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LEGALIZATION IS NOT THE ANSWER
Many immigration reform proposals focus on legalization and guest-worker programs, in addition to strengthening employer sanctions and border controls. Yet these measures will only increase the coercive power of employers to divide their workforce and lower work conditions. Twenty years ago, when advocates traded employer sanctions for the amnesty provision of IRCA, the cost of legalizing 2.7 million immigrants meant in return the future criminalization of tens of millions more people who came after 1982. Our country is now more divided than ever before. Proposals for "temporary guestworkers", are just a form of limited legalization that will keep one group of workers in indentured servitude-like conditions, while others continue to be criminalized. Focus on legalization turns the whole debate into an immigrant issue, when in reality it is an issue for all working people.
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