Filipino Workers Forced to Choose Between Families and Jobs
The Service Employees International Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, and community organizations have announced a discrimination lawsuit on behalf of immigrant airport screeners. They are charging the federal government with violating the immigrant screeners’ rights to due process and the Fifth Amendment.
The lawsuit is a response to the Aviation and Transportation Security Act signed into law in November, making airport screeners federal employees but denying them most federal employee rights and benefits, including whistleblower protections and the right to join a union. Under the PATRIOT act, airport screeners are also required to be U.S. citizens.
SEIU had argued against federalization, trying to preserve its organizing drive among the nation’s 28,000 airport screeners. SEIU represents 2,000 screeners in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago, and some other cities, but, according to spokesperson Andrew McDonald, once the law goes into effect November 19, 2002, “there will be no union, SEIU or any other union.”
Over 75 percent of the 1,250 screeners at the Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose airports are Filipino, the vast majority of them legal residents but not citizens.
Filipinos for Affirmative Action is one of the organizations supporting them. Director Lillian Galedo says the group is pushing for legislation that would grandfather in the current screeners so that they don’t lose their jobs, and also wants to organize retraining programs for those who do.
The ultimate goal, according to Galedo, would be to repeal the citizenship requirement, “so that it doesn’t start bleeding into other jobs.” At San Francisco airport, for example, she says, “they have talked about other jobs having a citizen requirement.”
LEGAL AND PAYING TAXES
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, for SEIU, the issue is now about the treatment of legal immigrants. McDonald says, “[These workers] are legally in this country, working and paying taxes, and all of a sudden they are being kicked out of their jobs because they are not U.S. citizens.”
Immigrants must be in the country five years before applying for citizenship, so some screeners are not yet eligible or are currently in the application process.
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Some lawmakers are considering how to expedite citizenship applications for immigrant airport screeners, a prospect that leaves the Bay Area’s Filipino workers in a bind. Due to the vagaries of immigration law, a Filipino permanent resident has a better chance of bringing family members to the United States than does a Filipino citizen-leaving them to choose between their families and their jobs.
Filipinos are the third largest immigrant population in the U.S., after Mexicans and Chinese, and Filipinos have one of the higher rates of naturalization. Because of the established quota systems and the backlog in processing applications, Galedo says that it would add years to the process of family reunification if a Filipino immigrant “changed a petition from legal permanent resident to citizen.”
Although the question of undocumented airport screeners in Salt Lake City made big headlines because of the Winter Olympics there, the vast majority of immigrant airport screeners are permanent legal residents, and many outqualify their U.S. citizen counterparts. The new law requires that airport screeners have a high school diploma, a requirement that would potentially displace thousands of screeners.
'The public sacrificed this low-level job category to the national hysteria that something had to be done.'
This is not a concern for the Filipino screeners, since most of them were professionals in their home country. Galedo says, “I don’t think anyone is feeling threatened by the education requirement.” The Department of Transportation has decided to forego this requirement for screeners who have at least one year of experience.
Ultimately, Galedo believes that “the public sacrificed this low-level job category to the national hysteria that something had to be done. It was a reactionary and irrational act to choose this out of all the different job categories in all the airport as the last line of defense.” Scapegoating screeners was made easier by the fact that it is one of the few mostly non-union job categories in U.S. airports.
McDonald concurs: “These folks have job qualifications and experience. Fifty thousand immigrants serve in the U.S. armed forces, and they also serve as pilots, baggage handlers, and flight attendants. Singling out airport screeners does not make airports any safer. We will be replacing them with people who have no experience.”
According to Galedo, “The screeners did nothing illegal on those mornings-whatever was on those planes was legal at the time. It was the airport policies that needed to be changed, not the human beings that were implementing those policies.”