The AFL-CIO executive council issued what union-activist release Labor Notes called” a remarkable reversal of its previous plan” on immigration in 2000. In the words of Labor Notes, the government called for the instant amnesty for illegal immigrants and the end of employer sanctions.
This speech was a turning point for organized work in America, which had largely backed immigration handle since its inception. Organized labor turned out to be ineffective in the two and a half decades that followed, allowing for a large amnesty for illegal immigrants and democratic expansionist immigration changes. Large Labor has been a steady ally of both Everything Leftist identity-based immigration activists and business halls like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce since the turnaround, presaged by the union’s resistance to rigid immigration-restrictions ideas in the 1990s. This raises the question: Why?
The Old Ways
Naturally, one would believe organized labor may make a plain labor market calculation. If the labor supply is decreased, the pay and fringe benefits may increase, and the labor supply should be under more gang control. According to the British model, union bosses maintain cartel-like control over the labor source, which is why, even in right-to-work says that forbid the payment of union costs, unions attempt to impose an exclusive monopoly on all workers.
Most important members of organized labor worked together until the 1990s, but only a minority of unionists advocated for cross-nationality cooperation. Some of the first “union labels” were promoted by” white labor leagues” in early California, which affirmed that the products had not been made by Asian immigrants ( mostly from China ). Samuel Gompers, president of the Legendary American Federation of Labor, was himself an immigrant to the United States and had a strong stance against Asian immigration. He frequently spoke in openly racist terms. His AFL supported the cruelly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which established a four-decade transition from Europe to Asia.
Gompers was almost exclusively. In response to the controversy surrounding the 1924 Act, A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Pullman Porters ‘ union and the most well-known Black trade unionist in the early 20th century, published an editor calling for an immigration ban in a Black neighborhood newspapers. Cesar Chavez, the farm workers administrator who founded the United Farm Workers of America, was a violent opposition of unlawful immigration.
While the labour movement supported the repeal of national origin restrictions under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act from the 1960s through the 1980s, organizations continued to seek a way to impose immigration laws on companies. Employer-based police made an appeal to labor-liberals of the late 20th century because it was believed that the problems of attacks would fall on the business area and that civil rights of racial minorities may be better protected than under a regime of protection against specific illegal refugees. In exchange for granting legal status to millions of previously illegal immigrants, the Simpson- Mazzoli Act passed an employer-level enforcement regime in 1986, a move that organized labor supported.
Behind the Turn
Simpson-Mazzoli failed to deter or halt illegal border crossings. In the 1990s, Congress had established a bipartisan commission to examine potential changes to immigration policies. The commission recommended tightening caps on immigrant admissions, a reorganization of immigration enforcement in the federal government, and a substantial program of” Americanization” to promote shared values. The late Cornell Industrial and Labor Relations School professor Vernon Briggs, a trade union-friendly academic who served on the board of the ideologically heterodox, single-issue immigration-restrictionism Center for Immigration Studies ( CIS), opposed the legislative package, which sought to codify the commission’s restrictionist recommendations into law.
Four main undercurrents were influencing organized labor’s transition from moderate to effective anti-open borders. According to the left-wing publication The New Republic, no organization in America has been a more steadfast supporter of generous immigration reform than organized labor in 2013.
First, the dominant ideology within organized labor changed a little bit from mid-century liberalism to contemporary Everything Leftism. By the 1990s, the Cold Warriors and the crooks who led Big Labor were on their way out. The new breed of senior union organizers got their start in Students for a Democratic Society and other radical 1960s organizations. Many people would later work diligently through organizations like ACORN and People Organized to Win Employment Rights to organize in the Alinsky-style community. As those groups matured, these activists witnessed the organizing group being absorbed into a traditional union or finding themselves working for Big Labor.
By the mid- 1990s, these activists were reaching the top of Big Labor’s greasy pole and looking to shift the declining labor movement to the left by making alliances with environmentalist, racial and ethnic- interest, and socially liberal groups. When Big Labor sided with the ethnic-interest Left for expansionist immigration, social justice unionism overcame the simple labor- market calculations and cartel- organizing logic of their predecessors.
Second, immigrant workers who were both legally present and not both provided organizing opportunities for the Alinskyite community, ethnic interest groups, and their labor union allies. The best union organizer is a bad boss, according to the old proverb, and this is a trait that is prevalent in underground illegal-immigrant employment: callous disregard for labor laws. For her efforts to mobilize immigrant workers who are subject to extremely unpleasant conditions in the Los Angeles garment industry, Biden Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su won a fellowship from the left-wing MacArthur Foundation.
This also served the ideological needs of the new labor activists. As Su’s critical race theory writings demonstrate, abused illegal immigrants ( or mixed-status immigrants ) were to the left a large source of potential union members who could become activists for broader left-wing interests.
Third, and prominently stated at the time the turn happened, was dissatisfaction with the implementation of Simpson- Mazzoli’s employer sanctions. Employers allegedly used the threat of handing over immigrant (especially illegal-immigrant ) workers to immigration authorities as a barrage of intimidation against workers who were in poor conditions in line. Tom Palley, an AFL- CIO economist, said in a 2001 debate with CIS’s Briggs:
We must remove the ability of employers to take advantage of this pool of workers. That involves, among other things, legalization, possibly trying to give safe harbor to undocumented workers where they are employed in for employer violations of labor law. So you must grant the undocumented worker safe harbor if the employer references the INS and says they are an undocumented worker. That is the way of thinking that the AFL-CIO’s policy is based.
If concerns about enforcement burdens were the stated cause of the change in Big Labor’s immigration program, the unstated justification for that was published two years later in book form from two labor-friendly but not union-affiliated commentators. The Emerging Democratic Majority, written by John Judis, then of The New Republic, and Ruy Teixeira, then of the Century Foundation, proposed that politics in the first decades of the 21st century would be defined by a liberal coalition of working- class voters, single women, urban professionals, and immigrant communities.
Liberal politicians riding immigrants ‘ votes and the votes of sympathetic urban professionals to power could influence the policy changes that could” RETVRN” American labor-employment relations to the 1940s for a labor union movement that is losing power and prestige from economic forces and workers ‘ choices as the conservative Taft-Hacker consensus grew in authority. That these political incentives matched Big Labor’s growing ideological tendencies was merely a bonus was that.
Consequences of the Turn
The turn has far more to do with a trail of confused populist-nationalists and their allies in the ideologically heterodox world of specialized anti-immigration groups ( like CIS), who are unable to comprehend why organized labor rejected its historical labor-market-based analysis of the immigration issue. Leftist organizing organizations with connections to immigrant communities gained traction both within and alongside Big Labor. The unions that are most focused on facilitating immigration, such as SEIU, the UFCW, and Unite Here, have gained influence within Big Labor itself.
In terms of broader context, Big Labor’s pivot on immigration at the turn of the millennium is a significant indicator of the development of social justice unionism, perhaps as significant as John Sweeney’s election as AFL-CIO president. Likewise, the shift and the way it is remembered on the left, as a triumph of progressive mutual interest over mere “business unionism” and self- interest, reveals the extent to which even radical leftism is baked within organized labor’s story of itself.
