Our campaign believes that our country must remember that it is a nation of immigrants. We support two principles developed by the Drum Major Institute:

Immigration policy should bolster—not undermine—the critical contribution that immigrants make to our economy as workers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers and consumers, because:

• On average, immigrants pay more in taxes each year than they use in government services, and these taxes fund programs like Social Security that strengthen and expand the middle class.

• The middle class relies on the goods and services that immigrants produce.

• By increasing consumer demand, immigrants generate economic growth that benefits the middle class: immigration is a major contributor to the expansion of Hispanic and Asian-American consumer markets—an estimated 12 percent of the nation’s 2004 purchasing power.

• Immigrants also stimulate the economy by starting small businesses and attracting investment capital from their countries of origin. Since the American middle class relies on the economic contributions of immigrants, a pro-middle-class immigration policy must not include mass deportation or aim to shut down future immigration.

Immigration policy must strengthen the rights of immigrants in the workplace:

• Under current immigration law, immigrant workers compete with their U.S.-born counterparts on an uneven playing field—to the detriment of both groups

• Because employers threaten undocumented immigrants with deportation, these workers cannot effectively assert their rights in the workplace by, for example, asking for raises, complaining about violations of wage and hour or workplace safety laws, or by supporting union organizing drives.

• As long as this cheaper and more compliant pool of immigrant labor is available, employers are all too willing to take advantage of the situation to keep their labor costs down and are less willing to hire U.S.-born workers if they demand better wages and working conditions.

• U.S.-born workers are left to either accept the same diminished wages and degraded working conditions as immigrants living under threat of deportation or to be shut out of whole industries where employers hire predominantly undocumented immigrants. When immigrants lack rights in the workplace, labor standards are driven down, and all working people have less opportunity to enter or remain part of the middle class. So a pro-middle-class immigration policy must guarantee immigrants full labor rights and make sure that employers cannot use deportation as a coercive tool in the labor market.

While not perfect, the bi-partisan “Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005” comes the closest to adhering to our campaign’s two core principles because it brings families together, charts a clear path to citizenship, creates legal avenues for immigrants to work in our country, establishes logical enforcement policies and, most important, embraces the idea that immigrants should participate fully in society.