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Damian Oquendo, an organizer of 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, holds a banner outside the Mount Holyoke College campus this month. He and others were rallying to demand fair union contracts before the expiration of the current agreements on June 30. (Douglas Hook / The Republican)Douglas Hook
Some of the recent immigrants who mow lawns, serve food and take out the trash at Mount Holyoke College want what many foreign-born students at the college already have – help with immigration issues.
The Service Employees International Union, representing about 170 employees at the college, is pushing for Mount Holyoke to contribute to a legal fund that would help in advising and defending employees, many of whom work in this country with temporary protected status.
That legal status, as evidenced by recent cases in Florida and across the country, can vanish quickly.
People whose immigration status has been changed need legal defense, an expense often too high for those working service sector jobs like the SEIU workers at the South Hadley college.
The union’s bargaining demand that the college contribute to a legal fund for employees is novel. But Mount Holyoke does provide a version of that service to its foreign-born students.
According to the college’s website, nearly 20% of the college’s students come from other countries. To help those students navigate the sometimes confusing, and recently fast-changing, rules of immigration procedure, the college set up the McCulloch Center for Global Issues. Part of the center’s work is to be “responsible for advising students and faculty about immigration regulations and procedures. We are here foremost as advisors and advocates for you.”
Mount Holyoke is not offering free legal defense for students and professors. It is, though, offering insight and advocacy to people whose immigration status might put them in jeopardy of being deported.
So far, according to SEIU officials, the college has declined to financially support a legal defense fund for its immigrant workers. As many as 35% of the union’s workers at the college are recent immigrants, many with tenuous legal status.
The college’s operating budget is a private matter, so we have no way of knowing how well the institution is managing. Two financial cornerstones, though, are public: the private college, like all educational institutions, pays no property taxes on its campus holdings. Also, the college holds an endowment of just more than $1 billion.
Endowments are not typically used for operating expenses, like salaries and legal defense funds, yet the fund’s size underscores the relative wealth of the small college. And not paying property taxes is in effect an annual gift of millions of dollars.
If the college does not want to set the precedent of paying for its employees’ legal woes, it could at least consider setting up an immigration advice and advocacy center for those workers.
Such a center would help bridge the gap between how the college advocates for its foreign-born students while sitting by regarding the urgent concerns of its immigrant employees.
