This Day in Labor History: February 17, 2000

On February 17, 2000, the AFL-CIO officially changed its stance on immigration. No longer would the labor movement in this nation officially oppose immigration. Instead, it moved to become one of the immigrant rights movement’s major allies in this nation.

The history of American organized labor and immigration was pretty bad for a very long time. From almost the very beginning of the labor movement, immigrants were shunned and feared and hated. Despite what some leftists want to say, it wasn’t capitalists who divided workers by race. Workers were more than happy to divide themselves by race and capitalists were happy to exploit that. The first major law to come out of the American labor movement was the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Knights of Labor were openly anti-Chinese and anti-“Hungarian,” by which they meant eastern Europeans generally. AFL head Samuel Gompers co-wrote a pamphlet called “Meat vs. Rice,” which argued for the banning of Asian immigrants because white workers who need meat can’t compete with these semi-human rice eaters. When Japanese and Mexican workers united the California fields in 1903 and created the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association and applied to join the AFL, the state federation rejected it, outraged that Japanese dare join the labor movement. The AFL happily worked with the government in World War I to crack down on immigrants and was a huge supporter of the Immigration Act of 1924 that effectively ended the immigrant waves into the United States, except from Mexico.

While immigration largely fell out of American politics after the Immigration Act, in California, things were still hotly contested. The Bracero Program that brought Mexican labor to the U.S. on temporary contracts was deeply opposed by large parts of the AFL and then AFL-CIO, in part because Mexican American workers were horrified by the exploitation of these workers and in part because of the typical anit-immigrant politics. Even Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers was a huge advocate of deporting the illegals, which he saw as undermining his own efforts. Never mind that actual UFW members were horrified at Chavez’s actions since mostly it was their own family members being deported. Trust me, Chavez had zero interest in listening to membership.

But things started to change by the 1980s. There were some quite embarrassing moments for organized labor in those days. The killing of Vincent Chin by angry, drunk UAW members, thinking this Chinese-American was Japanese and thus responsible for the loss of their jobs brought some real soul-searching in parts of the movement over how they considered immigrants. Moreover, the future of American population growth and thus the working class was clearly immigrants, especially from Latin America. Most certainly, not every union embraced this reality.

But many did and they were the ones who grew. That was especially true for the Service Employees International Union. SEIU already had a pretty broad mandate in the labor movement, but its core was in the janitors, nurses, and other service workers. You know who janitors increasingly by the 1980s? Latin American migrants. The Justice for Janitors campaign was not strictly about organizing Latinos. It really depended on the city. In Washington and Atlanta, this was about mobilizing a Black workforce. But in Los Angeles? These were migrants from Latin America. Moreover, a number of these workers were already politicized, left-wing refugees from American supported right-wing governments in nations such as El Salvador and Guatemala. So when cops beat the shit out of the janitors during a march in front of a building that they were picketing, in front of all the high-profile corporate tenants watching from the windows and wondering what the hell was going on, it was a transformative moment both for that campaign and for the American labor movement. Throughout the 90s, it became increasingly clear that Latinos were a big part of the labor movement’s future and the AFL-CIO had better figure this out.

The official policy change from the federation was to call for a blanket amnesty of all undocumented immigrants in the nation. This was a case where it had a lot of allies in the business community saying the same thing. Of course the business community also wanted cheap labor. But criminalizing millions of workers in this country made no strategic sense for the labor movement, especially when so many of then were family members of actual union members.

The AFL-CIO’s strategy shift was also driven by employers actions. On several occasions in the 1990s, unions would attempt to organize the nation’s meatpacking plants in rural areas such as Kansas and Iowa. In order to stop the union drive, the employers would turn themselves into the government for violating immigration law by knowingly employed undocumented workers. Then the government would deport the workers. In other words, the companies felt it was much better to take whatever fine they would get for employing undocumented workers than it was to accept a unionized workforce.

This really was a big deal. Said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, “”I think the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s decision is going to be a shot heard round Washington. ”You have a variety of employer groups saying, ‘We need more immigrant workers and we want our workers to be legal,’ and you have the A.F.L.-C.I.O. saying, ‘We want more immigrant workers to be legal and we’re willing to talk to employers about their legitimate needs.’ You have the makings of a business-labor compact that could draw new immigration policies for the next decade.”

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. The rise of the American far right made immigration bills impossible. At this point, I absolutely believe that if you locked the leaders of the AFL-CIO and the leaders of the Chamber of Commerce into a room, they could hack out a perfectly decent immigration deal in very little time. But the Chamber doesn’t control the Republican Party anymore and the racism at the heart of the Trump movement means there’s no chance for any kind of decent immigrant rights bill anytime soon. We saw this during the George W. Bush years, the kind of old-school corporate Republican that legitimately did want to do something for immigrants, but who faced such resistance already in his own party that it never happened. Even in the Democratic Party, there is plenty of desire to cave on immigrant rights, as the attempted deal to turn hard-right on border issues in order to fund Ukraine’s defense against Russia demonstrated.

Still, the AFL-CIO has remained a staunch supporter of immigrant rights in the over two decades since this policy shift. Unions such as UNITE-HERE and SEIU continue to organize in the immigrant communities. The heavily immigrant union under UNITE-HERE popularly known as the Culinary Union has become a political power in Nevada and is the biggest reason why that state has trended more toward Democrats that you would expect in the last two decades. There is a long ways to go. But even the building trades leadership will today say that they need to embrace immigrants, if for no other reason than the children of plumbers and carpenters don’t want to step into their fathers’ shoes and if the jobs are to remain union jobs, they are going to be staffed by immigrants or their children.

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