Unions, Immigrants Need Each Other

story and photos by David Bacon, contributor

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

It’s not hard to understand why he takes that view. Unions represent about 13 percent of US workers today, down from 35 percent in the early 1950s. To maintain the 13 percent, unions have to organize 400,000 workers a year. To grow by just one percent, labor must organize 800,000 people, a rate not achieved since the 1940s. Who, in the modern American workforce, actively wants to join the labor movement? For a growing number of unions, immigrant workers are part of the answer.

A labor upsurge among immigrant workers has become a national phenomenon. Many unions are starting to see immigrant labor as a base for rebuilding labor strength in industries where it’s been eroded, such as meatpacking, food processing, and residential construction.

However, unions now must confront the reality that the backward immigration policies they have supported in the past have made it harder for unions to organize and represent immigrants.

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

The Immigration and Naturalization Service audited the personnel records of over 1,000 employees of the Bear Creek Production Company In Bakersfield. After deciding that almost 300 of them were undocumented, the INS demanded that the company terminate them, citing the employer sanctions provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which passed with the support of the AFL-CIO. That provision makes working a crime for undocumented immigrants, and prohibits employers from hiring them. Like almost all California farm workers, Bear Creek workers are immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

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

In case after case, immigration law has been used to counter organizing efforts among immigrant workers. That problem is growing even more acute, because the Clinton administration made the workplace the focus of its efforts to enforce immigration law. According to Doris Meissner, INS Commissioner under Clinton, “work is the incentive that brings illegal immigrants into our country.” Preventing workers from entering the US without visas, she says, depends on removing them from the workplace, an INS strategy called “interior enforcement” away from the border.

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

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

The AFL-CIO resolution enjoys wide support, especially in service sector unions with large immigrant membership like SEIU, UNITE, and the Hotel Workers. Teamsters support for general amnesty is less clear.

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

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

Last year Silicon Valley’s wealthy high-tech industry won a unanimous vote in the House of Representatives expanding the H-1B guestworker program. New proposals are now being made by agribusiness, meatpacking, healthcare, and other industries. They’re supported by the Bush administration, and even Sen. Phil Gramm, who formerly opposed any increase in immigration. These proposals call for recruiting Mexican workers as one-year temporary laborers, and would force workers into the program through increased enforcement of employer sanctions.

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

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