Business joins May Day reform cry in L.A.
Thousands of immigrant workers prepare to march through the city. Business leaders, joined by union and political figures, echo their protest by calling for an end to blanket immigration raids.
As thousands of immigrant workers and their supporters prepared to march through downtown Los Angeles today, some powerful new allies -- business leaders -- will be joining the call for an end to blanket immigration raids on work sites.
The Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, joined by labor and political leaders at a news conference this morning, renewed its call for immigration reform that includes more worker visas and a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants.
Chamber officials will be armed with a new study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., scheduled for release today, showing that tens of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue could be lost if continued raids forced businesses to flee the state. They said the government should concentrate its limited resources and enforcement efforts on those companies with a clear history of exploitation of workers.
"This is a landmark moment," said Samuel Garrison, the chamber's vice president of public policy. "Here you have labor, business, local elected officials, immigrant rights activists and leading educators all coming together to say this has to stop.
"The raids are frightening workers. They are worrying employers," he added. "I think it's going to cause of lot of businesses to think twice about coming to Los Angeles."
But Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said officials would not stop enforcing the law. "It's ICE's sworn duty to enforce our nation's immigration and customs law and the agency is going to aggressively pursue that mandate," she said.
In fiscal 2007, the agency made more than 4,900 work-site arrests, a 45-fold increase over 2001, authorities said. Garrison said at least a dozen Los Angeles area businesses have been raided since January, including a Van Nuys manufacturing company in February, where more than 130 undocumented workers were arrested.
The high-profile business backing for march organizers' major goals comes amid a fierce national debate on immigration reform proposals, which have stalled in Congress. The battle over what to do about the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants has prompted hundreds of state and local legislative proposals, colored the presidential campaign and bought tens of thousands of marchers into the streets across the nation every May 1.
