Trš©ll Smear #13: āBernie voted against Immigration Reformā
This is another extremely cynical attack because it omits many important factors that were at play in the subject bill.
Yes, the 2007 Immigration bill did offer 12 million undocumented immigrants a chance to enroll in a āguest worker programā, but such programs are what Bernie Sanders calls āsemi-slaveryā and highly exploitative of the immigrants while at the same time very destructive to overall wages for working Americans.
During debate on the bill, Bernie said this:
āIt is not about raising wages or improving benefits. What it is about is bringing into this country over a period of years millions of low-wage temporary workers with the result that wages and benefits in this country, which are already going down, will go down even further.ā
In short, there were some very unsavory aspects of this bill that a pro-labor union supporter like Bernie Sanders, along with labor organisations and immigrant rights groups, simply could not accept:
AFL-CIO opposed guest-worker programs, which were expanded in the bill to win Big Business and GOP support. More strikingly, it lost the support of several pro-immigration groups, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens.
āLULAC cannot support a bill that will separate families and lead to the exploitation of immigrant workers,ā said Executive Director Brent Wilkes in a May 2007 statement. In June 2007, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said it ācannot support enactment of the Senate bill in its current form,ā citing no fewer than six major problems.
In general, Bernie has consistently opposed āopen bordersā because he sees it as a Reagan era (neoliberal) initiative to exploit poor foreign workers while driving down wages at home. So he was already predisposed to oppose the 2007 bill, which allowed for such exploitation.
The fact that AFL-CIO, LULAC and AILA all opposed the 2007 immigration bill means that Bernie did the right thing in voting against it.
