Eréndira Rendón, vice president of immigrant justice at The Resurrection Project, advocates for an initiative to provide employment authorization for all undocumented immigrants.
by Roger Fierro
Adriana Valencia, center-right, looks for temporary work while standing outside a Home Depot with Marielis Yepez, right, in Chicago’s New City neighborhood on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. (Trent Sprague/for City Bureau)
When Eréndira Rendón was a freshman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she faced unique challenges that came with being undocumented. Despite being protected from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals federal policy, she felt isolated from her peers and frustrated by the barriers she encountered.
That’s when she realized she had to be the one to make a change.
Now, as vice president of immigrant justice at The Resurrection Project in Chicago, Rendón connects immigrants with legal services and through community organizing. She is a proponent of Work Permits for All, a local offshoot of the national Here to Work campaign that advocates for employment authorization for all undocumented immigrants.
Rendón says this is possible through a policy known as parole, which is different from parole used in the criminal justice system. In the context of immigration, parole grants permission to enter and stay temporarily in the United States, and those who receive it are eligible for employment authorization.
“Our campaign is calling on the Biden administration to utilize his parole authority, and to allow undocumented [residents] to also apply for work authorization,” Rendón says, “as he has been able to do for new immigrants [from Ukraine, Venezuela and Ecuador].”
As tens of thousands of migrants arrived in Chicago over the past two years, Rendón’s voice has become a vital part of the conversation around migrant labor. Here’s what she had to say about the work of immigrant advocates like her.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Why is it important for people who have experience with being undocumented to inform policy?
Nobody cares more about your community than your community itself. It's very important that our community be given a seat at the table to be able to share our stories, and gather with legislators, changemakers and policymakers to come up with solutions.
It's only immigrants like ourselves who are advocating for more holistic solutions that would also help the existing long-term undocumented community. That's because we have to live it, and we know what it feels like to have to work for 20 to 30 years without work authorization. We know what it feels like to not be eligible for many benefits, and to not be eligible for a lot of the systems we actually pay into.
Why do we need Work Permits for All in Illinois? How will this impact labor conditions in the state if it passes?
We need Work Permits for All because it's incredibly beneficial to labor conditions. Right now, what we have is a community that is not protected because of their immigration status, that is exploitable in terms of wages, and vulnerable to being harmed at the workplace. These are people who oftentimes feel like they are not able to exercise their rights because of their immigration status. If you were able to give folks work authorization, then you don't have that class of folks. It also increases our tax base by having more folks in the formal economy instead of the informal economy. We need to make sure that employers are able to hire and employ the immigrant community.
In our reporting, we've heard about the perception that Ukrainian asylum-seekers have had a very different experience than recent arrival immigrants in Chicago. What's your sense of how these groups' experiences differ?
Ukrainians’ experiences obviously had to do with [how] the president utilized parole to quickly allow folks to come into the country and apply for work authorization. It wasn't just the president; Congress passed a bill allowing Ukrainian nationals to qualify for federal benefits like resettlement funding. It allows them to get Medicare and Medicaid — things that even legal permanent residents [who have lived in the U.S. for] under five years cannot do. It also allows them to begin the process of adjusting their status so they can become green card holders and become U.S. citizens.
I wouldn't compare the Ukrainian experience only to Venezuelans, because some Venezuelans and Ecuadorians actually get Temporary Protected Status, where a lot of other folks don't get anything. Ecuadorians and Mexicans are still coming in at historical numbers right now.
Ukrainians are being treated differently from every other immigrant population. It obviously has to do with race, and where Ukraine is geographically. It is unfair for the entire immigrant community. Immigration has always been an unfair system that harms, primarily, immigrants from the global south.
What do you say to immigrants who have waited years for work authorization, and who might be bothered by the reception of recent Venezuelan arrivals? How does your campaign seek to ease some of these tensions?
The way we tried to address that is by advocating for all immigrants to be treated equally, to be able to be given the same opportunities, regardless of what nationality you are from and how long you've been here. So for us, it's not necessarily about seeking unity for the sake of unity, it is about seeking justice. What is just is allowing all immigrants to be able to apply for work authorization.
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