Aff Workplace Raids
1AC
1AC – Labor Rights
Worker exploitation is rampant in the status quo and existing agencies are insufficient
Chen 12--Associate Professor, University of Colorado Law School [Ming Hsu, Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit: Bureaucratic Incorporation of Immigrants in Federal Workplace Agencies (March 9, 2012). Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, 2012; U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12-03. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2019181 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2019181]
Few would dispute that the legal and political climate for immigrant workers, especially undocumented workers, has been forbidding over the last decade. Immigrant workers have always been vulnerable to workplace abuse, but ever since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) the workplace has become a site of contention and fear. The Supreme Court’s landmark Hoffman Plastic v. NLRB decision in 2002 interpreted the employer sanctions provision of IRCA to limit remedies for undocumented workers subjected to unlawful discharge for reporting workplace abuses. The combined effect of Hoffman and IRCA was to create perverse economic incentives for employers to exploit immigrant workers suspected of lacking status and to dim the prospects for immigrant workers to challenge those abuses. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) aggressive use of workplace raids as a strategy for immigration control—first under President Bush and continuing under President Obama, albeit to a lesser extent—has exacerbated the situation, making credible employer threats to expose the status of their immigrant workers lacking documentation in retaliation for those workers’ complaints.14 Tasked with enforcing employment laws in a climate entangling immigration control with employment, workplace agencies have been caught in the crossfire: their statutory mandate to protect workers remains intact, while the political and legal context blunts their tools to implement that mandate. Each of the federal agencies discussed in this Article has struggled to reconcile the competing demands of their professional ethos with aggressive immigration enforcement and with contracting immigrants’ rights.
Abhorrent labor rights for unauthorized workers hurt global and national wage and work standards.
Braker 12—Columbia Law School [‘Julie. "Navigating the Relationship between the DHS and the DOL: The Need for Federal Legislation to Protect Immigration Workers' Rights." Colum. JL & Soc. Probs. 46 (2012): 329]RMT
Labor rights are critically important to the advancement of international human rights, as well as to the development of workplace standards for all workers. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, enumerates the following as fundamental human rights:
(1) [T]he right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) . . . [T]he right to equal pay for equal work. (3) . . . [T]he right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity. (4) . . . [T]he right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.28 The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which 160 countries are parties,29 also enumerates labor rights.30
Labor rights for all workers, authorized or unauthorized, are also important because the wages and conditions of all workers are interconnected. As Professor Lori Nessel explains, “Excluding the undocumented from labor and employment protection statutes allows employers to exploit undocumented workers with impunity and has a chilling effect upon the rights of all workers.”31 Further, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that “acceptance by illegal aliens of jobs on substandard terms as to wages and working conditions can seriously depress wage scales and working conditions of citizens and legally admitted aliens; and employment of illegal aliens under such conditions can diminish the effectiveness of labor unions.”32 Thus, labor rights are important both as a source of individual rights and of workplace standards.
Before discussing how immigration enforcement can interfere with employment rights, specifically those of unauthorized workers, it is important to identify what employment rights these workers have. To fully address this complex, contested issue would require an analysis beyond the scope of this Note.33 However, some employment rights have been unequivocally held to apply to all workers. Generally, immigration status will not affect an employee’s rights to the wage and hour protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA),34 and the right to organize and participate in a union, as provided by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).35 Thus, this Note proceeds by acknowledging that it cannot fully address the exact rights of unauthorized workers, but that all workers are entitled to certain labor and employment rights under the FLSA and NLRA.
Labor rights for immigrants are intertwined with labor rights for domestic workers
Read 6—General Counsel of Friends of Farmworkers, Inc. in Pennsylvania since 1982. He has a J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1976.[Arthur, “PROTECTING WORKER RIGHTS IN THE CONTEXT OF IMMIGRATION REFORM” Journal of Law and Social Change, Volume 9,https://www.law.upenn.edu/journals/jlasc/articles/volume9/issue1/Read9U.Pa.J.L.%26Soc.Change65(2006).pdf]RMT
When the rights of undocumented and migrant2 workers are not protected, the rights of all workers are diminished. Unscrupulous employers seek out undocumented immigrants or temporary workers because they believe that there are no consequences for violating their rights. These employers gain a competitive advantage over employers who abide by the law. This creates a perverse incentive for employers to hire undocumented workers over citizens or authorized workers. The position of citizen and authorized workers is weakened when they confront abuse or discrimination because their undocumented coworkers have fewer legal avenues for redress of labor violations, including unlawful retaliation, and therefore they have far less incentive to participate in efforts to improve conditions. My views on this issue are guided by historical, economic, and sociological reading on the impact of new immigrant, migrant, and other foreign-born workers on the terms and conditions of employment for more established immigrant communities. However, most importantly, my perspective is shaped by the practical experience of over 30 years of legal advocacy for worker rights and, in particular, for immigrant worker rights.3 This experience includes legal work relating to two principal temporary worker Frograms: the H-2A program for temporary agricultural workers and the H-2B program for temporary non-agricultural workers. 5
Higher wages lead to increased remittances - several statistical models prove.
Thomas Joseph, Yaw Nyarko, and Shing-Yi Wang 2015, Thomas Joseph is a professor of Business Policy and Strategy at IIM Udaipur, (Ph.D) in Corporate Strategy and Policy (2008) - Indian Institute of Management,Bangalore, Yaw Nyarko is a Professor of Economics, Co-Director of the Development Research Institute, received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, Shing-Yi Wang is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at Wharton. She is also an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University, Wharton, “Information and Remittances: Evidence from Matched Administrative Data,” http://assets.wharton.upenn.edu/~was/wage_remitV6.pdf
We begin by examining whether remittances vary with fluctuations in earnings. More specifically, we estimate the relationship between the logarithm of individuals’ earnings and the logarithm of the amount that they sent in remittances. The relationship presented here is not necessarily the causal impact of fluctuations in earnings on remittance patterns. For example, individuals may choose to exert more effort, work more hours and receive higher earnings in months where they want to remit more to their families.21 The results in this section provide the statistical relationship between earnings and remittances whereas the subsequent analyses provide better identified estimates of the causal relationship between earnings and remittances. The results are presented in Table 2. All the regressions include individual fixed effects, and year fixed effects. The standard errors are clustered at the individual level.22 For each estimate, we present a parsimonious specification as well as one that allows the effects of individual characteristics (age, Indian nationality, male and an indicator for high education) to vary by year. Panel A includes only those person-month observations where there is both a remittance transaction and a salary disbursal. Panel B assumes that the migrant did not earn anything in months without a salary disbursal. Panel C shows the results with the sample where the migrant does not remit anything in months where no remittance is observed in our data. Column 1 of Table 2 (Panel A) presents the fixed effects estimates of the relationship between salary and remittances in the sample in months where either remittances or salary are not observed are dropped. The results indicate that higher salaries of 10% correspond with 3.3% more remittances. All of the estimates in the table are significant at the 1% level. There are almost no differences in the estimates with and without time-varying effects of worker characteristics. Thus, in the results in the remainder of the paper, we focus on the parsimonious specification with individual fixed effects. Despite the fact that workers are on fixed contracts, there is substantial variation in their earnings month-to-month that reflects variation in the hours that they have worked. The average absolute value of the change in earnings from the previous month for the same individual is 20%. If we assume that the variation in a worker’s earnings is driven primarily by circumstances that are outside of the control of the individual worker, then the fixed effects estimate of the relationship between log earnings and log remittances provides the income elasticity of demand for remittances. Panel B displays the fixed effects estimates that correspond with the sample in which the months where salary disbursal is not observed are treated as months in which earnings equal zero.23 The coefficients drop substantially. Within-person changes in earnings of 10% map into 0.5% higher remittances. However, the results still suggest that fluctuations in earnings month-to-month correspond positively to changes in the remittance behavior of migrant workers. Panel C shows the estimates in which unobserved remittance are treated as if there were no remittances. Here the coefficient estimates increase substantially and suggest an earnings-remittance elasticity that is close to one; each additional percent change in earnings maps into the same percent change in remittances. While the results indicate the magnitude of the relationship between remittances and earnings depends on the assumptions made about the months in which transactions are not observed, the sign of the relationship remains the same and significant at the 1% level. The results suggest that month-to-month fluctuations in earnings correspond with fairly large changes on the amounts that migrant workers remit each period. These results are consistent with a number of models of remittances. We present a new estimate of the income elasticity of remittances based on high frequency, administrative data. These estimates may be of interest to policy-makers who are interested in leveraging remittances as a mechanism of improving the well-being of households in developing countries. It provides an estimate of how remittances would respond to policies in more developed countries that affect the earnings of migrants.
Remittances are critical for economic development of underdeveloped nations
Peria and Mascaro 8--María Soledad Martínez Pería is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group, World Bank, Washington, DC. Yira Mascaró is a Senior Financial Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Department of the Latin America and the Caribbean Region, World Bank, Washington, DC.[María Soledad Martínez Pería, Yira Mascaró, and Florencia Moizeszowicz “Do Remittances Affect Recipient Countries’ Financial Development?” *REMITTANCES AND FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT 173]RMT
Similarly, because remittances are typically lumpy, recipients might have a need for financial products that allow for the safe storage of these funds. In the case of households that receive their remittances through banks, the potential to learn about and to demand other financial products is even larger. On the other hand, because remittances can also help relax individuals’ financing constraints, they might lead to a lower demand for credit and have a dampening effect on credit market development. Also, a rise in remittances might not translate into an increase in credit to the private sector if these flows are instead channeled to finance the government. Finally, remittances might not increase bank deposits if they are immediately consumed or if remittances recipients distrust financial institutions and prefer other ways of saving these flows. Recent accounts of financial institutions’ attempts to “bank” remittances recipients—by lowering remittances fees and offering specially designed products—suggest that financial institutions perceive the likely impact of remittances on financial development to be positive.1 However, empirical research on the impact of remittances on financial development is largely lacking. One exception is a recently completed study by Aggarwal, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Martínez Pería (2006). Using balance of payments (BOP) statistics for over 90 countries during the period 1975–2003, the study uncovers a positive relationship between remittances and financial development. However, this study looks at all developing countries combined and does not test whether this relationship holds across regions and, in particular, for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This chapter investigates the association between remittances and financial development for Latin American countries both at the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, using the data and empirical approach pursued by Aggarwal, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Martínez Pería (2005), we compare the impact of remittances on financial development for countries in Latin America and outside the region. We try to correct for the potential endogeneity of remittances by using economic conditions in migrant-receiving (or remittances-source) countries as instruments. At the micro level, the chapter presents research on the association between remittances and the use of banking services in Latin America. With data from 19 household surveys for 11 Latin American countries, we test whether the proportion of households that use financial services is different between remittances recipients and nonrecipients in Latin America. Furthermore, we present results from detailed case studies on El Salvador (see Demirgüç-Kunt and Martínez Pería 2006) and Mexico (see Demirgüç- Kunt et al. 2007), two of the largest remittances recipients in the region. These case studies investigate the association between remittances and financial development more rigorously, attempting to correct for potential endogeneity biases. Finally, we complement the micro-level results with findings from interviews with officials of selected banks in the Latin American region (primarily from Colombia and Guatemala). These less rigorous case studies help to illustrate the increasing interest of banks in the remittances business, report on key contributing or limiting factors for the “bancarization” of recipients and senders, and showcase incipient efforts to develop specialized products for cross-selling of services to remittances recipients (see annexes A and B). The findings from this chapter can be summarized as follows. The macro-level analysis suggests that remittances have a positive impact on the financial development of developing countries overall, but this effect is smaller for Latin American countries. The micro-level analysis reveals that while there is evidence that the likelihood of using deposit accounts is higher among remittances recipients, and deposit markets are more developed in areas where a larger percentage of the population receives remittances, no such effects are present thus far when it comes to bank loan use and credit market development