Vox
By Dara Lind
June 22, 2015
Bernie
Sanders is running to the left of Hillary Clinton on economic issues,
but he's also attracted some criticism for keeping relatively quiet on
other issues that are
important to many progressives, including immigration reform. On
Friday, speaking to the National Association of Latino Elected
Officials, he embraced the issue — in the most Bernie way possible.
While
most Democratic politicians talk about immigrants as family members of
US citizens with longtime jobs and ties to their communities, Sanders
focused on the exploitation
of immigrants as workers.
His
speech doesn't change his existing positions: Sanders supported the
comprehensive reform package that cleared the Senate in 2013. And while
his NALEO remarks were
the first time he's addressed executive action to protect immigrants
from deportation — saying he'd expand existing protections to cover
parents of US citizens, legal permanent residents, and younger (already
protected) unauthorized immigrants — it's in line
with Clinton's position on the issue.
The
reason his remarks are so interesting is that they perfectly
encapsulate the Sanders school of progressivism: The biggest problem is
economic inequality, and identity
and social issues are simply reflections of that.
As Elise Foley reported for the Huffington Post:
[Sanders
focused] on the exploitation of immigrants who "have been routinely
cheated out of wages, held virtually captive by employers who have
seized their documents,
forced to live in unspeakably inhumane conditions and denied medical
benefits for on-the-job injuries."
Sanders
said another of his priorities is to ensure that workers are not
exploited by employers who think their undocumented status will prevent
them from speaking out.
He recalled a visit to Immokalee, Florida, in 2008, where he said he
saw workers in tomato fields "being paid starvation wages, living in
severely substandard housing and subjected to abusive labor practices."
As
I've written, this is the heart of Bernie Sanders's progressivism. He
believes economic inequality is not only the biggest problem facing
American society, but that
it's at the root of most of the other issues facing the country. It's
not that he doesn't care about the particular problems faced by
unauthorized immigrants, or by young African-American men threatened by
police aggression. It's that he sees those as fundamentally
economic problems.
When
he talks about the death of Freddie Gray and subsequent protests and
unrest in Baltimore, he says the "underlying issue" is the unemployment
rate among young African
Americans. And when he talks about immigration reform, he talks about
worker exploitation.
In
fact, one comment from Sanders's NALEO speech crystallizes his
philosophy: "It’s time to end the politics of division, playing one
group against another group — white
vs. black, male vs. female, straight vs. gay, or native-born vs.
immigrant." He believes progressives should protect the rights of those
disenfranchised communities. But he sees social inequality as a set of
symptoms and economic inequality as the disease.
Interestingly,
the exception to this was the one part of Sanders's speech where he
attacked Clinton on immigration — specifically, on her comments last
summer that the
families and unaccompanied children coming to the US from Central
America should be sent back. "America has always been a haven for the
oppressed; we cannot and should not shirk the historic role of the
United States as a protector of people fleeing persecution,"
Sanders said.
Clinton
has changed her tune on the children and families since last summer —
she's called for the Obama administration to stop putting families in
immigration detention.
But by acknowledging the fear of persecution as something important in
its own right, rather than framing it economically, Sanders was able to
remind the audience that Clinton hasn't always been as progressive on
immigration as she is today.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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