NRN this Week

Immigration reform push offers relief for job woes

Legislative agendas revived despite lingering terrorism worry

By Milford Prewitt

(Aug. 16) - Diverse groups within the worker-hungry restaurant industry, their hopes for immigration reform dashed in recent years by national-security priorities, are seeing signs that restraints on the employment of aliens are back up for review on the nation's regulatory agenda.

At the heart of reform proponents' optimism is a flurry of new federal and local legislative initiatives — the first since before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — aimed at overhauling what many see as unduly restrictive and punitive immigration policies.

Industry leaders and other experts, stressing that foodservice businesses are in dire need of immigration reform, point to National Restaurant Association forecasts that restaurateurs will need to fill 1.6 million new jobs by 2012.

Native-born Americans, particularly teenagers, are shunning entry-level restaurant jobs, and multitudes of baby boomers are preparing to retire in the coming years. Immigration reform advocates say the 8 million to 10 million undocumented workers believed to be living in this country could be a rich source of future employees if they gained legal status.

"Beginning in 2010, for every new employee who enters the workplace, two will be leaving," said Joni Thomas Doolin, chief executive of People Report, which conducts Internet-based employment analyses of labor and management trends in foodservice and hospitality.

Citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, Doolin points to dwindling "teenage engagement in the foodservice industry, which had been an obvious pool of labor for us for decades and has been declining for the past five years."

Her conclusion: "Simply put, we are running out of employees. We're facing some serious labor problems if immigration reform is not re-energized in this country."

The NRA, for its part, noted to members in its 2004 forecast and outlook that immigration reform was one of the top six priorities of the association this year.

However, Brendan Flanagan, the NRA's director of legislative affairs, said the industry has a lot to be excited about.

"We didn't have one bill in the 107th Congress to advance comprehensive immigration reform [last year]," Flanagan said in reviewing a spate of proposals dealing with the issue by elected officials in both houses on Capitol Hill. "That speaks to how far the issue has progressed this year, and we commend the senators and congressmen who are reviving this issue.

"We recognize, of course," Flanagan adds, "that real progress awaits the 109th Congress, but the wheels are certainly in motion and we are definitely looking forward to a real program that offers comprehensive immigration reform that benefits employers and immigrant employees."

The buzz for reform began in January when President George W. Bush outlined a broad need to reform the nation's immigration laws and turned his proposals over to Congress.

While details vary and goals differ, the several congressional proposals Flanagan has reviewed all contain two core objectives. They are the creation of legal mechanisms allowing employers to hire undocumented immigrant workers for jobs shunned by Americans and the implementation of systems allowing longtime-U.S.-resident workers lacking documentation and criminal records to acquire legal status over time.

The basic difference between the reform goals of Bush and rival presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is that Bush's plan would require alien workers taking unfilled jobs to leave the country at the end of defined tenures, while Kerry's plan would put those employees on a course toward U.S. citizenship.

Beyond differences over naturalization, the bills are being accorded high degrees of bipartisan cooperation, Flanagan said.

Among the initiatives are the Safe Orderly Legal Visa Enforcement Act, or SOLVE, sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., teamed up to sponsor the Immigration Reform Act of 2004, whose titular goal is "Strengthening America's National Security, Economy, and Families."

Three Arizona Republicans — Sen. John McCain and Reps. Jim Kolbe and Jeff Flake — introduced the Land Border Security and Immigration Improvement Act, whose aim is to enhance border security and address the consequences of years of inadequate and near-useless border controls.

Immigration reform activists also are excited about the sponsorship by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM, which was before the Senate Judiciary Committee as of early August. The bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Durban, D-Ill., and 46 other senators from both parties. It would give undocumented adolescent immigrants who entered the nation within five years of the enactment of the law, or who are younger than 16, "conditional status" in order to attend college or join the U.S. military. Upon graduation or honorable discharge, a qualified DREAM applicant would earn legal status to secure a job.

As the nation's largest employer of immigrants, the restaurant industry has a lot at stake in the debate.

Of 12 million foodservice workers, 1.4 million are believed to be immigrants, 500,000 of them Mexican, according to the NRA.

However, a restaurant group in New York City that helps immigrants land jobs estimates that 40 percent of all local foodservice employees may be undocumented or have other actionable visa problems — a percentage about which the NRA declined to comment.

Nevertheless, making undocumented workers legal is a goal of the Hagel-Daschle bill and a major reason why the NRA supports it.

But some fear that in the nation's current political environment, with both presidential candidates emphasizing national security as their top priority, the bills in Congress to reform immigration may be nothing more than a mirage.

"I just think it is too controversial right now," said Scott Vinson, senior director of government relations for the National Council of Chain Restaurants, one of many groups active in the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, which advocates reform. "I think it is something the [presidential] candidates just don't want to touch right now," he added. "But we think few things are more important to the industry's health than a comprehensive immigration reform package."

Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for the Citizenship and Immigration Services, or CIS, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said his agency nationally and locally has been soliciting ideas and suggestions from the restaurant industry about the department's priorities and relationship with employers.

The CIS is one of three predecessor agencies in the department that remain since the dismemberment of the old Immigration and Naturalization Services agency.

Bentley conceded that the powers of the Homeland Security department have tightened some areas of immigration enforcement, but in many other ways, he said, little has changed.

For example, the congressionally authorized issuance of 66,000 seasonal-work visas each year for positions in the hospitality and foodservice industry, principally for busy resort areas, still are occurring and probably will not change, he said, adding that the raids on workplaces that the INS used to conduct have ended in favor of pursuing known criminals or illegal aliens who should have left the country but still are here.

However, efforts made before September 2001 by the Mexican and American governments toward creating a special guest worker visa had come to a halt, Bentley confirmed. But, he said, one of the many bills winding its way through Congress might put that idea back in play.

Marielena Hincapie, director of programs for the National Immigration Law Center, a 20-year-old immigration clearinghouse and activist group based in Los Angeles, said she, too, was enthused by all of the legislative momentum to reform immigration.

But she said she worries that President Bush's proposals earlier this year were probably nothing more than pandering to the Hispanic vote. She further rued that with the passage of the Patriot Act and the breakup of the INS, the immigration debate too often has strayed into discussions on national security.

"But I think the good thing is that the more distance we put [between current concerns and] 9/11, more and more politicians will come to recognize that immigrants are not terrorists," she said. "Even Bush said in January that we need to fix our broken immigration system.

"Unfortunately, often what is being mentioned in the name of national security does not reflect the reality of the workforce," Hincapie said. She observed that that was the case "especially in the restaurant industry, where you have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to this country, paying taxes, law abiding, active in their communities, who still have no legal status to work."

Saru Jayaraman, a lawyer who heads the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York City — a group that aids immigrants with visa problems and helps locate restaurant jobs — said immigration reform has to consider unscrupulous employers.

"Forty percent of the restaurant industry [in New York] is made up of undocumented workers," Jayaraman asserted. "And they play a major role in that industry. And some employers, knowing that these workers fear deportation and knowing they have no power, pay them lower wages in abusive conditions, and it drives down wages.

"But regardless of a person's legal status, they still have the same rights according to our labor laws," Jayaraman added. "We fight for immigration reform because people should have the right to work without fear; and not only that, they are contributing a great deal to this industry."

But for all of the muscle and mobilization being exerted on behalf of immigration reform, the National Council of Chain Restaurants' Vinson argues that real change might be more than a year off.

"It's an issue that is not going to go away," he asserted. "Our industry is going to create more jobs than we have people to fill them.

"And so we've got to find a way," Hinson added, "to help employers with their employment needs and protect the nation, while finding some sort of way for foreign workers who are currently here to get work authorization that they can use to transition their status into something more permanent on the path to citizenship."