(The Center Square) – A bill to protect immigrant workers from being threatened by their employers passed during a California legislative committee hearing on Tuesday morning.
Assembly Bill 2495 would make it illegal for employers to threaten an immigrant employee to prevent or discourage that employee from reporting a workplace violation. Current law already protects immigrant workers who report such a violation, but only after a violation has occurred and the employee has reported it. No such protection exists for immigrant employees before they report that something is wrong at work, according to a legislative analysis of the bill.
“Anti-immigrant national rhetoric has emboldened bad faith employers to increasingly deter immigrant workers from complaining about violations of their workplace rights by making veiled threats, chilling statements or implicit warnings about immigration consequences,” Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San Jose and author of the bill, testified on Tuesday morning. “When such employer coercion succeeds, unlawful conduct goes unreported, workplace standards erode, and law-abiding employers are undercut.”
Those who testified in support of the bill said in the Assembly Judiciary Committee hearing that immigrant communities are fearful of immigration enforcement after increased enforcement efforts in the last year.
“Over the past year, immigration enforcement actions have become more aggressive and more public as authorities target immigrant communities in their homes, in hospitals, on their way to school and at work,” Hailey McAllister, senior staff attorney for Legal Aid at Work, testified in support of the bill. “In this political climate, undocumented workers must take real and significant risk to step forward to actively assert their workplace rights, and as a result, we’re seeing many workers who are afraid to speak up.”
Wage theft, unsafe working conditions and discrimination arise from such situations, McAllister testified.
“That fear doesn’t just harm immigrant workers. It undermines enforcement of California’s workplace protections for everybody,” McAllister continued.
No one testified in opposition to the bill on Tuesday, and no groups have registered their opposition to the bill, according to the legislative analysis.
According to research from the American Immigration Council, 27.3% of California’s population was born in a foreign country, and 19.8% of the state’s residents born in the U.S. live with at least one immigrant parent. Approximately 32.7% of the Golden State’s labor force consists of immigrants, that study shows.
Another 2024 study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that in 2022, illegal immigrants in the United States contributed $96.7 billion in taxes. In California, illegal immigrants paid $8.5 billion in taxes, making the state one of six that generated more than $1 billion in tax revenue that year from taxes paid by illegal immigrants. California was followed by Texas, at $4.9 billion; New York, at $3.1 billion; Florida, at $1.8 billion; Illinois, at $1.5 billion, and New Jersey, at $1.3 billion.
