Ana Avendaño, assistant to the president and director of immigration and community action at the AFL-CIO, sent the following message to working family activists:

Immigration has been all the buzz here in Washington, and you might have heard about it on your local news or radio station. 

It’s great news, because the story of immigrants in this country is rich and complex, and there’s a lot that goes into finding a road map to citizenship for the 11 million aspiring Americans. 

We’re hosting an online education session next week in the evening for anyone who wants to learn more about why the AFL-CIO is so invested in this fight for a commonsense immigration process. We want you to be there, so every member of our community knows how to talk about this issue. Will you join us?

Pointing to a New York City nanny who is undocumented and has spent years raising, nurturing and keeping other people’s children safe and attended today’s Senate immigration reform hearing, Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), told lawmakers:

If immigration reform doesn’t help Pat and domestic workers and undocumented moms throughout our country, then we can’t really call it reform….It’s time we make our immigration policy work for domestic workers.

This January, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced the Immigration Innovation Act, known as "I-Squared." It will triple the number of foreign temporary workers from about 800,000 to more than 2.3 million. This will distort the labor market for jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), which has only 4 million workers all told. I-Squared will seriously depress the domestic STEM labor market.

In an op-ed column in The Miami Herald, William and Mary professor Cindy Hahamovitch traces the history of landowners exploiting temporary agricultural workers in the United States for personal gain. These farm employers are currently calling for more temporary workers to be allowed into the country, and they want fewer regulations on those workers. Hahamovitch points out the irony of the landowners condemning the current system, which is one they helped create and has allowed them to exploit foreign-born workers for decades.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that key senators in the "Gang of Eight" negotiations over creating a commonsense immigration process are developing plans to reduce family visas, a decidedly anti-family stance. 

The united labor movement’s immigration principles are straight-forwardly pro-family: “Family reunification is an important goal of immigration policy and it is in the national interest for it to remain that way.”

Hundreds of activists representing working families rallied in Chicago on Thursday in support of commonsense immigration reform with a path to citizenship. The event was held by the Chicago Federation of Labor, Instituto del Progreso Latino and the AFL-CIO.

Today, labor is one of the key forces pushing for comprehensive immigration reform in Washington, D.C. To learn more about the movement's advocacy and more about how unions transformed themselves into outspoken champions of immigrant rights, I spoke with Maria Elena Durazo. A daughter of Mexican immigrant farm workers, Durazo rose to become the leader of the hotel and restaurant workers union in Los Angeles, the dynamic UNITE HERE Local 11. And, as chair of the national AFL-CIO’s Immigration Committee, Durazo is now a leading point person in the national immigration debate.

In Miami Gardens, Fla., last night union leaders, immigration activists and elected officials called for comprehensive immigration reform—including a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million aspiring citizens—in another in the series of actions that are part of the AFL-CIO’s immigration reform campaign. 

Of all the reasons a path to citizenship is vital for our nation's 11 million aspiring citizens, one powerful reason stands out: It's the right thing to do. Check out this great new video from Seattle, where DREAMer Elizabeth Lara explains why she's excited to become a citizen. Lara was joined by union members and community leaders who gathered to support comprehensive, commonsense immigration reform this week. 

The AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce have been working together to find common ground on comprehensive immigration reform. This morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Chamber of Commerce President Thomas J. Donohue released this statement on the groups’ shared immigration reform principles.  

The United States will always be a nation of immigrants who have contributed greatly to the vitality, diversity and creativity of American life. Yet, like the rest of America’s immigration system, the mechanisms for evaluating our labor market needs and admitting foreign workers—as well as recruiting U.S. workers—for temporary and permanent jobs are broken or non-existent. Current immigration policies are rigid, cumbersome and inefficient. What is needed is the creation of a professional bureau in a federal executive agency to inform Congress and the public about these issues together with a system that provides for lesser-skilled visas that respond to employers’ needs while protecting the wages and working conditions of lesser-skilled workers—foreign or domestic. Current efforts at comprehensive immigration reform present a unique and historic opportunity for American workers and businesses to work together to fix this aspect of the badly broken system.