Bernie Sanders Can’t Escape Questions About 2007 Vote on Immigration Overhaul
Since he began his campaign for the presidency, Senator Bernie Sanders has sought to build his base of support beyond the overwhelmingly white supporters he has in his home state of Vermont, whose backgrounds hew closely to some voters in the first two voting states, Iowa and New Hampshire. He has met with activists from the Black Lives Matter group and has appeared at a question-and-answer session with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
But Mr. Sanders could face continuing questions about his vote against a comprehensive immigration overhaul bill in 2007, as he did during the first Democratic presidential debate last week. And while he has recently presented that vote in humanitarian terms, his language at the time was starkly economic about guest-worker visas, which were viewed skeptically by organized labor.
“Why should Latino voters trust you now when you left them at the altar at the moment when reform was very close?” Juan Carlos López, a panelist and an anchor on CNN en Español asked in the debate last week about the senator’s vote against that bill.
“I didn’t leave anybody at the altar,” Mr. Sanders replied. “I voted against that piece of legislation because it had guest-worker provisions in it, which the Southern Poverty Law Center talked about being semi-slavery. Guest workers are coming in, they’re working under terrible conditions, but if they stand up for their rights, they’re thrown out of the country. I was not the only progressive to vote against that legislation for that reason. Tom Harkin, a very good friend of Hillary Clinton’s and mine, one of the leading labor advocates, also voted against that.”
He added, “Progressives did vote against that for that reason. My view right now — and always has been — is that when you have 11 million undocumented people in this country, we need comprehensive immigration reform, we need a path toward citizenship, we need to take people out of the shadows.”
But Mr. Sanders was part of an effort by liberal Democrats to kill the bill that year. His language at the time often related not to the concerns of the workers receiving the visas, but to the bill’s impact on American wage-earners. And those words are at odds with how much of the Democratic Party currently discusses immigration overhaul, all but guaranteeing he will continue to be asked to clarify his views.
“What this legislation is not about is addressing the real needs of American workers,” Mr. Sanders said in a speech on the floor of the Senate in 2007. “It is not about raising wages or improving benefits. What it is about is bringing into this country over a period of years millions of low-wage temporary workers with the result that wages and benefits in this country, which are already going down, will go down even further.”
He made a similar comment at another point that year, saying that the bill would “end up lowering wages for American workers right now.” It was, he said at yet another point, a “bad piece of legislation” for laborers.
In 2009, Mr. Sanders co-sponsored an amendment with Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who has called for an independent investigation into Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email use and was a top critic of the 2013 comprehensive immigration overhaul effort, which would have prohibited, among other things, the banks that received federal bail-out funds and engaged in mass layoffs of workers from hiring workers on guest visas. The 2007 bill failed, though Mrs. Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr., then both senators, voted for it.
Six years later, Mr. Sanders again had concerns about a comprehensive immigration bill, in part for the same reason — concern that immigration would keep down wages of American workers. But he voted for it after helping secure a key provision for a $1.5 billion training program for younger workers.
Warren Gunnels, the policy director for Mr. Sanders, insisted that Mr. Sanders’s concerns were multifaceted in 2007. Of the 2009 amendment with Mr. Grassley, which Mr. Gunnels called an example of Mr. Sanders seeking political consensus, the concern was, in large measure, over the roughly 100,000 workers who were laid off as those banks sought roughly 21,000 workers on guest visas. He pointed out that Mr. Sanders had brought attention in the Senate to the exploitation of immigrant workers in fields in Florida, and insisted his concerns have always been humanitarian-based.
“He has always supported a pathway to citizenship,” as well as the Dream Act, Mr. Gunnels said. “Yes, he’s very focused that workers in this country and everybody in this country has the ability to go out and get a decent-paying job.”
But, he added, “if you really study his record,” the support for helping immigrants is established.
An earlier version of this post misstated the year of the amendment Mr. Sanders sought with Mr. Grassley. It was 2009, not 2007.
