Unions, Immigrants Need Each Other

story and photos by David Bacon, contributor

“I am also convinced that as the labor movement is the besthope for immigrants, so are immigrants the best hope of the labormovement,” says Eliseo Medina, an immigrant from Zacatecas who becamea leading organizer for the United Farm Workers, and now serves asexecutive vice-president of the Service Employees union.

It’s not hard to understand why he takes that view. Unions representabout 13 percent of US workers today, down from 35 percent in theearly 1950s. To maintain the 13 percent, unions have to organize400,000 workers a year. To grow by just one percent, labor mustorganize 800,000 people, a rate not achieved since the 1940s. Who, inthe modern American workforce, actively wants to join the labormovement? For a growing number of unions, immigrant workers are partof the answer.

A labor upsurge among immigrant workers has become a nationalphenomenon. Many unions are starting to see immigrant labor as a basefor rebuilding labor strength in industries where it’s been eroded,such as meatpacking, food processing, and residentialconstruction.

However, unions now must confront the reality that the backwardimmigration policies they have supported in the past have made itharder for unions to organize and represent immigrants.

The impact has, in fact, been devastating. In the summer of 1999, inthe heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, hundreds of workers atthe world’s largest rose grower lost their jobs.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service audited the personnelrecords of over 1,000 employees of the Bear Creek Production CompanyIn Bakersfield. After deciding that almost 300 of them wereundocumented, the INS demanded that the company terminate them, citingthe employer sanctions provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform andControl Act, which passed with the support of the AFL-CIO. Thatprovision makes working a crime for undocumented immigrants, andprohibits employers from hiring them. Like almost all California farmworkers, Bear Creek workers are immigrants from Mexico and CentralAmerica.

The terminations were denounced by Arturo Rodriguez, president of theUnited Farm Workers. “These workers have been here 15, 20, 25 years,”he declared. “They have houses and families. Their kids are in ourschools. They’ve paid taxes for years and belong to our community.”

In case after case, immigration law has been used to counterorganizing efforts among immigrant workers. That problem is growingeven more acute, because the Clinton administration made the workplacethe focus of its efforts to enforce immigration law. According toDoris Meissner, INS Commissioner under Clinton, “work is the incentivethat brings illegal immigrants into our country.” Preventing workersfrom entering the US without visas, she says, depends on removing themfrom the workplace, an INS strategy called “interior enforcement” awayfrom the border.

The AFL-CIO’s former support for employer sanctions reflected thefederation’s business union policies of the Cold War. It enforced adefacto color line, seeking to protect wages for native-born workersby excluding immigrants rather than by organizing everyone.

The California Labor Federation began calling for the repeal ofsanctions in 1994, along with the two garment unions (now merged inUNITE), the Service Employees International Union, and the independentUnited Electrical Workers. Last February the AFL-CIO executive councilcalled for a new legalization program for the undocumented and therepeal of sanctions.

The AFL-CIO resolution enjoys wide support, especially in servicesector unions with large immigrant membership like SEIU, UNITE, andthe Hotel Workers. Teamsters support for general amnesty is lessclear.

Other labor activists go beyond the resolution. At a march in Oaklandin January, the new president of the Laborers Union, TerenceO’Sullivan, announced support for a broad legalization program, repealof employer sanctions, opposition to contract labor, protection forthe right to organize, and increased ability to reunite families inthe US.

While immigrant activists continue to struggle to get unions tosupport legislation embodying those demands, employers are puttingforward a very different program—the vast expansion of current“guestworker” visas, reinstituting a modern version of the old braceroprogram.

Last year Silicon Valley’s wealthy high-tech industry won a unanimousvote in the House of Representatives expanding the H-1B guestworkerprogram. New proposals are now being made by agribusiness,meatpacking, healthcare, and other industries. They’re supported bythe Bush administration, and even Sen. Phil Gramm, who formerlyopposed any increase in immigration. These proposals call forrecruiting Mexican workers as one-year temporary laborers, and wouldforce workers into the program through increased enforcement ofemployer sanctions.

The conflict between labor (which advocates legalization and therepeal of sanctions) and business (which pushes guestworkers andgreater sanctions enforcement) defines the new terrain of theimmigration debate. They both agree that immigrants have become apermanent part of the workforce, and whole industries depend on theirlabor. But should immigration law be used to supply those workers toindustry at a price industry wants to pay, or should it be used toprotect the rights of immigrants themselves?

The AFL-CIO’s reversal in position has shifted the political climatearound immigration in Washington, DC dramatically. Just two years ago,even discussion of limited amnesty was considered laughable amongBeltway lobbyists. “It’s really obvious that the change by the labormovement has made a whole new discussion possible,” says Victor Narro,a staff attorney at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in LosAngeles. “Now we have a labor movement that’s on the side ofimmigrants, rather than one bent on trying to stopimmigration.”