In the ensuing two and a half decades, organized labor completed its flip-flop to support for a broad amnesty for illegal immigrants and liberal expansionist immigration reforms.
Logically, one would think organized labor would make a simple labor market calculation.
If labor supply is decreased, wages and fringe benefits should rise, and unions should have more cartel control of the labor supply.
Legendary American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, himself an immigrant to the United States, was skeptical if conflicted on the issue of European immigration and adamantly opposed to Asian immigration.
Cesar Chavez, the farm labor organizer who founded the United Farm Workers of America, was a militant opponent of illegal immigration.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, while the labor movement backed the ending of national origin quotas under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, unions still sought some method to enforce immigration laws against employers.
Four major undercurrents were driving organized labor's turn from restrictionist on immigration to effectively anti-anti-open borders.
The Cold Warriors and crooks who led Big Labor when Big Labor was at its biggest were on their way out by the 1990s.
The consequences of the turn are far greater than just a trail of befuddled populist-nationalists and their allies in the ideologically heterodox world of specialized anti-immigration groups who cannot understand why organized labor rejected its historic labor-market-based analysis of the immigration issue.
Within Big Labor itself, the unions most interested in liberalizing immigration like the SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and Unite Here gained influence.
Taken in the broader context, Big Labor's turn at the millennium on immigration is an important marker of the rise of social justice unionism, perhaps as important as the election of John Sweeney, who midwifed the turn, as president of the AFL-CIO. Likewise, the shift and the way it is remembered on the left, as a triumph of progressive mutual interest over mere "Business unionism" and self-interest, reveals the extent to which even radical leftism is baked within organized labor's story of itself.
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