Immigration reform--uniting blacks and immigrants.

If you listen to President George Bush, the only way Mexicans can avoid the deadly and illegal trip across the U.S. border is to come as guest workers--temporary contract laborers for U.S. industry and agriculture. The 8-14 million immigrants already living in the U.S. without visas, he says, must become guest workers themselves if they want to get legal documents.

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While the president's proposal is the most extreme of those before Congress (and hasn't yet been formally introduced), all the other bills that would reform U.S. immigration law also have some temporary contract worker proposal attached to them. All except one.

In March, Houston Congress member Sheila Jackson Lee introduced the most comprehensive immigration reform proposal so far. It has no provision for temporary workers--she scorns the whole idea, particularly the Bush approach, as a "flat earth program."

Jackson Lee instead proposes to legalize undocumented people who have lived five years in the U.S., have a basic understanding of English and U.S. culture, and have no criminal record. "These are hardworking, taxpaying individuals," she says. "My system would give them permanent legal residency."

Bush proposes that immigrants come for three or six years, and then leave. "But people are human," Jackson Lee explains. "They might have married, invested, or tried to buy a house. They might have children and roots here. It's very difficult to imagine that a person with a three-year pass would voluntarily leave, particularly if they faced an oppressive situation where they came from."

The Jackson Lee bill is unique for another reason. Its cosponsors are nine members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including California's Barbara Lee and Michigan's John Conyers. For many years the Caucus has been outspoken on other areas of social policy. This is the first time, however, Caucus members have taken a pro-active approach to immigration.

Bill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum and former education director of the AFL-CIO, rejects the idea that the changing demographics of the U.S. population are not a concern for African Americans. He recalls a time when even liberal politicians reacted to criticism by black political leaders who condemned the Vietnam War or widespread poverty in the U.S., saying they should confine their concerns to civil rights in the South. "We don't want to just react to demographic changes," he asserts. "As African Americans, we're saying that we have something to contribute to this debate, too."

Today a growing number of labor, immigrant rights and black political activists recognize the similarity between the denial of civil rights to African Americans and the second-class status of immigrants in the U.S.

The Jackson Lee bill, HR 3918, prohibits discrimination based on immigration status, and makes it an unfair labor practice for an employer to threaten workers with deportation if they invoke their labor rights or worker protection laws. It would also require the Secretary of Labor to conduct a national workplace survey, to determine the extent of the exploitation of undocumented workers.

Jackson Lee opposes temporary worker programs because she believes they inevitably result in second-class status, in which workers can't enforce labor rights or use social benefits, if indeed they're entitled to them at all.

Temporary status not only encourages abuse of workers, she adds, but has a high social cost. "Who pays for their housing and healthcare?" she asks. "Do they pay into Social Security, or are they denied benefits? What rights do they really have?"

The social cost of guest worker programs can also include the impact on the jobs and wages of other workers. Here Jackson Lee and Fletcher are stepping off into a political mine field, because of a widely held perception that blacks and immigrants, especially Latinos, compete for jobs. "Certainly you're made to believe that the number of immigrants or undocumented people has an impact on others," she says. "We're made to believe that one group hinders the other. That's absolutely wrong, and I believe in fighting against it."

Workplace surveys show a pattern of discrimination against African-American workers in some industries employing large numbers of immigrants, such as electronics assembly and semiconductor production. Black janitors and hotel workers in Los Angeles saw their percentage in the workforce plummet in the 1980s, as employers replaced them with immigrant workers they hoped would accept lower wages. Union contracts were tossed aside. However, employers miscalculated badly. Immigrants from Central America and Mexico proved to be active and militant, and, eventually became the backbone of new unionizing efforts that pushed up wages for all workers. But the change in demographics became a fact in those workplaces.

This change took place during a period of massive plant closings, which eliminated the jobs of hundreds of thousands of African American and Chicano workers in unionized industries. Through the postwar decades, those workers had broken the color line, spent their lives in steel mills and assembly plants, and wrested a standard of living able to support stable families and communities. In the growing service and high tech industries of the '80s, those displaced workers were anathema. Employers said they were too old, and identified their race with pro-union militancy, according to sociologist Patricia Fernandez Kelly.

Today, corporations in those same industries argue they need workers to fill labor shortages to come, and promote temporary workers as the answer. Fletcher argues that "if there are people in communities destroyed because the industry which employed them is gone, and a few miles away there are labor shortages in other industries, then displaced people should fill the void. Instead, now we're hearing proposals for guest workers."

Giving employers the ability to bring in thousands of contract laborers, by expanding existing temporary programs or establishing new ones, allows them to sharpen job competition in areas and industries where workers are organizing unions, trying to raise wages, or challenging past patterns of discrimination.

Jackson Lee's bill tries to balance these interests. For U.S. citizens and residents, she proposes retraining and jobs programs funded by fees paid by undocumented immigrants applying for legalization. For immigrants, besides legalization, she proposes to ban discrimination based on immigration status. Employers, she says, should press for legalization instead of guest workers. "That would give industry a pool of legal permanent residents or those seeking that status," she declares. "Most work is not cyclical--restaurants don't close in the fall. They need people in permanent jobs, not temporary workers."

While the Jackson Lee bill doesn't address directly the role of U.S. foreign or trade policy in creating poverty and migration, it does seek to correct some of the inequities created by an immigration policy that often is used as an instrument of political reward or punishment. The Congresswoman points to the huge backlog of applicants waiting for visas in third-world countries, while many European countries can't even fill their quotas.

She further seeks to help refugees from two countries, Liberia and Haiti, whose refugee status is imperiled or denied, and whose cause the Black Caucus has championed in the past. Jackson Lee is the granddaughter of Jamaican immigrants herself, and sees in their effort to build a home in the U.S. the same daily struggle carried on by the many immigrants in her own Houston district.

"Families are torn apart," Jackson Lee laments bitterly, "and we're not adding to our security, but only to the misery of human beings who want to give their best to this country. We have a system that's not helping anyone."

David Bacon is a Bay-Area based writer and photographer, and a former factory worker and union organizer.