In my five years working for Pride At Work, I’ve seen my share of hate mail. Most of it is standard variety: “gay people are evil,” “the Bible says you’re going to burn in hell” – stuff like that. For someone who was immersed for the first 21 years of life in the Bible Belt of North Carolina, it’s going to take more than that to ruffle my feathers.

Lately though, I’ve been receiving a different type of hate mail. This hate mail is coming from gay people. We’ll call it a gay-on-gay hate.

These folks are not upset that Pride At Work has been a vocal opponent of the war or because of our support of affirmative action. The venom I’m receiving is being directed at me and Pride At Work, not for anything that I perceive as particularly radical; it’s being directed at Pride At Work because of our vocal stance in favor of compassionate immigration reform.

That’s right, we’re receiving hate mail because we’re supporting immigrants, documented and undocumented.

As a member of a community that has been scapegoated so often in the seven years of the Bush administration, it’s disappointing to see so many gay folks using the same venomous language toward the most marginal in our ranks, our immigrant brothers and sisters.

Come on folks, we can do better than this.

For the leadership, membership and staff of Pride At Work, this is a deeply felt issue, and one that we see as fundamental to our collective values of social justice and fairness for all people.

Most of the letters I receive emphasize the need to identify all undocumented immigrants in this country, detain them and then ship them out into the clear blue yonder.

Hello, folks, doesn’t this sound vaguely familiar? Do we not remember our own history with pink and black triangles?

As members of a community that has been rounded up before, the idea of rounding up other people for being illegal immigrants, terrorists or communists should appall us to the deepest degree.

We call for inclusive, comprehensive and compassionate immigration reform because we value all people, regardless of the labels that our government, media and other elites bestow upon them.

People are more than labels. The millions of undocumented workers who are in this country came for the same reasons most of our ancestors did – for the chance to get a well-paying job, a better education and a better life.

This is nothing new. It is the American dream.

New immigrants, too, are chasing the American dream. Their chance at the dream unfortunately intersects with a broken immigration system, one that allows, no, downright encourages employers to recruit undocumented immigrants for jobs that offer substandard wages, exploitation and a lack of safety standards.

The present crisis is not a consequence of the desperate acts of poor and frightened people; it is the consequence of the greed of employers who are hell-bent on seeking out the cheapest labor that they can find. It’s all about their bottom line.

Some may say that they’re against immigration reform because they don’t want to encourage lawbreaking. They forget that many of our ancestors broke laws or were involved in lawbreaking when they came here.

Think of those who fled to America to avoid conscription into the armies of Russia or Germany; those who fled religious and racial persecution in Europe, often breaking all kinds of laws to find safety here; those who were brought here forcibly on illegal slave ships. And remember that many of our forefathers settled on land stolen from American Indians and Mexicans.

And as we have seen from our country’s experience with Wal-Mart, a race to the bottom leaves us all losers.

We also call for compassionate immigration reform because so many of our friends, partners and lovers are caught up in an immigration system that gives them no legal pathway to citizenship. Because our love is seen as second class, our loved ones are denied the right to immigrate to be with us. Our inability to access the benefits of marriage on the federal level paralyzes our relationships when one of us is not a U.S. citizen. Because of institutionalized discrimination, our relationships must exist across oceans and continents.

Let’s move beyond the language of scapegoating. It’s time we stop viewing people as “documented” and “undocumented,” and view them as people.

For more information on compassionate immigration reform, please visit http://aflcio.org/issues/civilrights/immigration and http://www.immigrationequality.org