By Steve Brier
One of the persistent tragedies in the history of the U.S. labor movement has been the repeated opposition of unions to organizing new immigrant workers into their ranks. Not only the old AFL, but even the more progressive and inclusive Knights of Labor, attacked new immigrants (the Chinese, in the case of the Knights), refusing to organize them into their ranks and even working politically to restrict the entry of international workers into the U.S. Those moments when the labor movement shed its xenophobia and actually organized immigrant workers — the 1919 steel strike and the early CIO organizing drives in basic industry — stand out as beacons of light and organizing success in an otherwise grim and dark history of exclusion and labor defeat. Even the contemporary AFL-CIO, as recently as the late 1980s and early 1990s, actively opposed organizing the rising numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America entering the U.S. workforce, precisely at the moment that the labor movement was in sharp decline in the face of employer and government intransigence and attacks.
The recent spate of demonstrations and marches by new immigrant workers, especially those from Latin America, to revivify the labor movement through militant action (the 2011 May Day March for Worker and Immigrant Rights is a wonderful example of immigrant workers pushing organized labor forward) has helped change the decades-old perception that new immigrants can’t or shouldn’t be organized into unions. That progressive prod, along with organized labor’s shrinking political muscle in local, state, and national elections, is what has motivated the contemporary AFL-CIO’s recent announcement of a coordinated effort to register immigrants for citizenship. In a recent article and video by Marc Bussanich on LaborPress.org, Tefere A. Gebre, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President noted that:
The fact is we have 13.5 million immigrants with green cards in this country. Out of them 9 million of them are ready to become citizens tomorrow. And nobody is helping them. I feel like our movement is set up in a way to facilitate this. Can you imagine if we get 9 million immigrants to go through the labor movement to get their citizenship; they would help us build a stronger labor movement as we move forward.
Gebre was speaking at the opening of New Jersey’s first labor-led immigration support center, which will help 93,000 immigrants in Hudson County obtain citizenship. He concluded by noting that, as an immigrant himself, “This is something I really, really care about.” Let’s hope his enthusiasm and commitment to organize immigrant workers is matched by similar commitments from local and state-wide labor officials.
Dr. Steve Brier is a Murphy Institute Consortial Faculty Member and Prof. of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
