How long do people have to live in America before they’re considered American? How long does it take to prove themselves as productive, peaceful members of society? For millions of immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades, the answer seems to be, “never.” Immigrants without documents or with temporary status are vulnerable to exploitation by their employers and have been made scapegoats by xenophobic politicians. Patricia Campos-Medina joins host Alex Lovit to discuss how problems with the United States’ immigration, labor, and democratic systems are connected—and what it will take to fix them. Patricia Campos-Medina is a scholar of race, immigration, and labor. She’s the executive director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She coauthored the 2025 book Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace. https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/worker-institute https://www.russellsage.org/publications/book/legalized-inequalities
Patricia Campos-Medina:
I think that's the cycle. It's a cycle of, once there's economic opportunity, we let immigrants in. When there's economic contraction, we blame immigrants for that economic contraction.
Alex Lovit:
It's a cliche to say that the United States is a nation of immigrants, but for the 97% of us who don't have Native American heritage, that's true. Our ancestors came to this country seeking a better life or were enslaved and forced to come. So, why is our country tearing itself apart over immigration today? Why are so many Americans voting to deport neighbors who have been peaceful and productive members of our communities for decades? And who benefits from this chaos and cruelty?
You are listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit.
My guest today is Patricia Campos-Medina. Patricia is an academic scholar on immigration and labor issues, and she runs the Worker Institute at Cornell University. Patricia says that if we want to save our democracy, we need to fix our broken immigration system. And to do that, we have to strengthen workers' rights, too. Patricia thinks those changes are actually possible, even in today's political climate. In this conversation, she explains how the United States could address all of these problems together and how doing so benefits all of us.
Dr. Patricia Campos-Medina, welcome to The Context.
Patricia Campos-Medina:
Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Alex Lovit:
So, when I think about democracy, and I think this is true for a lot of people, I think about elections and government. And then when I think about work or labor, I think about bosses and paychecks. And those things are related, but they're not exactly the same. So, what does democracy look like in the workplace?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
Democracy in the workplace is very simple. It's workers understanding what are their wages, what are their benefits, what is the ability that they have to negotiate the rights with their employer, and what are the wages and the benefits? That's democracy.
And that's why labor unions are essential to any democratic process and to any democratic society. We cannot have a society in which we only have capitalists controlling the rules of the game. That's why we have labor law. That's why we have the National Labor Relations Act that was enacted in the United States in the 1930s after a period of economic turmoil and social activism demanding specific rights for labor unions. We have not had major economic labor reform since the 1930s in this country. We went from having about 30% of the workforce in the United States unionized, which had high levels of democratic engagement in our workplace, to now having about 12% of the workforce unionized. It's declined democratic engagement in the workplace. That is bad for democracy.
That is bad for our economy because as you had seen the decline in unionization in United States, you had seen a decline in wages and in income for workers. That's why today we have these high levels of income inequality in this country that align with the low levels of unionization in this country.
So, why can't the United States make sure that we have democracy in our workplace? We need to strengthen our labor laws so that more people have access to labor unions and access to democracy in their workplace.
Alex Lovit:
We've been talking about the relationship between democracy and labor. Let me bring in another factor here, which is immigration. The right wing often makes this argument that immigration is bad for labor because it is competition and it depresses wages. How do you respond to that argument?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
The right to belong in the United States for immigrants has always been a contested right. Immigrants, through our history, in good economic times, they are welcome because they are part of the workforce that we need for economic expansion. In bad economic times, they are attacked as the ones that are at fault for creating that economic contraction.
The first law of exclusion in immigration policy was actually the Anti-Chinese Immigration Act at the turn of the century, in which, after the Chinese immigrants came and built a railroad, then we expelled them. We saw that also, and this is a more recent case, during World War II when Americans were fighting the war overseas. We actually created for the first time this program with Mexico called the Bracero Program in which about 600,000 Mexicans were allowed to come to the United States to work legally. Once the war ended and Americans came back home from war, we began attacking Mexican immigrants as the ones to blame for the lack of jobs in some of our industries in the United States. Mind you, the Bracero program was a violation of civil rights law, was fraught with a lot of exploitation of Mexican workers, but it provided a legal entry for workers from Mexico to the United States.
But I put that as an example that, every time we need labor, we open immigration. Every time there is an economic contraction, we attack immigrants.
And where we are right now is immigrants being attacked as the other, as a political tool that is distracting the American workforce from the fact that, although we have big economic growth in Wall Street, we are stagnant in wages. We haven't really seen a growth in wages in the last 30 years. And rather than ask the questions as to who is benefiting economically from this arrangement, which is the aristocracy. We're talking about the rich people, the billionaires, the trillionaires at this point. We have a government blaming immigrants once again, and we have once again engaged in a period of deportation and attack against immigrants.
We have created this hierarchy of power in the workplace by creating this alphabet soup of immigration statuses with different set of rights and different sets of power. Workers who are undocumented, workers who are with some type of visas, workers who have limited visas, S-1B visas, all that creates workers with different rights. Since 1965, we had limited the ability of more workers to become American citizens. That had never happened before 1965. Every generation of immigrants that came from the beginning of this country were eventually allowed to become citizens. And that is why birthright citizenship is so essential to this country, as well, because within one generation, most immigrants became American.
So, I think that what we have created with these different systems of immigration status is that we have created workers with different rights in the workplace. And it's to the disadvantage of all American workers that we have this mismatch of who is a citizen and who's not a citizen, who can become a citizen.
Alex Lovit:
So, I understand from a capitalist perspective. If I'm a billionaire, I understand why that might advantage me. But not only billionaires are voting for immigration limitations. How is that vision sold to folks that maybe aren't benefiting from it economically?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
It's a distraction. Authoritarians are using immigrants as a scapegoat, blaming immigrants for the lack of economic mobility for American workers in this country. That has created this idea in the American public that the reason why there's no good paying jobs is because we are allowing these immigrants to come in, rather than question the fact that the reason that we don't have good jobs is that we have very few people at the top controlling our economic decisions.
The American economy is in a constant need of younger workers. Our birth rate has gone down. Our immigration is going down because of what Donald Trump is doing. They are not the ones holding back wages. We have not increased the wages of workers in the last 30 years. So, what we have done since then is, rather than increase worker wages, rather than figure out how to strengthen unions in the service sector, what we have done over and over again is limit legal migration, create a second class of workers by increasing undocumented migration, which has been keeping its wages low for American workers, and at the same time, using low wage workers as an excuse for maintaining an economic model that is not giving economic mobility to middle-class Americans.
Alex Lovit:
So, as you're saying, this cycle of exploitation and scapegoating is long. I mean, it's centuries old in this country, so it's pretty robust. It's going to be pretty hard to break. Let's talk a little bit about how to break it. I guess in the big picture, how do we get out of that?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
There are specific proposals to create order in an immigration system. We need to transform our employment-based immigration so that it becomes more of a portable visa program. A portable visa just means that the visa belongs to the employee. Right now, our H1B visas, our H2B visas, all those programs of temporary workers, those belong to the employers. So therefore, it is a system that doesn't allow for the democracy of you and me deciding how much I'm going to get paid. And if I don't like the job, if I don't like how you treat me, I can go look for another job. That's what a portability visa will be. It will be the basic democratic process of selecting who I work for. That's one thing.
The other one is that we know where immigrants are coming from, undocumented migration is coming from, in this country. It's coming from Central America and it's coming from Mexico. Eventually what we need to get to is creating what we call labor agreements with Mexico and labor agreements with Central America, giving workers the opportunity to come to work in areas that we need them and then go back to their lives and go back to their families. But what we have done in this country is make it impossible to leave once workers come to work.
So, if we are able to do those two things and get to a common sense economic reform, I think that we can be able to move forward and create more stability and get rid of these ups and downs of attacking immigrants as the scapegoat of our economic problems in this country.
Alex Lovit:
Well, let's talk a little bit about the history of how we got where we are and what that alphabet soup of immigration statuses, as you mentioned earlier, looks like. You mentioned the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. I'm used to thinking of that as a positive thing because it overturned the immigration policies of the 1920s that were very race-based and creating essentially racial limits on who could come to the country. So, to my perspective, 1965 looks like a positive step forward.
You were saying there's some problems with that. What was wrong with that Immigration Reform Act?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
It was a positive thing. Prior to 1965, we had the quota system in the United States and an immigration system that gave priority to white European migration into this country. And it was discriminatory for people in the global South. The 1965 Act changed who we are as a country because more people of color were able to finally migrate and reunite with their families in the United States, myself included. So, overall, it was a positive result.
What has happened since 1965 is that, when the country, the makeup of this country, began to change, we began to create more restrictive forms of legal migration, leading to the reform in the 1980s in which the positive was that Ronald Regan gave amnesty to a sector of the agricultural industry. The negative part of the immigration reform bill is that, for the first time, it made it a crime to hire a person who hadn't entered the United States without a permit. That was not the case in this country. You could enter the United States without authorization, find a job, prove that you were a person of good moral character and begin your process of belonging into this country. The Immigration Reform Act ended that.
So, overall, what the 1965 act did was to democratize who was allowed to belong in this country. And ever since then, we have been trying to retreat from that commitment that we made that if you were of good moral character and if you were working and you follow American value, that you could eventually become a citizen.
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. So, the 1960s then, we as a country take two steps forward. In the 1980s, there's some positives to that reform, but maybe taking a step back in respect to the employer sanctions, as you're saying there. And that's also, I think, about when you came to this country. Talk a little bit about your own family's immigration history.
Patricia Campos-Medina:
Yes. My story is relevant to the moment that we're in right now. I came to the United States in 1988 following my mom and dad who were political refugees of the 1980s war in El Salvador.
My father attempted to enter the United States legally through political asylum in 1979 and was denied and was deported back. But he was part of about the 98% of Central Americans who were denied political asylum in the 1980s. The way my father was able to get his papers was that he has stayed in this country and began to work for an Italian owner of a restaurant. Back in the '80s, you could get an employer to sponsor you for your work visa and stay in this country and wait for that visa to be approved. That's how he became a permanent resident and was able to go back to El Salvador in 1988 to bring my brothers and I to this country legally.
That ability for workers to apply for a work visa in United States was removed in the 1996 IIRIRA Reform Act by President Bill Clinton. So today, most workers who enter the country without permission have to leave to apply for a work visa to enter the United States. And that is a bad of return for 15 years. So, if you have been working for a long time and you have a family, you are basically stuck in the United States with no way to fix your status.
So, most Americans will say, why don't you become a citizen? Why don't you apply to work here legally? And many people don't understand, there is not a law that allows an immigrant to apply to become legal in this country if they had entered without a status. My father did the right thing. He applied for political asylum and was denied twice because it was the policy of the United States to reject Central American political asylees in the '80s.
And it remains the policy today. For different reasons, Central Americans today are asking for political asylum based on social issues for the gangs, warfare that exists right now in Central America. But it's the same policy. In many ways, we're repeating the same patterns. In the '80s, we connected an immigration policy to our foreign policy. And if the country you were leaving from was an ally, we granted you political asylum. And if they weren't, then you did not receive political asylum.
Alex Lovit:
Well, just to talk a little bit more about El Salvador and the Civil War. So, as you mentioned, your father, your family was fleeing political violence, and applied for political asylum, which is the right thing to do, the thing you're supposed to do, and was rejected as almost all refugees from El Salvador were rejected. And as you said, El Salvador was at the time a political ally of the United States, which is why these claims were being rejected. Could you talk a little bit about that? What role did the United States foreign policy play in El Salvador that led to this rejection on immigration policy side?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
The experience of El Salvador under that time is important because remember, during the '80s, we had the policy of fighting communism in the Western Hemisphere. The United States made the claim that the wars in El Salvador were wars for communism and the expansion of the Cuban experiment in Central America. But what it was, was a war against repression and against oppression. It was poor working class peasants rebelling against a very oppressive military government in El Salvador at that time, a government that had killed thousands and disappeared thousands of citizens.
And that war, I grew up during that time. We sold the American military in El Salvador during that time, even though Ronald Reagan kept saying, "We are not in El Salvador. We have nothing to do with El Salvador." We basically allowed and invested millions of dollars of military aid to the government of El Salvador that was engaged in an oppressive regime, oppressive war against its own citizens. Three million Central American Salvadorans left El Salvador during that time. My family was part of that migration.
And those who left came to the United States and asked for political asylum. Because the United States government at that time was pumping up and supporting the repressive government from El Salvador, President Ronald Reagan basically denied the political asylum claims of El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans at that time. So, what that led to is a whole population of Central Americans who stayed in the United States and became part of the undocumented population because they couldn't return to El Salvador. Many of those populations received what we call temporary protected status in 1992 at the end of the war, after Congress was forced through a legal case, the American Baptist Church case, to accept that it had been discriminating against Salvadorians.
So, how does our foreign policy impacts that immigration policy? We can see it exactly in El Salvador.
And we can see it today in Venezuela. Venezuela, it has been in political turmoil for decades. We have had something to do in one way or another in Venezuela. Yet when Venezuelans were forced to leave Venezuela because of that political turmoil, we rejected that immigration, the asylum cases, and once again, granted them TPS, temporary protected status. That has been rescinded by the Trump administration. And today, we had 600,000 Venezuelans who lost their temporary protected status.
And we don't know what's going to happen to Salvadorans. President Trump is supposed to determine whether he will extend TPS status to Salvadorians again. They have been under the status for the last 30 years. And it will be a great psychological and economic impact to those families if they were to lose it at this moment in time.
Alex Lovit:
So, as you're saying there, the Temporary Protected Status Program was started in the '90s. El Salvador is the first country. Talk a little bit about, what does that mean? If someone has temporary protected status, what is that status?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
Temporary protected status grants citizens of a foreign country who are living in the United States at a time of political instability or a natural disaster permission to stay in United States, gives them protection from deportation and a permit to work legally in the United States. It does not grant a path to permanent residency or citizenship. As a matter of fact, it is not allowed to transfer that permit to work into a path for permanent residency. That work permit has to be renewed every 18 months by the president of the United States. It does not allow you to receive benefits. You have to prove that you are employed. You have to prove that you are of good moral character to be able to renew.
So, this population, which at this moment is about 1.7 million workers who have temporary protective status, is fully employed, and they are a total asset to the economy. Right now, President Trump has decided that he will not renew for many of these workers, including Haitians and Syrians and Venezuelans. And we are waiting to see what he will decide to do with Salvadorans whose status expires in September.
Alex Lovit:
Okay. And for the people that Trump has rescinded that status from, that means they lose the right to work in this country and they also lose the right to residency in this country. Is that correct?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
Yes, they lose the right to work legally in this country and they are set for deportation. That is a disruption to their lives. Many of them have been here for 30 years, have families, have businesses, have homes. This is their country. Their country origin is no longer El Salvador or Honduras or Haiti. They have been living in this country for 30 years. So, to be deported to a country that they no longer belong to is rooting them a second time for the life that they know.
You also should know that, if you have TPS, you are not allowed to sponsor your family to reunite with your family. You're not allowed to travel back to visit your relatives. They have to have a judge allow them to leave and allow them to reenter. So, most people have not seen their families for 20, 30 years, and they are stuck here and they have built their lives here. So, it's a total disruption to their lives. Their lives are not temporary. That's what they say. They have built their lives in this country and they want to stay.
Alex Lovit:
You said that under temporary protected status, people need to demonstrate employment. Are people allowed to retire? If they've been here for 30 years, what does that look like?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
I mean, that is a question that those of us who advocate for holders of TPS have been asking. They have been here for 30 years. Many of them came as teenagers or in their 20s. They are getting towards the end of their productive years. What's going to happen if they can no longer show proof of employment? The injustice of that alone is something that we should be asking ourselves as a society. What do we owe these workers who are giving their sweat to this country now that they are older? They want to stay with their grandchildren and their families. And is it fair for us to send them back at this moment in their lives?
Alex Lovit:
So, I appreciate all of what you've just said because I think it's easy to see the headlines that Trump is changing TPS status and it's hard to sometimes see the human impact of that. And as you're saying, the human impact can be quite severe.
ICE has been in the headlines often for when its agents have killed people. Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, Lorenzo Araujo in Texas, Juan Guerrero in Maine. That is sort of seizing the headlines because somebody has died. What should people know about what ICE is doing that might not get as much media attention?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
ICE is abusing the basic humanity of workers, of our neighbors. It is creating an atmosphere of fear in our workplaces and in our communities. It is violating basic human rights. Under our constitution, we all have the rights of habeas corpus, the right to be treated with respect even when we are out under investigation for anything. So, the fact that ICE can act basically as a staple as a national enforcement with no concern for basic civil rights, I think that it should concern all of us.
The level of violence that we have seen ICE in the last few years, in part in the public eye, is not new, but now it's in our faces. I think that that's the difference. What happened in Minnesota, what happened with the killing of immigrant in Maine and the killing of an immigrant in San Antonio. It shows the level of violations of human rights that ICE is committing. And I think it's actually making them easier for Americans to see that it is time to abolish ICE and take away the level of power that they have.
In order to fix an immigration system, we need to go back to recognizing that immigrants are humans and they're just like you and me. What Donald Trump has done about comparing immigrants to an infestation, comparing them to criminals, talking about Haitian immigrants as eating their cats, comparing them to animals. What he has done is trying to dehumanize and make you and me think that those immigrants, they're undesirable. They're people we don't want around.
And what we have to remember is that that is a tool of authoritarians to make them accept the violations of the humanity of people. So, what we need to go back and do is to remember that the immigrant is the nanny who takes care of our child, is the person who picks up our foods, is the person who cleans up our yard, is the engineer who is designing code for AI. Immigrants are just like us. They want their children to have a better future, just like I want my children to have a better future and that's why they're here.
ICE is a tool to dehumanize us and we cannot accept that dehumanization in front of us.
Alex Lovit:
What comes next after abolishing ICE?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
We need to have a system of enforcement about immigration laws. No one is saying that we do not need to have that. But we need to have a system of immigration that is responsive to the needs of this country and this economy, a system of immigration that creates opportunity for workers to transform their compliance to American values and American law into a path to belong as American citizens.
We don't have that right now. We have made it impossible for law-abiding immigrants to ever become American citizens. And we have allowed them to work without a path to permanency and a path to citizenship. That system that allows workers to be in this country without access to rights is the system that we need to eliminate. And the labor unions and the advocates in the immigrant justice organization have several proposals to, how do we first legalize the 11 million workers who right now are fully employed in our economy? So, how do we allow them to legalize their status so that they are in a path to belonging? And, then how do we create a system of allowing new workers to come in through a portability visa program or to a labor agreement with Mexico and Central America?
So, there is a way to get out of this mess, but there has to be the political will by our members of Congress to create the opportunity for law-abiding immigrants to have a path to belong in this country. That can only happen if we create coalitions with the business community. The business community is not happy that they're in this moment in which the labor force is in such a disarray. There is a sector of the business community that wants the stability on the workforce to create a system that allows for a path for legalization for workers in this country. If we do that, then we can have an enforcement system that actually enforces labor law. Right now, what we have is a system of enforcement that is penalizing work, that is criminalizing work, and is dehumanizing immigrant workers to the benefit of the capitalist class who wants to have low wage, exploitable workers as part of their formula.
So, there is a way to get out of this mess. There are proposals right now in Congress, the PROMISE Act to create a path to citizenship for DACA holders, those are the Dreamers, and for TPS holders. And there are proposals to allow workers who are working illegally to transfer the years of work into permanent residency. We need to listen to those rather than keep accepting the hate rhetoric of Donald Trump in this issue.
Alex Lovit:
As we've just been talking about, in the 1960s, there was a substantial immigration reform. In the '80s, kind of a Band-Aid on that. The '90s TPS, right in the name temporary, but then in some cases has been renewed every 18 months for 30 years. So, it feels like we just keep putting Band-Aids on a problem and not revisiting the kind of fundamental question of what do we want our immigration system to be in this country. What you've just talked about is often called the phrase comprehensive immigration reform. You do think there's a political path forward to that?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
There's a silver lining in the disarray that President Trump's immigration enforcement has created. It's this possibility to discuss, what should immigration reform look like for that rewards the compliance and commitment of immigrant workers to this country? What would that look like? If there is a silver lining, I think it's that Americans are actually asking the question about why cannot those who are working here turn their status into a legal status?
And they're asking the question, "Why can't I help my nanny get their papers?" Now they're asking that question, "Why can the government just kill my neighbor?" They're asking that question. I think that we are at a moment of inflection in this country that we can take this debate forward.
And I think that we are going to see some movement, but Americans need to keep asking the questions. I believe in social movements. I believe that it's us as citizens that decide who belongs and who doesn't belongs in our society. And those of us who believe that immigrants who are law-abiding and are contributing should be part of the America, we should speak up.
The labor movement, the AFL-CIO, unions like SEIU, Unite Here, have been proactively demanding a solution. Remember, that was not the case in the 1990s. Some sectors of the labor movement were against legal immigration. But now the entire labor movement has moved to the side of we need legal immigration reform. And we are willing to work on real proposals to make that happen because they understand that the more workers we have without rights to belong in this country, the more they are exploitable and the more the capitalist class is able to separate them and tell them that they do not have rights in this country.
So, I think we have a way to get there and we just have to keep pushing for it.
Alex Lovit:
Well, so that is good news. And I think for those two, the labor movement and the immigration rights movement to come together, that's a powerful coalition. Talk to me about how that coalition might work with the pro-democracy coalition. I talk with a lot of folks that are really worried about American democracy, American government, whether we're going to continue to have free and fair elections. Are those movements that can work together?
Patricia Campos-Medina:
The pro-democracy movement needs the pro-democracy in the workplace movement, which is labor unions, and the pro-democracy in the immigrant rights movement that is fighting for a right for citizenship, for people to come together, so that we create a vision of what it looks like for an American democracy to truly be inclusive and to be multicultural, multi-religion, multi-race. The American democracy has always been an experiment in creating one society out of different groups of people. The fundamental freedoms of this country is that I can practice in the religion that I want, I can come from anywhere in the world, and eventually become an American.
So, how do we work together? I think the pro-democracy movement needs to defend the right to become a citizen in this country for those who are willing to comply with the American value of freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to be who we are in this country and participate in a democracy.
The other one is the labor movement's basic tenet is that we as workers have the right of freedom of association, which is a freedom of democracy. So, the pro-democracy movement needs to also support labor unions in their demand to reform a labor law in this country and align in support of some of the proposals that the national AFL-CIO has to strengthen the right of workers to have unions in the workplace. So, I think that that's how we work together, labor unions and immigrants in the pro-democracy movement.
Alex Lovit:
Well, it sounds like we have some work to do, but that's a vision of this country that I think is worth fighting for. Dr. Patricia Campos-Medina, thank you for joining me on The Context.
Patricia Campos-Medina:
Thank you so much for the conversation. These are very big topics, very big issues, but I'm glad we'll be able to tackle them.
Alex Lovit:
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Teo Clyburn, Jasmine O'Lare, and Darla Minich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter.
If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They're not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The Foundation's support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.
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