The Arizona Department of Public Safety raids a house in Phoenix, April 29, 2010. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)   For some immigrant rights organizations, President Obama’s principles for comprehensive immigration reform sound familiar. “The idea of the three-part tradeoff, that is, that we get some legalization in trade for guest worker programs and increased immigration enforcement, has been around for a long time,” says Lillian Galedo, executive director of Filipino Advocates for Justice in the San Francisco Bay Area. “We need a new alternative, based on much more progressive ideas. I don’t think the Dignity Campaign is the only alternative, but it’s an effort to get us to talk about what we actually want, not just what politicians in Washington tell us is politically possible or necessary.”

The Dignity Campaign is a loose network of more than forty immigrant rights and community organizations, unions and churches that has crafted an immigration reform proposal based on “human, labor and civil rights for all.” (Full disclosure: I am an active supporter of the Dignity Campaign.) The campaign’s member organizations support it as an alternative to the political strategy behind the tradeoff because of what they call the bitter impact of earlier tradeoffs over the last thirty years.

In Tucson, Arizona, the Coalición de Derechos Humanos calls comprehensive immigration reform, the shorthand name for the tradeoff strategy, “primarily a vague promise used to attract immigrant and Latino voters, [while] border communities have suffered the costs of irresponsible and brutal enforcement-only policies, resulting in death and violence.” A recent study by the Migration Policy Institute found that the federal government spends more today on border and immigration enforcement than on all other law enforcement agencies combined.

When the first discussions of the Dignity Campaign proposal began four years ago, Derechos Humanos formulated the demands about border enforcement. Instead of even more immigration agents, walls and now drones, they call for dismantling the high-tech wall, removing the National Guard, closing private mass detention centers and restoring civil rights to people living in border communities.

Isabel Garcia is a public defender, and every day her fellow lawyers defend dozens of people brought into Tucson’s Operation Streamline courtroom in chains, where they’re sentenced to prison terms for crossing the border. “That courtroom should be closed,” she says, “and the money redirected to healthcare and education, which our state is now busy cutting.” Derechos Humanos wrote that demand into the Dignity Campaign proposal too.

Galedo and Garcia first saw the tradeoff in 1986, in the Immigration Reform and Control Act. That law, signed by President Ronald Reagan, set up an amnesty that gave legal status relatively quickly to almost 3 million people. Nevertheless, they and other immigration activists of the day, including Bert Corona—widely recognized as the father of the modern immigrant rights movement—campaigned against it. The bill also contained employer sanctions, a provision that made it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers, and expanded a limited guest worker program into today’s H-2A visa scheme.

“We’ve lived with the consequences ever since,” Galedo says. “That’s why, when we look at Obama’s principles, or the CIR bills of the last decade, we think not just about our need for legalization, but that we’ll have another twenty-five years of enforcement and more guest workers. Because we’ve lived with those costs, we believe the best starting point for immigration reform is a discussion of what immigrant communities actually need and want, and what we know will actually solve the social problems around migration. That’s the source of the Dignity Campaign.”

Anoop Prasad, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, worries that President Obama’s plan for mandatory national use of the E-Verify database (a tactic for enforcing employer sanctions) “would in effect compel employers to act as immigration agents, responsible for verifying employees’ immigration status. This approach has not only proven ineffective in deterring people from coming to the US, it inhibits workers from exercising their basic workplace rights and protections.”

Several local unions and labor councils support the Dignity Campaign because thousands of union members have been fired as a result of workplace enforcement, and the campaign calls for repealing employer sanctions.

Another leg of the tradeoff, expanded guest worker programs, are also hotly opposed by Dignity Campaign organizations. Some wanted them abolished immediately because of a long record of employer abuse, while others favored an approach based on ensuring that workers in those programs have rights. In the end, the proposal calls for their abolition after five years, and increased enforcement of worker rights during that period. The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (the AFL-CIO’s constituency group for Latino union members) voted to support the Dignity Campaign because those programs treat migrants “as low wage workers with no rights.”

Changing trade policy especially separates the Dignity Campaign and other grassroots proposals from beltway CIR proposals. The Dignity Campaign proposal was modeled on the TRADE Act, introduced by Congressman Mike Michaud (D-ME), and calls for renegotiating all trade agreements to eliminate provisions that increase poverty abroad and displace workers and farmers or lower their living standards.

“Massive migration caused by poverty can only be addressed by changing those policies that cause poverty in the first place,” says Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. “President Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA before his first election, and that promise must now be kept as part of a humane immigration policy.”  

The Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB) is an organization of Mexican indigenous communities with a base in Oaxaca, and chapters in California and Baja California where Oaxacans travel as migrant workers. For José González, its binational vice-coordinator in San Diego, “the economic policies of the U.S. must be changed, because they are an enormous factor displacing people from our communities, forcing us to leave as our only way to survive.” 

Said FIOB on International Migrants Day last December, the Dignity Campaign “makes a clear demand for a broad immigration reform, and deals directly with the situation in which we live in our communities of origin.”

Finally, the Dignity Campaign calls for legal status for the undocumented, in a rapid and inclusive process, without excessive fees, fines, waiting periods or a preliminary temporary status. At the same time, it also calls for protecting the family reunification system and eliminating the current huge backlog by issuing all pending visas within a short period.

The Obama proposal, like most CIR bills of the last decade, pits people applying for family visas against those needing legalization. It proposes that the undocumented “must wait until the existing legal immigration backlogs are cleared before getting in line to apply for lawful permanent residency (i.e. a ‘green card’), and ultimately United States citizenship.” Today some applicants in Mexico City receiving family reunification visas applied over twenty years ago. In Manila the line is even longer. But no CIR proposal would issue more family visas to clear that backlog, while on the other hand they increase visas for guest workers.

“The only way to resolve this is by eliminating the backlogs,” Galedo says. “In our community we have people who have been waiting for years, and according to the federal government, 280,000 undocumented Filipinos as well. We need common ground here, not a fight.”

The groups that support the Dignity Campaign view the CIR proposals as products of an insider process in Washington, not the result of consultation with grassroots immigrant communities, unions and churches. “Now that there finally appears to be the political will to address immigration, it is critical that the voices of these communities be central in the debate,” Garcia urges.

Over the past few years, especially since the failure of the last big reform bills, this kind of process has taken place in many parts of the country. In addition to consultations with the FIOB, in Washington State, Community2Community and Pueblo Unido por la Dignidad organized over 30 Dignity Dialogues to get input from immigrant communities. The Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance has talked about an alternative to the CIR bills at its annual Unity Conferences of African-American and immigrant community leaders.

Even before the Dignity Campaign started, the American Friends Service Committee had extensive community meetings that resulted in a plan called A New Path. The Dignity Campaign proposal drew extensively on its ideas. There are others as well, but almost all have basic elements in common.

Campaign participants warn that the CIR proposals will move to the right as they go through Congress. This is what happened in the effort to pass the succession CIR bills over the last decade, and one reason why they died. It is also an important reason many groups outside of Washington have called for an alternative.

In the battles over those earlier bills, advocates for more progressive ideas were criticized for “making the perfect the enemy of the good,” discrediting what was politically possible, and dividing the base of support for CIR. But the Dignity Campaign believes that a progressive alternative gives the movement a goal and a vision to organize and educate the community. Instead of being “the enemy of the good,” Rosalinda Guillén of Community2Community says, “A good proposal will rescue immigration reform from bad ones.”

Many of the organizations that developed the Dignity Campaign supported a bill introduced by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee at the height of the last Congressional debate over immigration that tied legalization to job training and creation programs, and bolstered workplace rights instead of increasing enforcement. “Finding common ground between African Americans and immigrants is a key to winning immigration reform,” according to Bill Chandler. “Fighting for jobs and rights is a much better way to do that than anti-immigrant enforcement and guest worker programs.”

Whether the Dignity Campaign proposal, and others like it, become the basis of an alternative bill in Congress this time around depends on the willingness of progressive members to act independently. In the face of pressure to line up behind the President, it is unclear whether that will happen.

Chandler says a movement-building strategy is necessary to produce real change.  “It was the civil rights movement that ended the old bracero guest worker program, and won the 1965 immigration reform that repealed discriminatory quotas and set up the family reunification system,” he emphasizes.

The Dignity Campaign says, “We need to raise our aspirations, rather than simply criticize Congressional proposals.” 

Read Aura Bogado’s report on the unexpected events of yesterday’s Congressional hearing on immigration reform.