To the lyrics of African American spirituals and freedom songs like “Guide My Feet” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” a group made up of DREAMers, their families, clergy and other people of faith in Washington, D.C., earlier today launched the nationwide Campaign for Citizenship to call on Congress to create a road map to citizenship for the country’s 11 million aspiring Americans.

President Obama intends to push quickly to fix America's broken immigration system, according to The New York Times, including a path to citizenship—the core of the AFL-CIO's immigration reform agenda.

A new study shows that an immigration process with a pathway to citizenship—the centerpiece of the AFL-CIO’s immigration reform campaign—not only increases wages for aspiring citizens, but sows economic benefits throughout the entire economy.

The AFL-CIO is collecting stories of immigrant workers who seek to exercise their labor and employment rights and received threats from employers to report them to local law or immigration enforcement.

If you want to share your story, please contact Ana Avendano at blognews@aflcio.org. 

In some year-end reviews of labor in 2012 (here and here), we see an important missed connection that the union movement is committed to building in 2013. While these reviews identify important worker struggles throughout the year, they fail to recognize that all workers—immigrant, public, private, low-wage and middle-class—share values and experiences that unite them in a broad-based union movement. A major theme of many of last year’s important labor struggles was how immigrant workers and the union movement came together in local communities to win justice.

While government in Washington, D.C., remains divided and marked by long-term gridlock, governments in the states are much less divided. Of the 50 states, 37 now feature state governments where the governor and majorities in both legislative houses are controlled by one party—24 of those are controlled by Republicans. Extreme, anti-working family Republicans have repeatedly assaulted the rights of people in recent years and, by all accounts, the trend looks to expand in 2013. Working families are mobilized and fought back in 2012 and will continue to fight in 2013.  The response to the "right to work" for less push in Michigan was so strong, that governors in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have since declared that they won't push for right to work in their states.

The latest sign of how fast U.S. immigration politics are changing came last week from House Republican leadership.

On Thursday, in her speech nominating John Boehner as speaker, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference, surprised some people when she said that immigration reform would be one of the three top priorities of the House of Representatives.

Immigrant families with a spouse, child or parent who is a U.S. citizen will no longer be torn from each other when a family member who is an aspiring citizen begins the process of obtaining lawful permanent resident status in the United States, under a new federal rule on immigration announced Wednesday. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano says the rule:

Facilitates the legal immigration process and reduces the amount of time that U.S. citizens are separated from their immediate relatives who are in the process of obtaining an immigrant visa.

The time for immigration reform is now, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said to union leaders today. This will be a focus for labor in 2013. Hardworking immigrant families came to this country for the promise of freedom and the opportunity to provide a better life for their children—even if it meant uprooting their families. Working families are all the better for having hardworking new immigrants as contributing members of the communities, with full rights and equal protections. The country needs to create a common-sense immigration process with a road map to citizenship. 

The first edition of “We Stand in Solidarity with Migrant Workers” appeared on the AFL-CIO Now blog in 2010.  

Dec. 18 is International Day of Solidarity with Migrants and marks the date the United Nations adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

To commemorate this day, we have compiled personal stories of the immigrant experience at the AFL-CIO. As you’ll see, our colleagues’ collective experiences are a tapestry of the immigrant experience. Our co-workers have come to the United States from around the world for a variety of reasons—to escape war and repression, to work, to feed their families back home, to study and to marry.