LABOR AND THE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS MOVEMENT
By RUTH MILKMAN

Today the U.S. labor movement is a leading defender of immigrant rights. It was not always so. Historically, immigration has often been a wedge issue for organized labor, despite the fact that for most of U.S. history, the nation's working class had a substantial foreign-born component. Labor's role in the 19 th century Chinese exclusion movement is well known. And in the late 20 th century, many unionists feared that the influx of low-wage immigrants, especially the undocumented, posed a threat to hard-won labor standards, and thus favored strong restrictive measures. Organized labor supported the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which, in addition to providing amnesty for many undocumented persons already in the country, tightened border enforcement and introduced sanctions against employers who hired unauthorized immigrants.

IRCA, however, failed to stem the cross-border influx. There are an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States today; the foreign-born population as a whole is more than triple that size. (1) In recent years, unions have become much more receptive to the idea of organizing immigrants, and more supportive of the broader immigrant rights movement.

Highly Receptive

In the aftermath of IRCA's passage, unions began experimenting with immigrant worker organizing, and found that foreign-born workers proved highly receptive to such efforts. The iconic example is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)'s “Justice for Janitors” campaign, which made a dramatic breakthrough in Los Angeles in 1990 and went on to replicate that success in other cities around the nation. Foreign-born workers in other lines of work – ranging from construction and manufacturing to hospitality, home care and other service industries –were also recruited into union ranks in the 1990s. As a result, the gap between unionization rates of native-born and foreign-born workers has virtually closed; native-born workers have a slightly higher overall unionization rate (12.6 percent in the first half of 2007, compared to 10.2 percent for the foreign-born) but this mainly reflects the under-representation of foreign-born workers in the highly unionized public sector. (2)

These recent developments fly in the face of the still-widespread presumption regarding immigrants, especially the undocumented: that they would have little or no interest in or impact on the nation's labor movement. Why should they be willing to take on the considerable risks involved in union organizing? According to the conventional wisdom, the majority are sojourners who intend to return home after a short stay in the United States , and U.S. wages and working conditions compare favorably with the jobs that they left behind in their home countries. Besides, for the undocumented at least, getting involved in organizing might lead to apprehension by the immigration authorities or even deportation.

Yet the available evidence suggests that immigrant workers, including the undocumented, are actually more receptive to union organizing efforts than native-born whites. Not only is this the common impression of organizers on the ground, but it also has been borne out in surveys. For example, a 2001-02 statewide survey in California found that 66 percent of non-citizen respondents, regardless of ethnicity, expressed pro-union sentiments, compared to 54 percent of foreign-born citizens, and only 42 percent of native-born respondents. (3) The organizational successes of the many worker centers that have sprung up around the country in the past decade also testify to the readiness of immigrant workers to organize collectively, if not always in the form of traditional unions.

Immigrant Organizing

Several factors turn out to facilitate immigrant organizing. One is the strength of social networks among working-class immigrants – networks that are essential to basic survival for newcomers with limited resources and that can help galvanize unionization efforts as well as political mobilization. Secondly, class-based, collective organizations like unions are often highly compatible with immigrants' life experiences and worldviews, whereas native-born workers tend to have a more individualistic orientation. And crucially, the stigmatization of immigrants, which begins during the migration process and continues for many years after settlement, means that when unions or worker centers reach out and offer a helping hand, it is often welcomed with enthusiasm. The experience of stigma, and of being under siege in a hostile environment, rather than generating passivity and fear as many observers once presumed, instead can foster solidarity and organization.

In the course of the 1990s, as immigrant union organizing successes became more widely known and employers learned to turn the immigration law to their advantage in resisting such organizing efforts, labor began to rethink its position on immigration policy. The key turning point came in February 2000, when the AFL-CIO Executive Council passed a resolution calling for the repeal of employer sanctions and a path to legalization for the undocumented, while also endorsing immigrant union organizing. From then on, labor's active support helped build political momentum for immigration reform until the events of September 11, 2001 put the issue into the deep freeze.

By the time immigration reform efforts resumed a few years later, the climate had radically shifted, empowering the nation's most xenophobic political forces. In December 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill known as H.R. 4437, which was sponsored by Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin . It included measures that criminalized undocumented immigrants, simply for being present in the United States , as well as those who assisted them. Although it never became law, and indeed initiated a period of ongoing political stalemate over immigration reform, it did galvanize the immigrant rights movement, which mobilized on an unprecedented scale in the spring of 2006, when millions demonstrated in protest against H.R. 4437 in cities across the nation.

Since those gigantic marches, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stepped up its workplace raids and deportations of undocumented immigrants, while also intensifying efforts to police the border. Carefully orchestrated to maximize media exposure, ICE's displays of force, along with other efforts to intimidate and expel foreign-born persons in some localities, seem calculated both to strike fear into the immigrant community and to placate the right-wing xenophobic camp that is such a key Republican constituency. Indeed, in August of this year (2007), the Bush administration announced plans to tighten workplace enforcement by forcing employers to discharge workers whose social security numbers do not match government records. One might doubt the government's capacity to carry out this threat, which could potentially affect millions of workers and their employers, but it nonetheless escalates the level of intimidation dramatically. (4)

Meanwhile, with much less fanfare, immigrants themselves have reacted by pursuing available opportunities for political incorporation. Naturalization applications along with new voter registrations have soared in the past year, among those eligible. These developments – fulfilling the promise displayed on the signs of many of the marchers in the spring 2006 protests, “Hoy Marchamos, Mañana Votamos” (“Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote”) -- have received far less media attention than the ICE raids and the local mobilizations of anti-immigrant forces, but may prove more significant in the long run.

A Virtuous Circle

Even if the short-term prospects for immigration reform are slim, it will not be easy to put the genie back into the bottle. The nation's political landscape already has been significantly altered by the fallout from the spring 2006 events, as the heavily Democratic Latino vote in the November 2006 U.S. midterm elections suggests. The dynamics underlying this shift will only intensify in the years to come, as more naturalized citizens become voters and as new immigrants continue to arrive – with birth rates that greatly outpace those of the native-born. Insofar as anti-immigrant animus remains strongly associated with the Republican Party, thanks to H.R. 4437 and the Bush administration's ICE raids, the growing immigrant vote is likely to be harnessed by the Democratic Party. This presents a great opportunity for organized labor (whose political reach is far more substantial than its relentlessly declining share of the workforce might suggest) to create a virtuous circle between immigration political mobilization and workplace organizing.

In the abortive immigration reform debates in 2006 and 2007, labor was internally divided over proposals for a new guest worker program. The SEIU lent its support to a guest worker provision as part of a package providing a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants already in the United States , on the condition that key protections (e.g. freedom for guest workers to change employers) would be included. The national AFL-CIO, however, opposed the guest worker provision, citing the bracero program (1942-1964) and other historical examples to argue that it would inevitably open the door to new forms of immigrant exploitation.

This division roughly mirrored the 2005 split in the labor movement, in which seven unions, led by SEIU, left the AFL-CIO and formed the rival Change to Win (CTW) federation. Although not all CTW affiliates embraced the SEIU position on the guest worker issue, most did so. In general, the unions that have been most active in organizing immigrants in recent years are concentrated in the CTW camp – SEIU, UNITE HERE, the Laborers and the Carpenters, and, of course, the United Farm Workers. By contrast, most AFL-CIO affiliates, rooted in the public sector, old-line manufacturing, transportation, communication and the elite building trades, still represent an overwhelmingly native-born constituency – and at the rank-and-file level there is still considerable ambivalence about immigration in many of these unions.

Tactical Disagreement, But Strategic Consensus

Precisely because SEIU and some other CTW affiliates already have a substantial foreign-born membership, including a significant proportion who are undocumented, they were keenly interested in helping to secure a political compromise on immigration that included a path to legalization – even if they had to hold their noses and go along with a guest worker provision that, by all accounts, would have been an essential feature of any politically feasible legislative package. By contrast, the AFL-CIO could afford to take a stand based on abstract principle, given its overwhelmingly U.S.-born membership, few among whom see a path to legalization for the undocumented as an urgent matter.

But this was a tactical disagreement, not one about basic policies or principles. At this point, the leadership of organized labor in both the AFL-CIO and CTW is strongly supportive of immigrant workers and their rights. And virtually no one in the House of Labor failed to see the enormous potential of immigrant organizing manifested in the massive spring 2006 protests. Shortly afterward, indeed, both the CTW-affiliated Laborers' union and the AFL-CIO itself built formal relationships with the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, and now more and more unions on both the CTW and AFL-CIO side are venturing into immigrant organizing. In short, regardless of their differences on other issues, leaders in both of the nation's union federations recognize that the labor movement's revival – perhaps even its survival – will depend in large part on organizing immigrant workers alongside the native-born, both in the workplace and at the ballot box.

Notes

1. Jeffrey S. Passel, “The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S. : Estimates Based on the March 2005 Current Population Survey,” Pew Hispanic Center Research Report, March 7, 2006, p. 4. Available online at: http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf

2. Computed from U.S. Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group data for the first six months of 2007, using unrevised sampling weights. See http://www.irle.ucla.edu/research/pdfs/unionmembership07-bw.pdf.

3. Margaret Weir, “Income Polarization and California 's Social Contract,” The State of California Labor 2002 ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 2002), p. 121. Available online at: http://www.irle.ucla.edu/research/scl/pdf02/scl2002ch5.pdf

4. This article was submitted for publication on August 25, 2007. In the weeks before and after the essay's publication (October 2007), the author anticipates there will be further developments on immigration enforcement issues.

Ruth Milkman is professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California , Los Angeles . Her most recent book is L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).

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