other industries haven’t fared as well. Brazilian workers are often recruited into the building trades and other more dangerous lines of work, according to Fausto DaRocha, executive director of the Brazilian Immigration Center.

DaRocha notes that 12 percent of people who die on the job in the Massachusetts workforce are Brazilians. At the same time, Brazilians are more likely to be subjected to crackdowns on undocumented workers, according to Da Rocha. Last year, of 109 workers were deported as a result of raids, Brazilians accounted for 105.

“I think because we’re a newly-established community, we don’t have enough organizations to support us,” Da Rocha said.

Unions weren’t always in support of immigrant workers. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, many labor unions complained that U.S. companies were employing immigrant workers and undocumented workers who were willing to work for less than U.S. citizens. Undocumented workers were often used to break strikes and unionizing efforts.

In the last few years, however, unions have begun to take a different attitude, according to Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.

“They realize that if immigrants have workers rights and benefits, all workers will benefit,” he said. “It’s no longer us against them. They’re not letting companies pit one worker against another.”

Initially, labor was unsupportive of sanctions against employers who exploit undocumented workers. But in the last four years, those attitudes have shifted, according to Noorani.

In his remarks to the gathering, Haynes said the AFL-CIO is in support of revamping immigration policies to better protect undocumented workers, including criminal sanctions against employers who deny undocumented workers their rights.

“We need an immigration policy that is transparent and fair,” he said. “The current system leads to exploitation.”

Haynes said the AFL-CIO is calling for criminal prosecution of companies that exploit undocumented workers, pointing to a Wakefield nursing home that alleged Haitian union activists threatened workers with voodoo in a union drive.

“It was probably the most shameless thing I’ve seen,” he said. “But stuff like that goes on all the time.”

Elected officials are also more supportive of undocumented workers. Menino’s call in support of licenses for undocumented Massachusetts residents signals high level support for a controversial cause. Menino voiced his support for the measure before launching into an apparently unscripted speech about diversity in Boston.

“Diversity has become one of our greatest strengths,” he told the gathering.

State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson and state Rep. Tim Toomey are co-sponsoring legislation that would enable undocumented Massachusetts residents to receive Massachusetts drivers licenses.

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