The Fight of Our Lives

Congress is poised to begin a debate on what might be the only major progressive legislation with a chance in 2007--comprehensive immigration reform. One obvious obstacle is the Bush Administration, which has talked as though it cares about immigrants but has consistently acted to hurt them--through the raids that are tearing apart families, by increasing fees and requirements for naturalization and most recently with an outrageous proposal that, if implemented, could require a family of five to pay $64,000 and wait twenty-five years to get green cards. A less obvious but no less formidable obstacle to passing legislation is the division and confusion among progressives about immigration. The stakes are very high: If most white progressives remain disengaged on one of the most significant moral issues of our time, they may miss one of the biggest opportunities to build a progressive majority in the twenty-first century.

The movement that put millions of people in the streets last spring has been growing for more than a decade, enlisting hundreds of community organizations, unions, churches and ethnic media. Leaders of the immigrants' rights movement have a broad social vision that begins with immigration reform but doesn't end there, and immigrant workers have emerged as a key force that could disrupt the reigning neoliberal consensus. Winning immigration reform would produce millions of new US citizens who would change the face of the electorate. The immigrants' rights movement needs allies to win in 2007, and it will remember those who showed up for the fight.

In order to realize the potential for the kind of alliance that could produce legislation in 2007, we need a clear moral framework and a policy architecture that embodies it. There is unity within the immigrants' rights movement on some core principles: a path to citizenship for all the undocumented workers currently in the United States, which would benefit US workers by eliminating competition with workers who are especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse; elimination of backlogs in the family visa system to reunite families; and a restoration of due process and civil liberties lost in the wake of 9/11. But disagreement on the left about other key issues has the potential to undermine the prospects for legislation and fracture the coalition we need to build.

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