While the entire national press corps focuses on whether Republicans will kill immigration reform, Randi Weingarten has dropped a poison pill of her own.
No, the president of the American Federation of Teachers doesn’t call it that. Instead, it takes the form of a new report issued by a coalition of union and activist groups that aims “to end the systematic abuse of international workers who are recruited to work in the United States.”
The report would “solve” that abuse through a host of new regulations that would make it more difficult and expensive for workers to come here in the first place.
We’re not surprised the AFT is on board. If you think of our public schools primarily as a jobs program, it makes perfect sense.
We don’t minimize abuses, particularly by unscrupulous middlemen. But the answer is ending the need for a middleman by cutting red tape to give us a clean and straightforward guest-worker system that America needs and workers can understand.
This also happens to be the best way to get the bipartisan sign-on needed for an immigration bill to pass. Somehow, we think Weingarten already knows that.