Immigrant Workers as the Future of a Progressive Safety and Health Movement in the United States

Abstract

When New Solutions was founded 20 years ago there were tens of millions of recent immigrants living in the United States. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 allowed over 1.5 million undocumented immigrants to regularize their immigration status to permanent residents through the amnesty included in the Act; almost a million got their permanent residency through the Special Agricultural Worker Program. In total, about 2.7 million were legalized by 2001 [1]. Therefore, the health and safety of undocumented immigrant workers was not really part of the national worker health and safety agenda then, maybe with the exception of farm workers, who had been included in this agenda since the boycotts led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s. The size of the unauthorized population grew by 300,000 to 500,000 per year between 1990 and 2006. The total number of undocumented immigrants grew to an estimated 11.9 million in 2008, with 59 percent of those coming from Mexico, 11 percent from Asia, 11 percent from Central America, and 7 percent from South America. The booming economy of the United States in the 1990s combined with the so-called “lost decade” elsewhere to create the most important pull and push economic factors for this large migration to the United States. By 2010 a brand new immigrant working class had developed in many urban and rural areas all over the country, with major hubs in traditional immigrant destinations in California, Texas, New York, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, and Florida, as well as in new destinations in North