We Love You, Dad!
From the AFL-CIO
Six years ago, President Barack Obama started a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, which temporarily gave security to nearly a million immigrants brought to the United States as children. On this Father’s Day weekend, as we celebrate our families while children are torn from the arms of parents seeking asylum in the United States, it’s time for all working people to look to our core values as a labor movement and a nation of immigrants. We must do better.
The increasingly harsh treatment of immigrants and those seeking asylum in America has become a political flashpoint, because of its shocking cruelty and because it is part of the larger effort by the right wing to divide working people while rigging the economic rules to keep us all poor.
Working people are taking a stand in defense of immigrants, because policies like DACA and TPS protect a vital part of the American workforce and clear the way for ALL working people to stand together and fight to improve pay and working conditions.
America’s union movement urges us to follow a better path. Keep families together. Honor our national commitment to DACA and TPS recipients. And finally fix our broken immigration system, so more families can celebrate Father’s Day together.
For those not persuaded by humanitarian reasoning, there’s this: $3.5 billion. That’s how much more wealth America would create if participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and temporary protected status programs became citizens, making it possible for workers across the board to win higher pay and better benefits.
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