Twelve Million Lives At Stake Today in the US Senate’s Immigration Reform Vote

Late last year, the Woodfin Suites hotel in Emeryville, California retaliated against twenty-one workers by firing them days before Christmas. The hotel employees had, gasp, organized themselves as workers to make the hotel abide by the city’s living wage law. The pretext for the mass firing was that those workers’ social security numbers did not match federal records. The same hotel that had hired the “illegal” immigrants suddenly fired them on that basis when they sought to organize for what was rightfully theirs: the hotel had robbed each of them of two weeks salary for work they had already done. By mid-January, the Alameda County Superior Court ordered the hotel chain to hire the workers back. Hotel owner Samuel Hardage then went nuclear on them.

A detailed investigation by Joseph Plaster of the San Francisco Bay Guardian reveals that the hotel management then contacted US Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA), to whom Hardage had donated $4,200 in 2006. Hardage is also a “Bush Pioneer” (the club of those that raised $100,000 or more for George W. Bush’s political committee). The congressman got Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency on the case, which then opened an “audit” on the hotel employees’ immigration status, the first step towards a raid.

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