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Today’s Immigration Two-Step

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Two StepToday the Department of Homeland Security released a statement saying that it will scrap the highly inefficient and wasteful No-Match program.

This marks a huge victory for workers’ rights advocates and those who exposed the program’s deep flaws. These flaws were outlined in a release by the National Immigration Law Center over a year ago:

John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO: “This rule does nothing to address the corporate abuses of undocumented workers that are driving down wages and standards for all workers. If the Bush administration really wants to control illegal immigration, it should start by requiring that all companies pay legal wages and abide by our labor laws.”

Marielena Hincapié, staff attorney and director of programs at NILC: “DHS has issued a treatise trying to rationalize a policy that will strip millions of workers from their jobs as a result of the inaccuracies in the government databases and this ill-conceived rule. Rather than addressing the underlying problems, the administration is simply repackaging the same old flawed rule, which is anti-worker and anti-immigrant. Good employers will lose out at a time when our economy can’t sustain further job loss, while bad employers are getting more cover to hire and exploit undocumented workers, and thereby undermining all workers’ rights.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Obama Administration’s rejection of this Bush era policy.

Unfortunately the Department of Homeland Security also decided it would
focus on expanding the highly inaccurate E-Verify program
without addressing what to do with the 12 million
undocumented immigrants living, working, and contributing to our nation and without charting a path to fix our nation’s broken
immigration system in a true, comprehensive manner. Our kind of common sense solution enjoys widespread popular support and is something which the Administration has recently convened a bipartisan group of legislators to get started on.