Suman Raghunathan

Perfect Strangers No More: Finally, Good News from Hazelton on Immigration

For once, I get to write about a good decision on immigration – a rare occasion in these days of forgetting what our nation and our economy owe to immigrant workers and their families. It simply doesn’t help the American middle class if we make undocumented workers perfect strangers in our communities. (And no, I’m not referring to the ‘80s television show that showcased the heartwarming welcome a quirky Balkan immigrant got in America.)

Strangely enough, the good news is coming out of Hazelton, PA – seat of one of the country’s most vitriolic, short-sighted, and unfair attacks on immigrant workers – that inspired a wave of 40 anti-immigrant measures throughout the country.

Last week, a federal judge struck down Hazelton’s local anti-immigrant ordinance that would, among other things, have required undocumented immigrants to register at City Hall and would have fined landlords who rented to immigrants without verifying they were in the country legally.

Thankfully, the judge realized just how unconstitutional these fine local responses to immigration were(yes, I am being facetious here) and how they would subject immigrants to even more exploitation from employers and landlords. There’s no new news there. I’ve written in the past that the problem isn’t undocumented immigrants, it’s actually crooked employers who don’t want to pay their workers a fair wage or protect them from workplace injuries. Rather than do either of these things, many employers circumvent existing workplace protection and minimum wage laws by hiring undocumented workers and then using their lack of legal status to force them to accept whatever piddling wage they want to offer.

Coincidentally, all these efforts supposedly aimed at helping America’s middle class will only hurt our nation’s workers more. Once undocumented workers are forced to accept low wages and dangerous working conditions because of their legal status, those of the American middle class suffer because they must compete with the same undocumented workers.

What we really need is to legalize undocumented workers so exploitative employers don’t have a weapon (lack of status) to use against hardworking immigrants. We also need to enforce existing worker protection laws, which protect all workers whether they’re immigrant or native-born.

Thankfully, the city of New Haven and the state of Illinois have both seen the light. New Haven issued ID cards to all city residents last week regardless of their immigration status, and Illinois issued a New Americans Immigrant Policy in 2005 that demanded state agencies figure out how they were going to meet the needs of the state’s immigrant communities.

For more on how it actually makes good public policy sense to integrate immigrants into communities, check the Opportunity Agenda’s recent op-ed.

Here’s to the end of Perfect Strangers in Hazelton.

Suman Raghunathan: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 1:35 PM, Aug 03, 2007 in Immigration
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