Immigration
North America’s Building Trades Unions joined a unified labor movement in urging Congress to pursue a solution to our broken immigration system that is comprehensive and that puts workers first. Without reform, workers will continue to suffer at the hands of exploitative and unscrupulous employers.
NABTU will continue to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform legislation that includes the following: provides aggressive enforcement against unscrupulous employers who violate immigration laws and erode labor standards by hiring and exploiting undocumented workers; improves current temporary worker programs to maintain the integrity of the building and construction industry; provides hardworking people who have lived here for years as upstanding members of their communities an opportunity to earn lawful permanent resident status; and addresses immediate concerns about homeland security.
Unfortunately, comprehensive immigration reform has languished in Congress for far too long, and in its place, individual immigration-related policy provisions have been inserted in bills through backroom deals, such as expansions of the H-2B guest worker program, which is consistently used by unscrupulous employers in the construction industry to exploit guest workers and drive down community wage and benefit standards.
