Labor unions and union members nationwide are playing a significant role in opposing the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. They’ve protested the federal detention of SEIU official David Huerta in Los Angeles at a rally against workplace deportation sweeps by ICE. Unions protested the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a tradesworker apprentice, to El Salvador.
This kind of solidarity would have been less common a generation ago, when some segments of the labor movement saw immigrants as low-cost competitors for their union jobs.
Two days ago, this was the sound in lower Manhattan: “ICE out of our schools! ICE out of New York!”
Alongside immigrant rights groups protesting ICE deportation sweeps was the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants, a coalition including unions representing teachers, Teamsters, service workers and others in New York.
Maeve Campbell is a social worker and organizer for the group. She said the Labor Committee isn’t just marching.
“United Federation of Teachers — which are public school teachers — they’ve formed committees in several different schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan and distributed know your rights information to defend students, where the bottom line is, ‘They’re not going to take our kids,’” she said.
But it’s not all smooth sailing.
“We’ve made some efforts in the Labor Committee to get construction workers involved,” Campbell said. “Well, guess who does construction in New York? It’s undocumented immigrant workers. People are very, very afraid.”
Immigrants have historically played a crucial role in the union movement — organizing garment workers in New York, industrial workers in the Midwest and farm workers in California.
But in the post-war period, relations soured, according to Hayley Brown, research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“The labor movement unfortunately had kind of a fractious relationship with immigration. There were concerns that immigrants were going to erode bargaining power for union members,” she said.
Sometimes it got ugly. “Were there some unions that were calling the INS on undocumented workers even in the 1970s? That’s true, that did happen,” said UCLA labor historian Toby Higbie. “But unions began to see that that was a losing strategy.”
One reason? Simple demographics, said Brown.
“A higher share of union members are foreign-born now,” she said. “Their share has actually almost doubled — 8.4% in 1994 and today it is 15.4%.”
Which means, “given that so many working people are either immigrants, the children of immigrants, or live in mixed-status families or communities, it is in the interest of both the immigrant rights movement and the labor movement to collaborate,” Toby Higbie said.
In Chicago, factory worker Maribel Martinez said a union drive at her workplace is pressing for better pay and safer working conditions. The group organizing the workers is also educating them about their rights as immigrants.
“Well, in general, we are not afraid of immigration coming to our work,” she said in Spanish.
Martinez added that most of her fellow employees have permission to work in the U.S. They’re more worried about having their rights as workers violated than they are of immigration raids.
