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Coalition vows to defeat harsh immigration bill: “WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. coalition of business, labor unions and religious groups launched a campaign on Thursday to defeat a bill backed by Republicans that would turn some 11 million illegal immigrants into felons.”

(Via Reuters: US News.)

It’s review time here at demosthenes us. Business needs these immigrants. They aren’t taking jobs from Americans. Americans don’t want these jobs. Any neoliberal free-marketer ought to look at the labor situation and conclude that restricting labor movements is not too different than restricting capital or means of production. It’s inherently anti-capitalist, and that’s why business is on board.

Finally moving currently illegal works into the sunshine of American regulatory policy and without the fear of being turned into INS by vindictive employers would provide an opportunity to organize those workers. Organizing them in a free market for labor should allow organized labor to move the current wage floor upward, improving the situation for low wage workers around the country. It’s also a chance for them to finally reverse decades of membership roster drain caused by being victims of their own success (federal and state labor laws), as well as their own failures (union corruption, state laws inimical to effective organization). That’s why organized labor is on board.

Turning people who are just seeking a better life for their families into felons will push them into already overcrowded prisons, possibly hardening them against the world, and cause unneeded suffering. That’s why religious groups are on board.

Please pay attention this time, anti-immigration folks. Possibly our 3rd or 4th most important national symbol (after the flag, and maybe the White House and/or the Capitol building), the Statue of Liberty, does not say, “Show me your green card,” but instead this:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

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justice, politics, economy, immigration