Sanders on minimum wage and class warfare

IowaPublicTelevision
Published on Sep 3, 2015

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) says if someone works 40 hours a week, they should not be living in poverty. As a result, he says the federal minimum wage needs to be raised over several years to a living wage.

Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, the U.S. Congress has debated and passed several new bilateral trade agreements with Peru, Jordan and Chile, as well as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Congressional debates over immigration policy have proceeded as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of displaced people migrating to the United States, looking for work. As Rufino Domínguez, former coordinator of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB), points out, U.S. trade and immigration policy are part of a single system, and the negotiation of NAFTA was an important step in developing this system. “There are no jobs” in Mexico, he says, “and NAFTA drove the price of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the United States to work because there’s no alternative.”

Economic crises provoked by NAFTA and other economic reforms are uprooting and displacing Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas. While California farmworkers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of Mexico with larger Spanish-speaking populations, migrants today increasingly come from indigenous communities in states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero. Domínguez says there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the United States, 300,000 in California alone.

Meanwhile, a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment has demonized those migrants, leading to measures to deny them jobs, rights, or any pretense of equality with people living in the communities around them. Solutions to these dilemmas—from adopting rational and humane immigration policies to reducing the fear and hostility toward migrants—must begin with an examination of the way U.S. policies have both produced migration and criminalized migrants.

Lori Wallach on U.S. Job Losses, Record Income Inequality, Mass Displacement in Mexico

Despite the central role immigrants play in our economy and in our daily lives, undocumented workers are reviled by some for political gain and shunted into the shadows. It is time for this disgraceful situation to end. This country faces enormous problems and they will not be solved unless we are united. It is time to end the politics of division in this country.

We cannot and we should not be talking about sweeping up millions of men, women, and children – many of whom have been here for years – and throwing them out of the country. That’s wrong and that type of discussion has got to end.



In 2008, Sen. Sanders traveled to the tomato fields of southern Florida and met with migrant workers who were paid paltry wages for back-breaking work. After his visit, Sanders invited leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to come to Washington and testify at a Senate committee hearing where they confronted growers on abusive labor practices. The result in Immokalee, Florida was better working conditions and increased pay.

But how many more Immokalees are out there? How many fields or factories are there where people – often without legal status – are used up and thrown away? We cannot continue to run an economy where millions are made so vulnerable because of their undocumented status.

Many in the business community have argued for a massive expansion of temporary guest worker programs as the answer to the immigration issue. That is not the answer. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, guest workers are routinely cheated out of wages, held virtually captive by employers who seize their documents, forced to live in inhumane conditions and denied medical treatment for on-the-job injuries.

In addition, we as a nation have got to realize the importance of dealing not just with the issue of immigration but with the very real refugee crisis we face. It was appalling last year when so many voices were insisting that the large numbers of desperate, unaccompanied children who crossed our borders be turned away or simply shipped back to their country of origin like a package marked return to sender.



Unfortunately, American policy in Latin America has too often made difficult economic and political problems even worse. For example, supporters of NAFTA told us that this unfettered free trade agreement would increase the standard of living in Mexico and significantly reduce the flow of undocumented immigrants into this country as a result. The opposite was true.

Since the implementation of NAFTA, the number of Mexicans living below the poverty line has increased by over 14 million people. Almost 2 million small farmers have been displaced. And in the twenty years since NAFTA growth in per capita GDP has been only half of that experienced by other Latin American nations. Not surprisingly we have seen a 185 percent increase in the number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico from 1992 to 2011.

AS PRESIDENT, SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS WILL: