Need for workers spurs call for action

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, Oct. 3, 2008 | 2 a.m.

As the nation watched Congress scrambling to try to prop up a struggling economy, a little-known Texas organization rolled out an expensive ad campaign in Las Vegas and four other Western cities last week, hoping to revive another piece of unfinished Capitol Hill business — an immigration law overhaul.

Called Mexicans and Americans Thinking Together, MATT for short, the group launched a slick spot last Thursday that asks viewers whether it’s right to be “stopping short of successful immigration reform,” as Congress did last year when a bill fizzled. The legislation would have bolstered security, legalized millions of illegal immigrants and created a guest worker program.

In the ad, an announcer says the first goal is being achieved, but the second and third have been forgotten.

The advertisement shows a swimmer finishing a race, a bridge half-done — images allusive to the campaign’s main point: Finish what you start.

MATT held a news conference at UNLV that included Jan Jones, a senior vice president of Harrah’s Entertainment, and Tony Sanchez, a senior vice president of NV Energy.

This is noteworthy: Top executives of the state’s second-largest private employer and of the corporate parent of the Las Vegas Valley’s power company publicly backing a specific approach to the undeniably polarizing issue of immigration.

It is also nothing new. For nearly a decade Nevada casinos, hotels and restaurants have supported creating a pathway to legalize workers already here and bring in more workers, joining a national group called the Essential Workers Immigration Coalition in 2000.

Two months after 9/11, Bruce Bommarito, then-chairman of the Nevada Hotel and Lodging Association, said, “The time will come soon when we’re back at full capacity, and we’ll have the same need, employment-wise, as before. Then we’ll need to look at some kind of reform again, and this isn’t in contradiction with security for our nation.”

This is not true everywhere — in Detroit, for example, you don’t hear the chief executive of General Motors saying such things.

Blaine H. Bull, a consultant for MATT, called Nevada very unusual in this regard, and said this could make the state a leader in pushing for change when the issue inevitably returns to Congress.

Jones, who was mayor of Las Vegas during the 1990s, said she would like to believe the architects of Southern Nevada’s economy have come to their position on immigration “because we’re progressive” — but she knows better.

It’s a practical consideration. Many of the service economy’s workers are immigrants, both legal and illegal. A growing economy needs a steady labor supply.

Van Heffner, president of the hotel association, whose members boast 135,000 rooms and 260,000 workers, said, “We strongly support comprehensive immigration reform,” the term coined to describe last year’s failed bill.

With at least 5,000 hotel rooms coming online in the next six months, he said, “we need to continue making certain we get the labor we need.”

As for the allegation that the industry really just wants a steady flow of low-paid workers, Jones points out that most workers who gain legal status and work on the Strip enter the Culinary Union, which fights for higher wages.

Of course, none of this is exempt from politics. MATT’s news release noted that the ad launched a day before the first presidential debate.

Both campaigns have issued Spanish-language ads recently, each accusing the other of positions different from the one their shared support of the failed legislation indicates — an attempt to curry favor with Hispanic voters.

But one thing remains. We should stay tuned to Nevada’s top businesses on immigration, because they won’t be abandoning the issue, now or in the next Congress, no matter who becomes president.