Unions and the Politics of Immigration

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Notes

1. John Sweeney, “Organizing the New Workforce,” Service Employee (March/April 1986), 2.

2. David Bacon, “Organize and Defend the Rights of Immigrant Workers,” Oregon State AFL-CIO Summer School, 2000.

3. Leah Haus, “Openings in the Wall: Transnational Migrants, Labor Unions, and US Immigration Policy,” International Organization 49, 2 (Spring 1995), 291.

4. Haus, “Openings in the Wall,” 292.

5. Ruth Milkman, “New Workers, New Labor, and the New Los Angeles,” in Unions in a Globalized Environment: Changing Borders, Organization Boundaries, and Social Roles, ed. B. Nissen (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 119.

6. Edward J. W. Park, “Labor Organizing Beyond Race and Nation: The Los Angeles Hilton Case,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 24, 7/8 (2004), 139.

7. For example, Sallie Westwood and Annie Phizacklea, Trans-nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (London: Routledge, 2000); Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging. (New York: Routledge, 2001); S.L. Croucher, Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabirān, and Ulrike Vieten, The Situated Politics of Belonging (London: Sage, 2006); and Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull Books, 2007).

8. Yuval-Davis et al. The Situated Politics of Belonging, 3.

9. Croucher, Globalization and Belonging, 41.

10. Here we follow Gary Herrigel's idea about the social construction of political economy. He challenges traditional material and structural accounts and stresses the importance of identity as a factor in labor activity: “Organizational construction and reform are not seen as a problem of adaptation or adjustment to pressures somehow independent of themselves. Rather, organizations in a political economy (labor organizations, corporations, associations, public agencies, etc.) are understood to be collectively engaged in the definition and conceptual representation of what those pressures are” (“Identity and Institutions: The Social Construction of Trade Unions in the United States and Germany in the Nineteenth Century,” Studies in American Political Development [Fall 1993], 378). To understand organizations' responses to shifts in modes of production requires an understanding of the political struggle over the perception, definition, and social construction of those shifts.

11. Bruce Nissen and Guillermo Grenier, “Unions and Immigrants in South Florida: A Comparison,” in Unions in a Globalized Environment ed. Nissen, 132.

12. Nissen and Grenier, “Unions and Immigrants in South Florida,” 132–33.

13. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).

14. Dennis Kearney and H. L. Knight, “Appeal from California. The Chinese Invasion. Workingmen's Address,” Indianapolis Times, February 28, 1878. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5046/

15. Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

16. Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 52.

17. The AFL's testimony is more surprising than the CIO's given that the CIO was generally more progressive on race and ethnicity, and the AFL tended to be more hostile toward non-European immigrants.

18. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004).

19. Edward M. Kennedy, “The Immigration Act of 1965,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 367 (1966), 137–49.

20. Kennedy, “The Immigration Act of 1965.”

21. James G. Gimpel and James R. Edwards, Jr., The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999).

22. David Bacon, “The Political Economy of International Migration.” New Labor Forum 16, 3 & 4 (June 2007), 56–69.

23. These assumptions were so widespread that in 1993, in his book New Immigrants, Old Unions: Organizing Undocumented Workers in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), Hector Delgado writes “The unorganizability of undocumented workers . . . has become a ‘pseudofact’” (10).

24. These arguments mirror earlier ones about immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Unorganizability was one way in which they were deemed a threat to the American worker. In order for these immigrants to transcend their designation as competitors, scholars and the immigrants themselves had to prove their organizability. “The charge that Eastern and Southern European immigrants were unreceptive to unionization or made poor union members has also been made – and has been challenged by a number of labor historians” (Delgado, New Immigrants, Old Unions, 147).

25. “The AFL-CIO and Immigrant Workers,” Class Struggle 12 (June/July 1996). http://the-spark.net/csart122.html

26. Delgado, New Immigrants, Old Unions, 151.

27. Milkman, “New Workers, New Labor, and the New Los Angeles,” 116–17.

28. Ibid., 103.

29. Ibid., 122.

30. Bruce Nissen, “The Role of Labor Education in Transforming a Union Toward Organizing Immigrants: A Case Study,” Labor Studies Journal 27, 1 (2002), 109.

31. Guillermo Grenier and Bruce Nissen, “Comparative Union Response to Mass Immigration: Evidence from an Immigrant City,” Critical Sociology 26, 1/2 (2002), 82–91.

32. Paul Johnston, “Rethinking Cross-Border Employment in Overlapping Societies: A Citizenship Movement Agenda,” in Forum for Transnational Employment (California Institute for Rural Studies, 1999).

33. The Freedom Rides were initially sponsored by HERE, followed by the SEIU, and then the AFL-CIO.

34. Mario T. Garcia, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 286–87.

35. Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 232.

36. Haus, “Openings in the Wall” (note 3), 304.

37. Arturo S. Rodriguez, “Op-Ed by UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez on the Guest Worker Program,” United Farm Workers Press Release (1/30/2008). http://www.ufw.org/_board.php?mode=view&b_code=news_press&b_no=3512&page=1& field=& key=&n=508

38. Nissen and Grenier, “Unions and Immigrants in South Florida.”

39. Ted Wang and Robert C. Winn, “Groundswell Meets Groundwork Preliminary Recommendations for Building on Immigrant Mobilizations,” A Special Report from The Four Freedoms Fund and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (July 2006), 8.

40. Kate Bronfenbrenner (ed.) Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross-border Campaigns (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2007).