Yes, Some Undocumented Workers Are Organized

In some cases, the class politics of opposing Trump’s anti-immigrant authoritarianism are obvious. Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the two high-profile green card holders who were arrested and threatened with deportation for constitutionally protected pro-Palestinian speech, were both members of unions of graduate student workers.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was “mistakenly” deported to a Salvadoran gulag by the Trump administration, is a member of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART). It’s a no-brainer that these people’s union brothers and sisters would speak out on their behalf. But the situation in Los Angeles might initially look different.

It’s easy to imagine that every undocumented worker in Southern California is a nonunionized day laborer poised at the knife’s edge of extreme poverty and willing to accept any wage and working conditions whatsoever. And a great many of them really are undergoing experiences that closely align with this image, or ones that are almost as bad. But with nearly a million unauthorized immigrants estimated to live in Los Angeles, some are inevitably going to land union jobs. Certainly, there are plenty of unionized hotels and restaurants around the city where a significant percentage of the workforce is undocumented.

Earlier this week, I spoke to a former SEIU and UNITE HERE organizer who told me about the long conversations he used to have, sitting in the living rooms of undocumented families, convincing workers that there’s no way that the information they put on a union card would find its way to immigration authorities. Those were difficult conversations, but as eager to improve their material conditions as any other workers, many of them went for it.

These were successful campaigns. The union organizer also told me about situations in which, in workplaces that had already been organized, the union would often file grievances on behalf of undocumented workers who were fired after their Social Security numbers came back “no match,” seeking to at least buy a little time to help these workers while they worked on resolving their immigration status.

Such stories would be totally incomprehensible to those who believe this section of the working class is innately unorganizable. A common narrative on parts of the “populist” right is that the Left and the workers’ movement were once staunchly anti-immigrant (or certainly in favor of ruthless, maximalist enforcement of existing immigration laws), and that, to the extent this has changed, this has been the result of middle-class “wokeness” displacing the proletarian common sense that had previously prevailed. But this is a severe oversimplification at best and an outright distortion at worst.

It’s true that some union leaders have historically been suspicious of immigration from lower-wage countries on the grounds that this will put downward pressure on wage levels for the native-born working class. But it’s also true that this has mostly been the position of comparatively conservative portions of the labor movement, especially the exclusivist craft unions affiliated with the old American Federation of Labor (AFL).

AFL leader Samuel Gompers, for example, notoriously supported the Chinese Exclusion Act as a way of keeping out cheap labor. More radical and militant unions, like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at the beginning of the twentieth century or the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, have often taken the opposition position, embracing and organizing hyperexploited immigrant workers to fight like hell to improve their conditions.

In his autobiography, IWW leader “Big Bill” Haywood recounts that, in his speech opening the union’s first national convention in 1905, he “turned over” in his head how to address the audience. Participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune a few decades earlier had used the salutation “fellow citizens,” so Haywood briefly considered that, “but here there were many workers who were not citizens of the country, so that would not do.” He settled instead on “fellow workers.”

Gompers, Haywood, and Milton Friedman

The current position of the (long since merged) AFL-CIO on immigration is much less like Gompers’s than Haywood’s. One explanation for that might be that the labor movement has “gone woke.” We can arrive at a more plausible explanation, though, if we start by noticing that the issue is never “immigration or no immigration.” It’s always what the ground rules are governing how that immigration happens.

And on that issue, the option that’s worst for labor is the status quo. Milton Friedman, perhaps the most important libertarian economist of the twentieth century, sounding a bit like capital’s collective id, can be seen on YouTube cheerfully explaining that immigration is “good for the country” but “only as long as it’s illegal” so migrant workers “don’t qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for Social Security, they don’t qualify for all the other myriad of benefits that flow out of our left pocket to our right.”

What he wanted, in other words, was an immigrant workforce — but one that was maximally economically desperate, terrified, and willing to accept whatever deal they were given. Friedman was clear-eyed enough to understand that it would ruin everything if these workers got rights.

Unionized and Not-Yet-Unionized Workers

The current position of the faux-populist right, and the historical position of some of the more cautious and conservative elements of the labor movement, is based on some premises whose truth should be granted by even those of us who fiercely disagree with their conclusion. It’s not wrong that the presence in the country of workers desperate enough to accept very bad wages and conditions has sometimes been used quite effectively by capital to undercut the bargaining position of other workers.

We should find it repulsive when some well-meaning pro-immigration people talk about undocumented immigrants doing jobs “Americans don’t want to do.” What this really means is that citizens aren’t typically desperate enough to do those jobs for such low wages or in such awful conditions. Many such jobs once were done by American citizens, who typically got a far better deal.

But acknowledging the reality of the problem is compatible with multiple possible solutions. The idea that those of us who want a bigger and more effective labor movement should cheer on Trump’s vile and anti-human crackdown is a bad joke when we remember the rest of the Trump agenda. Even if we imagined that the whole undocumented workforce would somehow be removed from the country by these crackdowns, why think organized labor would reap any benefits?

The administration has been making an unabashed effort to abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which protects workers from being fired for union activity. It’s ripped up the collective bargaining agreements of federal workers. It’s pushed for work requirements for Medicaid, which would further reinforce the dependence of workers on their bosses for basic health care. The list goes on.

If we somehow imagine that the administration was successful beyond anyone’s wildest projections in removing undocumented workers, why not think they’d be sufficiently successful in the rest of these goals to neutralize any loss of bosses’ bargaining power from the reduction in labor competition?

But forget that for a moment. Imagine a hypothetical version of the Trump administration that actually took the economic populist rhetoric sometimes thrown around by Trump allies like Steve Bannon seriously. This would be an administration that attempted to remove undocumented workers at the same time that it pursued social democratic policies in other areas. Even there, the idea that an anti-immigrant drive would somehow benefit labor (or, rather, the part of labor that wasn’t being deported) is extremely dubious.

Once we acknowledge that the comparative desperation of undocumented workers can be used by bosses in some sectors to drive down wages, there are at least two possible solutions. One, favored by the pseudo-populist right, is to try to remove the cheap-labor competition by expelling all eleven million of these people from the country. The other is to try to make their labor less cheap. This can be done and is being done to some extent on a small-scale by the hard work of union organizers like the one I spoke to, and it can be facilitated on a national level by giving immigrants a path to citizenship so they can come out of the shadows, have far less fear of joining unions, can take their employers to court for labor law violations without worrying that ICE will be waiting outside the courthouse, and so on.

One reason to prefer the second strategy is moral. An immense amount of human suffering is being inflicted on nonviolent and otherwise law-abiding workers and their families as they simply try to keep their heads down and live their lives. Nor are they the only victims. As we’ve seen in the last week in Los Angeles, the mechanics of deportation often (and especially when, as now, authorities are looking for big splashy gestures to prove that they’re ramping things up) rely on pretty blatant racial profiling. Plenty of American citizens get swept up into immigration detention, where their insistence that they have citizenship is routinely disregarded. In some cases, immigration officials assume that their passports are fake.

People being held in immigration detention don’t have the same rights to legal counsel as Americans accused of other kinds of crimes, and there have been cases of wrongfully detained citizens sitting in detention for a very long time. There’s a closely related strategic point about trade union principles here too.

How much credibility would your union have if it stood by and did nothing as members were kidnapped from the work site by masked federal agents? There’s a reason David Huerta, for example, has been such a powerful voice for immigration reform, and it’s not identity politics trumping class solidarity. Quite the opposite.

But there’s also a purely strategic case for the second option. It’s not as if there’s a button under the desk at the Oval Office reading “remove all eleven million undocumented immigrants.” If there were, Trump most certainly would have pushed it during his first term. We could have four long miserable years of the kind of grotesqueries ICE has been carrying out in Los Angeles happening every day, and quite likely, most of the undocumented population wouldn’t be swept up.

The ones who avoided deportation, though, would be that much more terrified of being noticed, that much harder to organize, and that much more vulnerable to hyperexploitation. Imagine that Trump managed to deport a million undocumented workers around the country, for example. How much harder would that make those long living-room conversations about taking the risk of signing a union card?

Labor Can Deliver the Gods

The resistance to ICE in Los Angeles has often been diffuse and disorganized. Relatively apolitical immigrants, reaching for the first symbolic language that comes to hand, have often defaulted to symbols of cultural identity, waving Mexican flags or using slogans like “Viva La Raza” (Long live the race). That’s perfectly understandable, but it’s hardly the basis for a movement best positioned to win majority support in a country where this is a minority cultural identity.

Indeed, the combination of such symbolism and the scattered outbreaks of rioting and looting that have happened as the Trump administration continues to escalate tensions has combined to create powerful propaganda with which the Trumpist right can discredit the protests. (Of course, there have been plenty of American flags at the protests too, but they don’t show those on Fox News and One America News.)

Similarly, anyone with a soul should feel some sympathy with the desperate friends and coworkers of the ordinary people being dragged away into immigration-detention hellholes who have tried to do what they can to stop the deportations, like surrounding ICE agents and pelting them with whatever objects come to hand. But at least as a general rule, such efforts simply won’t stop what’s happening. Scattered individuals can’t do much to defeat a massive, well-funded, and ruthlessly brutal state agency.

Even in a country where the overall rate of union density is as depressingly low as it is in the United States, the social force best positioned to change these calculations is still going to be organized labor. While America’s structure of repressive labor laws makes unauthorized wildcat strikes risky and difficult, in any situations where they can be pulled off, shutting down workplaces where some of the workers are dragged off by ICE gives other employers a powerful incentive to think twice about cooperating with the agency, and the more of this that happens, the more the risk-reward calculations for currently unorganized undocumented workers shifts in the direction of betting on solidarity.

Similar points apply to standard tactics of labor resistance to get around the legal restrictions on spontaneous strikes, such as “sick-ins” and slowdowns. And the more people at any workplace standing around an ICE agent and making it difficult for them to quickly go about their business, the more likely it is that a given sweep will fail.

Even apart from these tactical specifics, the larger strategic point is clear. Many of the protests going on in LA this week have been labor organized, and the more that becomes the dominant note, the better. The more the Left can frame the issue not as one of groups defined along ethnic lines fighting with each other (in which case tribalist mechanics would tend to push the majority of the population to the wrong side), but as a universalist question of workers’ rights, the better.

The more the face of resistance to Trump’s grotesque immigration machine isn’t a confused teenager standing around a burning car but a trade unionist talking about how an injury to one is an injury to all and he won’t stand by while his brothers and sisters are taken by ICE, the better. None of this guarantees that the right side will win. But it can give it a far better chance.