solidarities and restrictions: labor and immigration policy in the united states

Volume 10, Issue 1 2012 Article 6

The Forum

LABOR IN AMERICAN POLITICS

Solidarities and Restrictions: Labor andImmigration Policy in the United States

Janice Fine, Rutgers University - New Brunswick/Piscataway

Daniel J. Tichenor, University of Oregon

Recommended Citation:Fine, Janice and Tichenor, Daniel J. (2012) "Solidarities and Restrictions: Labor andImmigration Policy in the United States," The Forum: Vol. 10: Iss. 1, Article 6.DOI: 10.1515/1540-8884.1495

©2012 De Gruyter. All rights reserved.

Brought to you by | Rutgers UniversityAuthenticated | 192.12.88.131

Download Date | 11/13/12 7:38 PM

Solidarities and Restrictions: Labor andImmigration Policy in the United States

Janice Fine and Daniel J. Tichenor

AbstractIn American labor’s response to immigration over time, one can observe “a movement

wrestling” between restrictionist and solidaristic positions. A crucial transformation of Americanlabor’s response to immigration occurred from the 1930s to the 1960s which is attributed to fourfactors: changes in the structure and composition of the labor market, shifts in immigration flows,shifts in the attitudes of the labor movement toward immigrants, and the changing disposition ofthe American state toward unions. In this article we look at the policy choices and dilemmas thathave faced the American labor movement since the 1940’s, putting forth a conceptual frameworkfor understanding labor’s shifting positions over time and identifying critical moments in Americanpolitical development. Having laid this foundation, we move on to a consideration of labor’s mostrecent positions concerning contemporary policy debates.

KEYWORDS: labor, immigration, unions, movements, policy



Immigration poses difficult choices for national unions dedicated to defending the rights and economic lot of workers who, despite globalization, still live and work in individual nation-states. Immigration has always vexed the US labor movement because it is a country long dependent upon immigrant labor but at times locked in pitched battles over the ethnic, racial, and religious diversity that these newcomers introduce. We are a nation built upon immigration, but also one with strong nativist traditions.

In American labor’s response to immigration over time, one can observe “a movement wrestling” between restrictionist and solidaristic positions.1

There have been historical moments when the U.S. labor movement followed a strategy of sweeping restriction, times when it expressed solidarity

Labor’s dilemma is whether to advocate for restrictive policies to close labor markets and preserve labor standards for the existing native and naturalized workforce, or to champion more open or solidaristic policies in order to organize immigrant workers and preserve labor standards for all. Complicating the picture further, “two restrictionisms” have animated the labor movement on questions of immigration—restriction on the basis of defending labor standards and restriction on the basis of racial and ethnic hierarchies—as well as “two solidarities”—solidarity on the basis of defending labor standards and solidarity on the basis of unifying diverse races and ethnicities within one labor movement.

2

In this article we look at the policy choices and dilemmas that have faced the American labor movement since the 1940’s, putting forth a conceptual framework for understanding labor’s shifting positions over time and identifying critical moments in American political development. Having laid this foundation,

with new immigrants, and still other periods when it has combined restrictive and expansive stances toward newcomers. These findings revise familiar conclusions of scholars who presume that U.S. organized labor persistently opposed immigration until a sharp break in the late twentieth century. By contrast, we argue that the American labor movement underwent a gradual evolution, from predominantly restrictionist positions on immigrant admissions and membership to more expansive ones, because of policy learning and legacies that proved durable and conditioned the movement’s responses in later periods.

1 Janice Fine and Daniel J. Tichenor A Movement Wrestling: American Labor’s Enduring Struggle with Immigration 1866-2007, Studies in American Political Development, Volume 23 (October 2009), 218–248. 2 Strictly speaking, one might propose “expansionism” as a conceptual opposite to “restrictionism.” Though “expansion” is used when that is an aim in itself, more often American labor has found itself divided over how to respond to labor market changes it does not control. Thus “solidarity”—in either the material or ethnic sense—is the primary strategic alternative to restricting entry to the nation or the labor market. This analytical choice is thus consistent with these authors’ efforts to foreground union strategy in this analysis.

1Fine and Tichenor: Solidarities and Restrictions

Published by De Gruyter, 2012Brought to you by | Rutgers University

Authenticated | 192.12.88.131Download Date | 11/13/12 7:38 PM

we move on to a consideration of labor’s most recent positions concerning contemporary policy debates.

What Shapes American Labor’s Policy Positions?

A crucial transformation of American labor’s response to immigration occurred from the 1930s to the 1960s – a pivotal period often neglected by scholars studying immigration and American unionism. In these decades, the labor movement organized unskilled industrial workers at unprecedented levels, won more support from the national state than ever before, and gradually rejected the restrictive immigration policies it had championed so vociferously in the Progressive Era. Inside the movement, unskilled workers, many first or second generation Americans from southern and eastern Europe, once deemed unassimilable by many union leaders, became targets for unprecedented levels of union recruitment.

To understand this seachange, let us consider the broader dynamics that influence labor movement responses to immigration. In particular, there have been four important sources of security or insecurity for the labor movement over the course of American political development. First, change in the structure of the labor market has had profound implications for the movement. During the Gilded Age, for example, labor market dislocations such as mass production, industrialization, and corporate growth created tremendous insecurity for unions and their leaders. By contrast, the post-World War II era yielded substantial stability in the labor market that fortified organized labor’s standing. Second, the number of immigrant and foreign workers entering the country on a regular basis also influences the movement’s ability to organize and promote its goals. Mass immigration or the importation of large numbers of temporary foreign workers has the potential to undermine the power of unions, while a less porous labor force provides a more stable playing field. Third, beyond the volume of foreign labor flows lie perceptions of racial threat associated with “new” immigrants. Racial and ethnic hostilities trumped universalistic ideals within the labor movement for nearly every new immigrant group, from Chinese and southern and eastern Europeans to Latinos. Yet over time, experience with assimilating these groups into unions and changing racial views of federation leadership provided more traction for solidaristic views of nontraditional immigrants as promising recruits deserving of sorority and fraternity. Finally, the disposition of the American state, the executive branch, congress and the courts, toward the labor movement clearly has shaped its relative security or insecurity. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, government repression or indifference created a tenuous and rigid order for unions. In the New Deal years and its aftermath, the national state became a more trusted and reliable ally of the

2 The Forum Vol. 10 [2012], No. 1, Article 6



labor movement until the Reagan era when state support dramatically waned. Table 1 captures how the changing structure of the labor market, new workers, and the state’s disposition can nurture either a secure or insecure environment for the U.S. labor movement.

Table 1. Labor Movement Environments

External Forces Nurtures Insecurity Nurtures Security Labor Market/Structural Forces Scale of Immigration/ Temporary For. Workers Racial Antipathy/ Xenophobia Toward “New Immigrants” The State/Governmental Stance on Unions

Dislocation/new

challenges

High volume; porous labor force

New Ethnic/ Racial Groups

Perceived as Unsuited for Union Membership

Repressive or Indifferent

Stable

Low volume

New Ethnic/ Racial Groups Perceived as Promising Recruits

Supportive

Labor and Immigration Policy in the Post-War Period During the post–World War II years, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) assumed rival positions on national immigration and refugee policy. This divide was already evident in the 1930s, when the CIO joined with pro-immigration groups in supporting special admissions for those seeking to escape Nazi repression and genocide, whereas the AFL joined nativists in battling successfully to deny visas to desperate refugees.3

3 Stephen Wise, Challenging Years (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 239.

Formed in 1935, the CIO was motivated by the desire of key national unions to organize the largely unskilled immigrant workforces of the new mass production industries and those unions’ impatience with the AFL’s craft-union approach. The




CIO provided a vehicle for organization and security to the millions of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who had arrived prior to the first world war and to the black migrants from the South who came north after the flow of migration abated.4 These workers occupied the bottom ranks of mass production labor in the unorganized industries, whereas AFL trade unions were largely composed of older Germans, Danes, Scots, and Britons. This environment was marked by the growing dominance of industrial unionism and its incorporation of southern and eastern Europeans, new alliances with the national state to minimize economic insecurities, and low levels of immigration. It is perhaps not surprising that the CIO from the start looked more favorably than the AFL on immigration in general and was willing to override quotas on behalf of World War II refugees. By contrast, the AFL was adamant that “any lowering of the immigration bars be opposed, and . . . all phases of traditional immigration policy be maintained.”5

After the war the AFL eventually supported liberal efforts to assist European refugees. But it also staunchly backed the McCarran-Walter bill of the early 1950s, which sought to maintain stringent limits on Asian, African, and southern and eastern European immigration. The CIO denounced the bill, labeling it “one of the most severe blows to civil liberties, as well as to American relations with citizens of foreign nations” and called for its repeal.

6 National immigration policy, a CIO resolution declared, “should be liberal and democratic and make no distinction among immigrants on grounds of race, religion or color.”7

As it had in the past, the AFL pledged support for the national origins quotas, but joined other labor organizations in expressing alarm that Mexican Braceros and unauthorized migrants had “depressed wages and destroyed working conditions.” In 1951 the AFL proclaimed that the presence of hundreds of thousands of Braceros, coupled with an estimated 1.5 million undocumented aliens, compromised the “security” of American workers. That same year, CIO President Philip Murray denounced INS failures to prevent illegal immigration from Mexico in his report to the convention. “As long as the Mexican border remains ‘an open sieve’,” he warned, “the influx of wetbacks will continue to displace hundreds of thousands of American agricultural laborers and seriously lower working standards.”

8

4 In fact, by the end of the World War II, half a million black workers had joined CIO unions.

Their warnings fell on deaf ears. In 1951 restrictionist legislators, including Senators McCarran and Eastland, shepherded Public Law 78

5 American Federation of Labor, Proceedings of the Annual Conventions, 1946 bound volume, Resolution 85, p.250, George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, Maryland. 6 Proceedings of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1952, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 131. Cornell University archives. 7 Ibid. 278–279. 8 Ibid. 126–127.




through Congress, reauthorizing the Bracero program, claiming that to do otherwise would be “unfair to the farmer and the Mexican involved.”9

The AFL’s failure to curb Mexican temporary worker programs had no bearing on its support of the McCarran-Walter bill. Indeed, federation lobbyist Walter Mason, at the direction of the AFL, denounced an expansive Humphrey-Lehman-Roosevelt bill because it promised to undermine “the spirit of the Quota Act of 1924” and “disturb the ethnic equilibrium of this country.”

10

The 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO brought about an enduring shift in organized labor’s role in national immigration politics. In contrast to the AFL, the CIO and its affiliated unions were longtime supporters of both refugee relief and the dismantlement of the national origins quota system. As Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and CIO explained to Congress in 1955, “many thousands of members of CIO unions themselves immigrated to this country, including Philip Murray, the late President of the CIO.”

In its defense of national origins quotas, the AFL stood by an immigrant admissions system premised on racial and ethnic bias.

11 Because of its rich ethnic tradition, he observed, the CIO was offended by the preferential treatment of northern and western European immigrants and the idea that an “ideal racial composition can be frozen.”12 Although the AFL had traditionally taken a more restrictionist stance, especially on the necessity of quotas, even before the merger with the CIO, several northern state-level Federations of Labor had challenged the AFL’s position on immigration policy. The ascendance of George Meany, who favored both the AFL-CIO merger and liberal immigration reform, to the presidency of the AFL in these years was also significant. No sooner had Meany assumed the helm of the newly merged labor organization in 1955 than he promptly fired the AFL’s director of legislative affairs, a longtime defender of immigration restriction. 13

9 David Reimers, Still the Golden Door (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 54.

Soon after the merger, the AFL-CIO Executive Committee made immigration reform one of its top priorities. Demands included increased annual admissions to 250,000 and the “abolishment of the national origins quota system entirely.” Organized labor’s defection from the restrictionist camp leveled a serious blow at postwar nativists.

10 Notes of the Legislative Department of the American Federation of Labor on Immigration, 1952, AFL. AFL-CIO Legislative Department Papers, Meany Memorial Archives. 11 Walter Reuther, CIO representative, statement before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, November 21, 1955. Papers of the AFL, AFL-CIO Legislative Dept, Box 27, Folder 16. 12 Ibid. 13 Interview with Andrew Biemiller, May 22, 1979, by Alice M. Hoffman.George Meany Center for Labor Studies Oral History Project, AFL-CIO Merger, Collection 15, Box 1, Folder 4, Meany Memorial Archives.




In 1963, during the Kennedy administration, organized labor finally fulfilled a long-standing wish. Joining with religious groups and welfare rights organizations, it helped terminate the Bracero program. On the heels of this success, in 1965 the AFL-CIO joined a variety of ethnic, economic, and human rights groups to work closely with the Johnson White House and pro-immigration reformers in Congress to dismantle the national origins quota system. It was a clear renunciation of organized labor’s earlier endorsement of restriction on the basis of race. Reformers did not anticipate that the new ceiling on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, combined with the end of the Bracero program, would swell unauthorized Mexican inflows. The dramatic rise in unauthorized immigration was unmistakable and troubling to decision makers. For labor, finding a solution to unfettered Mexican immigration was unfinished business.

The initially progressive character of fighting illegal immigration in the 1970s was confirmed for many liberal Democrats by the struggle of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Association (FWA). The movement focused on winning decent wages and working conditions for Mexican American agricultural workers. The campaign to organize farmworkers focused attention on undocumented aliens who were imported by growers to break the grape-pickers’ strike. At congressional hearings and in publications, Chavez and the United Farm Workers, a new AFL-CIO affiliate that succeeded the FWA, assailed the INS for doing little to discourage illegal immigration.14

During the early 1970s the AFL-CIO’s Legislative Department mobilized broad support in the U.S. House for employer sanctions legislation, but as the decade progressed, new Latino and Hispanic lobbies vigorously opposed the idea. In 1975 the UFW and Chavez were persuaded by Latino groups to oppose only undocumented aliens who engaged in strike-breaking activities. The UFW also announced new support for a generous amnesty program.

15 In the same year, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) served notice that it was campaigning to unionize undocumented aliens because of their enduring presence in the garment industry. ILGWU officials publicly explained that their new policy toward unauthorized workers reflected an inability on the part of the federal government “to do anything about illegal immigrants.” 16

14 See El Malcriado: The Voice of the Farm Worker (newsletter of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee) 11 (March 15, 1968); and the unpublished testimony of Chavez before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, quoted in Kitty Calavita, Inside the State (New York: Routledge, 1992), 155.

Among prominent Latino labor groups, only the AFL-CIO’s Labor Council for Latin American

15 “Chavez Shifts Views of Illegals,” reprinted in “Illegal Aliens”: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and International Law, February 4, 26, March 5, 12, 13, and 19, 1975, 82–83. 16 Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1975.




Advancement (LCLAA) remained stridently opposed to illegal immigration. For its part, Congress was deadlocked for the rest of the decade.

In 1986, the AFL-CIO threw its weight behind passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), a compromise package of watered-down employer sanctions provisions, legalization for undocumented aliens living in the country since 1982, enhanced Border Patrol resources, and a new seasonal agricultural worker program to appease grower interests. IRCA legalized millions and also attempted to put policies in place that would curb the growth of the undocumented workforce, but it was ultimately frustrated by the inefficacy of its employer sanctions provision. Rather than preventing employers from hiring the undocumented, the sanctions actually gave them cover. Although the law required them to ask for documents, it did not require employers to verify their authenticity. As a consequence, employers were able to follow the letter of the law while still hiring large numbers of undocumented workers. Growing evidence suggested that some employers were following a strategy of selective verification as a tool for foiling union organizing drives.17 Several of those most involved in organizing low-wage immigrant workers, including the International Ladies Garment Workers (ILGWU), the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), once supportive of employer sanctions, began passing resolutions calling for repeal as early as 1992.18

By the late 1980s it was clear to national policymakers that the IRCA had done virtually nothing to discourage illegal immigration. But legislators were eager to shift their attention to the easier task of expanding legal immigration. The Immigration Act of 1990, which expanded annual visa allocations by 40 percent, unified ethnic groups, humanitarian organizations, labor unions and the AFL-CIO, business groups, and free market conservatives. It benefited both family-based and employment-based immigration and increased the number of temporary employment-based immigrants. Tellingly, in the same year the AFL-CIO, long the most strident advocate of employer sanctions, made little effort to press for stronger enforcement amid new illegal immigration. Instead, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland joined fellow members of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in lobbying for more vigorous enforcement of job antidiscrimination protections for Latinos, Asians, and legal aliens.

19

Between 1990 and 2000 in sheer numbers, more immigrants arrived in the United States than during any previous period in American history. In just ten

17 See Chisti, 71–76. 18 See Leah Haus, “Openings in the Wall: Transnational Migrants, Labor Unions and U.S. Immigration Policy,” International Organization 49, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 299–304. 19 Lane Kirkland to Lawrence Siskind, February 16, 1989, Addition. Papers of the Coalition on Civil Rights, Container 46, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.




years, the immigrant population in the United States grew by one million persons per year, rising from 19.8 million to 31.1 million. 20 By 2005, foreign-born workers accounted for 14% of the civilian labor force--7.2 million of these were undocumented immigrants--accounting for close to 5% of the labor force. The largest percentage of the new arrivals came from Mexico and other countries of Central America. Meanwhile, the American labor movement had continued a steady decline from representing about 1 private sector worker in 3 outside of the south in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to 1 in 7 by 2000 and 1 in 12 by 2005. To some national unions, immigrant workers toiling under difficult conditions for low wages in overwhelmingly private sector jobs represented the possibility of a large new constituency that could be brought into union membership. For them, the priority was to pursue immigration policies that could help facilitate organizing these workers. Indeed, a 2004 Migration Policy Institute analysis concluded that between 1996 and 2003, the number of foreign-born union members had increased by 28 percent, while the number of native union members had declined by 6 percent.21

Strikingly, it was in the context of the massive wave of immigration and the unprecedented numbers of undocumented workers of the 1990s that the AFL-CIO, rather than returning to a restrictionist approach, reversed course in 1999 and called for the repeal of the employer sanctions provision it had strongly supported as part of the IRCA. In adopting the new position, the AFL-CIO had come to the conclusion that employer sanctions were a failed strategy. The same Executive Council resolution that forswore opposition to employer sanctions also called for expanding the organizing rights of immigrant workers, a broad amnesty for the undocumented, and immigrant admissions based on family reunification. The comprehensiveness of this approach represented the culmination of a shift in the federation’s outlook and strategy, which had begun in the 1970s when the federation provided strong support for farmworker organizing and later in that decade came out in support of a broad amnesty program. It also reflected efforts by important international unions throughout the 1990s to organize the undocumented while disavowing employer sanctions. It was a gradual but ultimately decisive shift from viewing unskilled foreign-born Latino and largely undocumented workers as unorganizable and pursuing policies to exclude them, to seeing these workers as instrumental to building the membership of the labor movement and pursuing policies to extend them legal status.

22

20 See Diane Schmidley, Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Special Studies No. P23-206, December 2001.

21 “Immigrant Union Members Numbers and Trends,” Migration Policy Institute Immigration Facts 7 (May 2004). 22 According to Haus in Unions, Immigration and Internationalization the federation evolved toward support for a more and more expansive amnesty from the late 1970s to 1986, when it




The federation’s new position spurred increased activism on behalf of an expansive immigration policy, but there would be tremendous division within the “House of Labor” over specifics. In particular, the primacy of opposition to guest worker programs within a larger package of immigration reform would become a significant subject of struggle within the movement.

In the summer of 2005 five AFL-CIO unions, amounting to more than a third of American union membership, formally left the federation and formed a new labor coalition, Change to Win.23 The loss was quite dramatic: between 2005 and 2006 the federation lost 4,476,375 members because of this split. 24 The rupture was largely over political control of the federation, although some of its momentum had to do with impatience over the pace of organizing and a perception of the AFL-CIO’s unwillingness or inability to hold affiliates accountable for making it their top priority. Four of the five founding unions of the new Change to Win Coalition had the largest numbers of foreign-born workers in their membership bases of the entire Federation and had ambitions to organize millions more. 25

In the months following the institutional rift, rather than retreating from its immigration work, the AFL-CIO intensified it. Top-level AFL-CIO staff, working out of the general counsel’s office as part of the Immigrant Workers Project,

26

supported amnesty for all undocumented workers who had resided in the United States for one year prior to enactment of the new law, and explicitly discussed amnesty as an organizing tool. Pp 306–308.

pursued several strategies, including lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform legislation; working with affiliates to strengthen local union representation of immigrant members; building partnerships with grassroots, community-based immigrant worker organizations and litigating to defend immigrant workers’ rights. Labor on both sides of the split were extremely involved in the huge

23 The unions were SEIU, UNITE-HERE, the Laborers International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Teamsters. They were joined by another AFL-CIO union, the United Farm Workers, as well as the Carpenters, who left the Federation in 2003. 24 Authors’ calculations based on the Directory of US Labor Organizations, 2006 and 2007 eds. (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs). 25 See Brian Burgoon and Wade Jacoby, “Is Immigration Dividing U.S. Labor?” (paper prepared for the British Journal of Industrial Relations Conference, London, March 2006). Using occupation-level data, the authors estimate the foreign-born proportions of the core occupations of the different Change to Win unions as 24 percent in cleaning and building services (SEIU, HERE), 16 percent in health-care services (SEIU), and 23 percent in construction labor (LIUNA). See page 30 and figure 7, “Foreign-born Shares of Change to Win Coalition Compared with Total Employment.” 26 In some ways this latest effort was also a continuation of projects begun years earlier. In 1987, as part of the AFL’s evolving support for amnesty and organizing immigrant workers, the federation established the Labor Immigrant Assistance Project, which was directed by the Los Angeles central labor body. See Haus, Unions, Immigration and Internationalization p. 307.




immigrant rights rallies and the campaign for comprehensive immigration reform that unfolded during 2006 and 2007.

Labor leaders within Change to Win, several of whom had led the campaign to reverse the federation’s position on employer sanctions, concluded that the federation’s hard-line opposition to a guest worker program prevented a workable policy compromise with business. Feeling that reform was within reach, in exchange for a means of legalizing roughly twelve million undocumented immigrants in the United States, they acquiesced to an expansive temporary worker program in some form. In contrast, the AFL-CIO adopted the position that once a labor market shortage and legitimate employer need for new immigrant workers was established, it should be met by increasing legal permanent resident (LPR) visas rather than expanding temporary programs.

Ultimately, the AFL-CIO and many other unions, including some of the Change to Win membership, opposed the Border Security and Immigration Act of 2007. The Act included significant new funding for border security and other interior enforcement measures, a graduated system of earned legalization for qualified undocumented immigrants and a shift to a “merit-based” points system. It also proposed a temporary worker program of 200,000 workers to be admitted for a two year period, eligible for renewal twice, as long as the worker spent a period of one year outside of the United States between each admission (which eventually had a five-year sunset provision). When it looked as though the measure would die, however, other Change to Win unions worked with business organizations and the White House behind the scenes to resurrect it. Despite these efforts, the grand bargain met its final demise in the summer of 2007.27

The 2007 debate was a unique moment in the American labor movement’s struggles over immigration. Rather than demonstrating a clear-cut division between “restriction” and “solidarity” within organized labor, both sides in this debate pursued solidarity and championed immigrant rights. The differences within the movement over the amnesty-for-guest worker tradeoff, although bitter, were an illustration of a labor movement wrestling over the best strategy to defend labor standards while welcoming new immigrant workers as the lifeblood of a revitalized labor movement.

To be clear, the defeat came not at the hands of labor unions, but at the hands of a powerful, grassroots, anti-immigration mobilization that ultimately blocked the business lobbies from mobilizing the necessary Republican votes.

27 The actual vote was on invoking cloture, and it was 46 Y, 53 N.




Explaining the Shift The AFL-CIO’s evolution toward more solidaristic policies in the postwar period can be attributed to the four factors we discussed above: changes in the structure and composition of the labor market, shifts in immigration flows, shifts in the attitudes of the labor movement toward immigrants, and the changing disposition of the American state toward unions. In particular, the relatively secure environment of the postwar period provided the labor movement with a mostly stable labor market, limited to modest inflows of foreign workers, and greater support and protection from the national state.

The rise of industrial unionism reflected a new orientation toward unskilled workers. “Within the brief span of six years, American workers in the basic industrial sector of the nation witnessed the transformation of their bargaining structures from relatively impotent bodies into equal partners in the industrial relations system,” writes Walter Galenson in his definitive account of the CIO’s rise. “It is no exaggeration to say that there was a fundamental, almost revolutionary change in the power relationships of American society.”28 The AFL strongly responded to the challenge posed by the CIO by engaging in its own aggressive organizing and succeeded in preventing the CIO from penetrating its existing areas of strength. It grew from 2,317,500 members in 1933, to 3,516,400 in 1936, to over 4 million in 1940.29

From 1901 to 1920 the flow of legal immigrants into the United States was approximately 600,000 per year. Between 1921 and 1950, however, the flow of legal immigrants into the United States was only 100,000 per year (excluding Mexicans coming through Bracero). During the time when the nation’s gates were all but closed to newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, unskilled workers who had arrived earlier in the century were organized and incorporated into unions as never before. Ironically, it was the low levels of immigration mandated by the national origins quota acts—the major policy legacy of labor’s virulently restrictionist period during the early 1900s—that facilitated labor’s enduring reorientation toward expansionism.

AFL unions were transformed by the rise of mass production, evolving from strict craft unions of skilled workers, led by the Machinists and the Teamsters. As Foner notes, the AFL unions “ultimately responded to the CIO challenge by becoming semi-industrial unions of multiple crafts and skills.”

In addition to the volume of foreign labor flows are long-standing perceptions of racial threat associated with new immigrants. As history has 28 Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 73. 29 Christopher L. Tomlins, “AFL Unions in the 1930’s: Their Performance in Historical Perspective” The Journal of American History, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Mar. 1979) p. 1023.




unfolded, there has been an expansion by fits and starts of whom labor believes it can and should include. When this occurs, we observe the cognitive migration of certain categories of the previously excluded, such as unskilled workers and southern and eastern European workers in the 1930’s, from labor’s restriction column, where the strategy is chiefly one of attempting to keep people out, to the solidarity column, where the strategy shifts to policies that facilitate organizing them into the movement. In the same period however, particularly for the AFL, far less tolerant views of Mexican workers predominated. Also, it was not until World War II, when the AFL, following the lead of the U.S. government rejected its classic support for Chinese exclusion. Anti-Mexican worker views shifted gradually between the 1970’s and the 1990’s and then dramatically when organized labor made a historic shift away from employer sanctions. Indeed, labor leaders recognized new Latino and Asian immigrants as a crucial means to revitalize the movement as they had earlier waves of immigrants.

Finally, the disposition of the American state—the executive branch, Congress, and the courts—toward the labor movement clearly has shaped its relative security or insecurity. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, government repression or indifference created a tenuous and rigid order for unions. During the period from 1935 through World War II, the labor movement functioned far more as a central institution of industrial capitalism than as an interest group. 30 This was especially the case during the war and immediately afterward, when labor and capital were involved in peak-level bargaining of a truly corporatist nature, with the state playing a decisive role.31

30 Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen suggest “that organizations come to be regarded as institutions to the extent that their existence and operation become in a specific way publicly guaranteed and privileged” and discuss unions as institutions: “[A]s long as trade unions are mere organizations, they can be suppressed and may even be outlawed by a hostile government. In some societies however, where their existence and activities have become protected by collective values and politically enacted norms, they constitute a socially sanctioned constraint for economic actors.” In the view of the authors of this chapter, during certain limited periods American labor becomes an institution, but it unbecomes one later on. See Streeck and Thelen, “Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,” in Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.12.

The Wagner Act of 1935 enshrined private sector workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively in federal law, placing the federal government for the first time on record in favor of a system of industrial relations that recognized the

31 The War Labor Board (WLB) and Office of Price Administration (OPA) were key institutions that took on the management of wage and price relations within and between industries. According to Lichtenstein, the WLB not only helped unions add five million new workers in three years, but also mandated grievance and seniority systems, sick leave, paid mealtimes, vacation pay, and other benefits that were the goal of prewar organizing and bargaining campaigns. Lichtenstein, State of the Unions: A Century of American Labor (Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 102.




legitimacy of unions. In the New Deal years and their aftermath, the national state became a more trusted and reliable ally of the labor movement, until the Reagan era, when state support dramatically waned.

Significantly, the new commitments of this formative period had staying power as organized labor faced the insecurities of the Reagan revolution and globalized markets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a result of relentless globalization, offshoring, and unchecked corporate power, industrial unions have taken an extraordinary beating. Labor’s strong perception of the state as overwhelmingly hostile to its interests was reinforced by the passage of the NAFTA in 1994, the rise of an extremely effective union-busting industry resulting in the firing of tens of thousands of workers seeking to organize unions, and numerous NLRB decisions deleterious to organizing. Yet the profound labor market dislocations dealt to labor unions by lean production and globalization, the increasingly entrenched anti-union stance of the national state, and even the large inflows of undocumented workers did not lead to a policy of renewed restrictionism. Rather, the labor movement continued to strongly support amnesty, coupled with at least a rhetorical commitment to organizing the millions of unskilled immigrants, including the undocumented.

In a perilous environment for the movement that harkens back to the Gilded Age, one might reasonably expect a new restrictionism. Yet even as the global economy remade the labor market, record numbers of unskilled immigrants from Asia and Latin America arrived, and the government ceased to be a trusted protector, leaders of the movement targeted noncitizens for recruitment, endorsed expansive immigration policies, and rejected racial and ethnic hierarchies of its past. This remarkably novel approach toward immigration in an insecure environment reflects the logics and legacies of the New Deal period—a more stable time when American unions enjoyed greater leverage and their leadership first organized unskilled workers and then slowly but decisively abandoned immigration restriction.

Having shifted with the organization of vast numbers of immigrant workers by the CIO and the AFL (as well as the CIO’s emphatic embrace of refugee relief and rejection of national origins quotas) and shifted again decisively with the strong campaign to overturn national origins quotas by the AFL-CIO in the 1950s and 1960s, labor leadership had a durable new set point on immigration policy, which did not allow it to fall back to a restrictionist position and in fact helped to propel it further into the expansionist camp.

Bringing the Story Up to Date

After the defeat of CIR in the Spring of 2007, the AFL-CIO continued building ties to the immigrant rights movement through working with worker center




networks and also becoming a central player in the legal defense of immigrant workers’ rights. As key players at the Federation saw it, much of the dissension within their ranks went away with the unions that split to form Change to Win. Those remaining were united in the view that there needed to be a legalization program for the 10-12 million undocumented residing in the country along with the establishment of a system for “future flow”—which would address how levels of employment-based temporary and permanent immigrant admissions would be set going forward. Ana Avendano, Assistant to the President and Director of Immigration and Community Action for the AFL-CIO was hopeful that a consensus position could be achieved and believed its achievement instrumental to building labor support for CIR.32

The AFL-CIO asked former Democratic Labor Secretary Ray Marshall to chair a special committee on immigration that had as its mission bringing unions together around development and adoption of a common position on immigration reform.

33

Among some of the building trades unions there was a view that immigration itself, rather than industry or government, was responsible for rampant misclassification of workers as independent contractors by employers and that the way to curtail it was to require employers to verify the immigration status of workers through e-verify. The white collar union International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) had been campaigning for reform of the H-1B and L-1 visa programs, arguing that employers were hungry for these visas because they made it possible to hire skilled foreign workers for less money—not because there was a shortage of similarly qualified domestic workers.

Well known for his efforts to raise labor standards, Marshall had the standing to visit with the principals of many national unions including construction unions like the bricklayers, ironworkers and electricians who felt that construction was being disproportionately impacted by immigration and had historically been hostile to the Federation’s support for reform and bring them into a process. Marshall also met with agricultural unions including the Farm Labor Organizing Committee that had long been working to unionize migrant workers in the fields including those who were working for R.J. Reynolds.

34

32 Author’s interview with Ana Avendano, January 31, 2012.

According to Avendano, the common thread running through Marshall’s conversations with national unions was the perception that immigration was undermining labor standards. The other issue was the labor leaders’ own electoral imperatives: how could they advocate for

33 The Labor Movement’s Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, AF L-CIO and Change to Win, April 2009 http://www.aflcio.org/issues/civilrights/immigration/upload/immigrationreform041409.pdf 34 “Guest Worker Programs and the STEM Workforce”, Fact Sheet 2011, IFPTE




increased levels of immigration when substantial percentages of their members were unemployed?

Weighing all of the different issues raised by the various national unions, he developed the framework that would comprise the basis for labor’s new immigration policy consensus. The basic tenets of the policy were:

1. An independent commission to assess and manage future flows, based on labor market shortages that are determined on the basis of actual need; 2. A secure and effective worker authorization mechanism; 3. Rational operational control of the border; 4. Adjustment of status for the current undocumented population and 5. Improvement, not expansion, of temporary worker programs, limited to temporary or seasonal, not permanent, jobs.

The framework was adopted at an AFL-CIO executive council meeting in 2008.

Comprehensive immigration reform’s defeat in 2007 together with the election of President Obama created the opening to bring labor together across the two federations. There was a sense on the part of some of the national unions and immigrant rights groups that they had “gone too far” to try to reach an accommodation with elements of the business community, particularly with regard to acceptance of an expansion of temporary worker programs. Also, having been told by the Administration that in order for CIR to advance it was important for the labor movement to coalesce around a unified position, both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win had a strong incentive to come together and in the Marshall plan, they had a vehicle for discussion. SEIU’s Eliseo Medina and top immigration policy staff negotiated with the Federation to make alterations in some of the wording that would facilitate its endorsement. In April of 2009, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win jointly put forward the Labor Movement’s Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform pledged to “fully protect US workers, reduce the exploitation of immigrant workers and reduce employers’ incentive to hire undocumented workers rather than US workers.”35

For the AFL-CIO, the so-called “future flow” component is the linchpin of the entire framework because it addresses how immigration will be managed going forward (once undocumented workers and their families have a pathway to legalization and visa back-logs are cleared) and would replace the current employer or market-driven system with a government run commission of experts for determining the numbers of permanent and temporary workers admitted into the U.S., “One of the great failures of our current employment-based immigration system,” the framework states “is that the level of legal work-based immigration

35 Ibid




is set arbitrarily by Congress as a product of political compromise—without regard to real labor market needs—and it is rarely updated to reflect changing circumstances or conditions….” The Federation believes strongly that labor market shortages can be scientifically determined.

Although family reunification would continue as a central component of US immigration policy, the solution set forth in the labor framework proposes an entirely new system for the setting of employment visa numbers and for the recruitment and placement of foreign workers that would eventually replace existing procedures and programs. The proposal places the setting of temporary and permanent employment visas in the hands of an independent commission that would assess labor market needs on an ongoing basis, examine the impact of immigration on the economy, wages, the workforce and business and, utilizing a methodology approved by the Congress, set the numbers of foreign workers to be admitted on employment visas. There would be no country caps or what is referred to as “arbitrary” caps on occupational classifications; admission numbers would be set based upon a determination of a long-term labor shortage in an industry.

In contrast to proposals that attempted to turn the current flow from illegal to legal by providing enough visas to clear demand, the AFL-CIO proposal was not aimed at trying to equalize the number of visas with the current flow. Employers would be required to prove that they had made a strong effort to hire US workers and to “fill those jobs at the prevailing wage and other conditions that will not cause a depression in wages or working conditions in that industry.”36

Hired workers would come into the US with a conditional green card that would turn into a standard green card once the government processed a worker’s petition to remain in the US. As unscrupulous practices on the part of recruiters has been a source of worker exploitation, no employer or labor contractor would be allowed to recruit abroad. To function properly, the system requires Congress to appropriate adequate funds to ensure against backlogs, which have been a major problem under the current system, and that “all visas that can be distributed each year are actually distributed, under both employment and family classifications.”

Prevailing wages would be set by state labor departments, with geographically specific data, and workers would be covered by all US labor and employment laws. Once an employer’s petition to hire a foreign worker was approved, the job would be listed on a computerized job bank list posted available through US consulates across the globe; workers would send in applications while living in their home countries and employers would hire based upon these applications.

37

36 “AFL-CIO’s Model for Future Flow: Foreign Workers Must Have Full Rights” p. 2.

Finally, the proposal calls for reforms to existing temporary worker programs beginning from the principle that they apply only to seasonal

37 Ibid




labor shortages, are limited in size and scope, require employers to pay the adverse wage level set by state workforce agencies and to bear the costs of recruitment fees, hiring, subsistence and travel “so that workers are not exposed to large debts that hinder their ability to enforce their rights”.38 To aid workers in recovering pay they are owed, the proposal requires employers to post a bond that is “at least sufficient in value to cover the worker’s legal wages…” and mandates creation of a system that facilitates workers making claims against the bonds.39

Response to the AFL-CIO’s future flow proposal has been predictably mixed. Senate Democrats embraced a version of it, including a commission that would study “America’s employment based immigration system to recommend policies that promote economic growth and competitiveness while minimizing job displacement, wage depression and unauthorized employment” as part of their recent immigration reform blueprints. Likewise, House Democrats (backed by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus) included a robust commission in their “Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009.”

Not surprisingly, several prominent employer groups have initially opposed the framework ideas arguing for a market-based rather than regulatory solution. The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC), a group comprised of many of the largest employers in the fast food industry, denounced the proposal to have a commission. Instead, EWIC has argued for a provisional visa program that “gives employers, not government, the primary say in which workers they need to man their businesses and gives the US labor market, not Congress or a commission, the primary say in how many workers enter the country annually in a legal program.” 40 The US Chamber of Commerce has echoed EWIC’s position, asserting that “the free market is by far the best tool for setting immigration quotas and picking immigrants…Employers need and will continue to fight for a market-based immigration system.” 41

Not all the opposition to the commission has come directly from business interests. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) also released a

A Republican-oriented pro-immigration think-tank, the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) issued its own policy brief critiquing the commission idea, concluding that a commission would “…likely harm US competitiveness, push more work outside the United States, fail to reduce illegal immigration and will increase the number of immigrants who die each year at the border due to a lack of legal avenues to work in America.”

38 Ibid 39 Ibid, p.3. 40 “Business Group Disappointed by Immigration Proposal, Looking Forward to Congressional Debate on Reform” Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, December 16, 2009. 41 Press Release, US Chamber of Commerce, June 2009.




statement in strong opposition to the AFL-CIO’s proposed commission stating that it was fatally flawed for several reasons. It pointed out that the commission would “add a layer of national level determinations of local labor market needs”, which would “make the system more complex rather than simplifying a process that is burdensome for employers in need.” AILA also worried that labor data is only updated every two years so that it would be “backward looking and not equipped to assess our current and future needs” and also that employers needs for unique or highly skilled labor are “often the bellwether of future larger trends as new technologies transform the labor market.” It added that government commissions are “rarely insulated from political pressure” and that commission appointees would not be accountable to voters. 42

Despite these rather strong denunciations, these business lobbies are pragmatic and may well end up to negotiating with labor on the commission idea in order to achieve some of their own objectives.

Conclusion: Contemplating a Commission-based Approach As we have seen, organized labor in the United States formed new commitments on immigration policy between the New Deal and the Great Society. This formative period proved durable as the labor movement confronted profound insecurities of the “Reagan revolution” and globalized markets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Despite labor market dislocations, new waves of unskilled immigrants from Asia and Latin America, and a government that ceased to be a trusted protector, leaders of the movement targeted noncitizens for recruitment, endorsed expansive immigration policies, and rejected racial and ethnic hierarchies of its past. This was undoubtedly a reflection of decreasing membership rates among native-born workers. But its pro-immigration positions also flowed directly from the logics and legacies of the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s—a time when American unions enjoyed greater leverage and reoriented their approach toward immigrant rights and admissions.

Today the American labor movement continues to wrestle over immigration and the competing logics of restriction versus solidarity. To a certain extent, common cause is forged between those who believe that government cannot stop international migration and those who believe it should not do so. Both groups argue for “market-based solutions” that would transform the flow from illegal to legal by drastically raising the number of temporary visas available to workers so that all are able to access the labor market legally rather than trying to restrict the flow.43

42 AILA Position Statement on Business Immigration Reform Principles, Monday, July 20, 2009.

The AFL-CIO proposal for a commission implicitly rejects

43 See for example, Stuart Anderson, “Making the Transition from Illegal to Legal Migration” National Foundation for American Policy, November, 2003; Daniel Griswold “Willing Workers:




a market-based approach to migration instead taking a normative approach that focuses on human rights for migrant workers and their families and protection of labor standards in the U.S..44 It assumes that government can achieve a much greater level of control over the border, that it can tightly regulate employment-based admission so that workers can be brought in selectively to address labor shortages within specific sectors and that once here, they can be confined to participating employers within a sector. On the border question, Massey, Portes, Griswold and other migration scholars have argued that despite billions spent in recent years on high tech fencing and increased border patrol personnel, border enforcement did not keep immigrants from coming (prior to the recession). It forced them to attempt crossings in more remote areas, which resulted in more deaths in the desert and compelled migrants to pay more to coyotes to guide them, which meant they arrived in the US with higher levels of debt and ended up staying much longer than originally planned. 45 Today, as new Pew research46

The philosophical premise of the labor commission is that it is proper to restrict immigration to protect labor markets for US workers. All countries place their own people above all others—but as long as there are extreme disparities between the global rich and poor countries, closing borders and restricting access means sentencing some to poverty simply based on an accident of birth. The AFL-CIO argues that this is why the focus must be, in addition to legalizing those already here, on improving conditions in home countries so that workers are not forced to leave their families and communities behind in search of work.

underscores, migrant numbers from Mexico have decreased since 2007. Explanations for this range from the efficacy of government enforcement such as increased deportations and heightened border control to social and economic factors like lower birthrates and greater opportunities in Mexico combined with the lasting downturn in the U.S. This development adds fuel to the debate about whether the federal government can exercise control over the flow of workers across borders, an issue central to the viability of the Marshall framework.

Through the role it has played in the global economy and in international affairs, the US has been a leading global actor in catalyzing migration: some argue that it ought to incur obligations based upon those historical advantages. Sassen, Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Massey among others argue that our government Fixing the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States” the Cato Institute, October 15, 2002; Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration, pp. 142-164, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002; and Janice Fine et al., “The W Visa: A Workable Compromise in a Difficult Situation”, proposal prepared for Center for Community Change and SEIU, 2007. 44 Ana Avendano, Draft Paper, July 31, 2009. 45 Massey, Durand and Malone, 16. 46 Passel, Jeffrey, D’Vera Cohn and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Pew Research Center, “Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero-and Perhaps Less” April 23, 2012.




ought to take our special relationship with Mexico, Central America and parts of the Caribbean and our long-term reliance on cheap labor from those countries (along with our complicated political role) into account when thinking about borders and quotas. Should the commission, for example, take unemployment rates and economic conditions in those countries as well as our own into account when setting employment quotas? As an example, in contradistinction to the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement does not allow for the free movement of labor along with capital, goods, commodities and information. In raising these questions, we want to be clear that we believe strongly in the doctrine of shared responsibility in terms of a bilateral commitment between the US and Mexican governments to address migration as well as the Federation’s suspicion of circular migration programs. As Hazan argues, by embracing low road development strategies including low wage jobs, outsourcing, subcontracting and informality, inadequate regulation of multinationals and enforcement of labor standards, and allowing the erosion of the social welfare system, the Mexican state bears significant responsibility for the high levels of out-migration.47

Implicit in the labor framework’s placement of strong limits on temporary programs is the ideal that in a democracy economic and political citizenship must always go hand in hand

48 and that it is never acceptable to allow workers access to a state’s labor market without access to equal political rights and welfare state programs. The difficult question is whether, even in the face of limited rights, these workers are better off being able to access American labor markets. Surveying strategies for tackling economic development of the global south, Lant Prichett has highlighted the astonishing impact more open migration policy would make to economic development. 49

47 Miryam Hazan, “Sustainable Jobs and Emigration from Mexico: the Meaning of Shared Responsibilities in Immigration Reform” paper prepared for the Service Employees International Union, in possession of authors.

Prichett calculates that the industrial world currently transfers about 70 billion a year in overseas development assistance but that allowing just a 3% rise in their labor forces through relaxing restrictions would result in a 300 billion increase to poor country citizens—dwarfing any aid or trade programs.

48 Michael Waltzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, pp. 31-63, New York: Basic Books 1983, 49 See for example Saskia Sassen-Koob, 1998. Chapter 3 “America’s Immigration Problem”: 31-53; In Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: New York Press 1998. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “The History of Mexican Undocumented Settlement in the United States,” Chapter 2 in Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration, 19-33. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994 and Lant Pritchett, Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock On Global Labor Mobility, Center for Global Development, Washington D.C.




The commission idea, as well as a renewed commitment to workable employer sanctions and verification, reflect a theoretical and philosophical concern for protecting native and naturalized workers in the United States while still welcoming newcomers and defending their labor rights. When married to an equally fervent agenda to legalize undocumented immigrants and to sustain robust legal immigration, this plan as a whole captures the nuances and complexities of expanding labor’s ranks while protecting existing members in an era of insecurity. Even as the American labor movement’s activism on immigration has changed dramatically over time, it continues to be an issue that presents significant tradeoffs.




solidarities and restrictions: labor and immigration policy in the united states

Documents