Fifteen Senate Democrats, plus a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders, voted against a carefully crafted immigration bill in 2007 that would have created a pathway to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants. Ted Kennedy negotiated with George W. Bush’s White House, but the AFL-CIO mobilized against the hard-won compromise because union leaders believed that more competition in the labor force from guest workers would depress wages for the native-born.
Sanders, who joined with Jeff Sessions to kill what turned out to be the last best hope in a generation for true reform, paid a political price in the 2016 Democratic primaries for siding with organized labor over the Latino community.
“Sanctions against employers who employ illegal immigrants (are) virtually nonexistent,” the Vermont senator complained at a press conference 10 summers ago, as he stood alongside union leader Richard Trumka, now the AFL-CIO’s president. “Our border is very porous. … At a time when the middle class is shrinking, the last thing we need is to bring over, a period of years, millions of people into this country who are prepared to lower wages for American workers.”
Fast forward to this Labor Day.
Speaking Monday at a breakfast sponsored by the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, Sanders called Trump’s decision to end DACA “one of the most cruel and ugly decisions ever made in the modern history of this country by a president.” The senator said Trump is “trying to divide our nation up based on the color of our skin (and) based on the country in which we were born.” “Our job as trade unionists, as our job as progressives, is to bring the American people together and to fight any and all attempts to divide us up,” Sanders told the crowd of union members.
-- That 2007 vote was only a decade ago, but it feels like an eternity. In the intervening years, there really has been a sea change in Democratic politics. Not a single Senate Democrat, or Sanders, opposed the bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013 but never got a vote in the GOP-controlled House.