The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Civil rights and labor organizations told Congress last week that immigration reform could happen this year if it takes into account the concerns of all low-wage workers in the legislation.

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of LCCR, said that Congress must fix our nation's immigration system now because "it fails to keep up with economic realities, it fails to provide an orderly way to keep track of who is here, it inhumanely splits and keeps families apart, it penalizes children for the actions of their parents, and it is so unfair and so burdensome that it fails to give people enough incentives to play by the rules."

He added that Congress' immigration reform legislation must take into account the needs of low-wage workers, those that are citizens and those that are immigrants, by:

• providing more effective enforcement of antidiscrimination laws;
• improving advertising and tools to alert workers of job vacancies;
• increasing public education efforts to counter stereotypes about native and non-native born workers;
• enhancing job skills and training programs for all low-wage earners; and
• increasing enforcement of fair pay and overtime requirements and safety, health and labor laws.

In April, the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federation, the two largest labor federations in the nation, annouced their own standards for immigration reform, which has a similar focus on low-wage workers  "The key to designing a sustainable workplace immigration system is that the flow of future workers must be rationally based on the always-evolving labor market needs of the United States," said Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).