The National Labor Union (NLU) and Mass European Immigration

The first national labor federation in the United States, the NLU, was organized in 1866 by the leaders of several craft unions, most notably William Sylvis of the International Molder's Union. Its founding was the culmination of a wave of union organizing that began in 1862 in the Northeast and Midwest as workers confronted an increasingly industrial economy and emerging factory system. Technological advances and the increasing introduction of machines undermined skilled workers' position in the labor market, leading to job loss and declining wages. Catalyzed by the Civil War's demand for large-scale production and improved transportation systems (culminating with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869), a truly national market was taking shape.Footnote ¹⁵

Attendance at NLU conventions was dominated by organizations of skilled workers—local building trades and other craft unions. From its founding, the NLU declared the importance of organizing the unskilled as well as the skilled into trade unions. Acknowledging the absence of trade unions for many unskilled workers, the Committee on Trade Unions and Strikes called for their organization into a general Workingmen's Association.Footnote ¹⁶

As the NLU organized in the Gilded Age, unions and eight-hour leagues were struggling to pass local, state and federal legislation delimiting work hours. By 1868 eight-hour laws were passed in six states and several cities, and in June of that year Congress enacted a bill granting an eight-hour day to mechanics, laborers and all federal employees.

Despite NLU efforts to press the Grant administration and Congress for more effective enforcement, these reforms suffered from weak implementation. Although no longer automatically treated by the courts as criminal conspiracies since the 1842 ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in the Commonwealth v. Hunt case, unions had reason to view the state warily during this period. Many employers forced workers to sign “iron clad” oaths that made not joining a union a condition of employment. Courts in several states sanctioned the use of a blacklist by employers.

The NLU and its member unions were torn over large-scale European immigration. Immigration opponents argued that large numbers of newcomers provided employers with a tractable labor force that promoted strikebreaking, reduced wages, took scarce jobs, and worsened working conditions. By contrast, other NLU activists refused to support legislative restrictions on voluntary immigration due to, as A.T. Lane summarizes, “their acceptance of traditional American values,” “fellow feeling for people seeking opportunity and escaping oppression,” “their understanding of natural rights,” and “recognition of the economic advantages [for the nation as a whole] of immigration.”Footnote ¹⁷

NLU debates over European inflows were waged as solidarity versus restriction almost exclusively on the basis of defending labor standards, with little or no hint of the ethnic and religious animosities that drove many nativist movements of the day. Instead, contract labor became the target of labor's political ire. Accordingly, in 1868, labor groups successfully persuaded congressional Republicans to repeal their earlier authorization of contract labor legislation of 1864.Footnote ¹⁸

But NLU unions had little faith that new restraints on contract labor would diffuse the threats posed by mass European immigration, and they wrestled over additional responses. With the federal government neither inclined nor equipped to further control European inflows, the NLU instead sought to persuade their European union brothers to lend assistance. At the 1867 NLU national convention, William Sylvis, the federation's president, won delegate support for “an intercontinental agency” to counteract “the intrigues of capitalists.”Footnote ¹⁹ In pursuit of this goal, the NLU took their case to the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association. A.C. Cameron, the American NLU representative to the international meeting in 1869, told the General Council that U.S. workers looked to the international organization to help provide immigration control when employers used European immigrants to undermine American strikes and wages. In particular, following Sylvis's instructions, Cameron recommended that the International Workingmen's Association and the NLU form a joint Emigrant Bureau to gather and distribute accurate information about U.S. wages and working conditions, including warnings about industrial sectors in which employers and union members were at odds. In addition, Cameron urged the General Council to encourage European workers to resist American employers trying to recruit them as strikebreakers. The General Council agreed on both counts, which marked a pivotal moment for transnational labor solidarity.

In a similar spirit, individual American union leaders forged alliances with their counterparts overseas to discourage European workers from immigrating when it was most harmful to U.S. worker interests. For instance, William Jessup of the New York Ship Joiners and Robert Applegarth of the London Society of Carpenters and Joiners developed a close alliance for these purposes, eventually amalgamating their two unions.Footnote ²⁰ Strikingly, U.S. labor leaders pursued international cooperation precisely because they saw formal policy restrictions on voluntary European immigration as anathema to traditional national and union principles.

California Labor Activism, the NLU, and Chinese Exclusion

If the NLU and its member unions were conflicted about European immigration, they felt less ambivalent about Chinese immigration, which they attacked as economically and racially unacceptable. Indeed, organized labor stood at the center of the anti-Chinese movement in California.Footnote ²¹ Labor antagonism toward the Chinese found early expression at mass meetings of white miners in the state who protested against “capitalists” profiting from an “Asiatic inundation.”Footnote ²² As a developing industrial and urban center with powerful manufacturing and shipping interests, San Francisco became the locus of California union organization and politicization in the 1860s. Between 1860 and 1870, the city's population soared from 57,000 to nearly 150,000. In the late 1860s, the closing of unproductive mines, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the steady migration to the state of new settlers led displaced workers to San Francisco in search of scarce jobs. Employers responded to this labor oversupply by reducing wages and extending the working day.Footnote ²³

Union leaders blamed these labor market developments on Chinese workers (comprising 13 percent of the city's labor force), who were said to displace white laborers by accepting “servile” wages and working conditions. “[The Chinese] do not constitute as European immigrants do, an addition to the industrial element,” one California newspaper declared. “On the contrary, they are substitutes and supplanters, every one of them who obtains employment is taking the place of a white man, and depriving him of work.”Footnote ²⁴ The fusion of economic and racial restrictionism was unmistakable from the start. Although many Chinese traveled to the United States as voluntary immigrants, labor groups and newspapers presumed all arrived as bonded or “coolie” laborers, thereby representing a new slave trade that degraded free white labor.Footnote ²⁵

Labor resentment of Chinese workers also stemmed from their employment as strikebreakers. When Irish railroad workers went on strike for higher wages in 1863, for instance, financiers of the Pacific Railroad recruited thousands of Chinese laborers to work for meager wages and under poor conditions. White laborers first organized secretive anti-coolie clubs in this period, but wartime prosperity and railroad construction quieted Sinophobic tempers. As unemployment and labor unrest grew after the war, however, these clubs reappeared and spread to every ward of San Francisco.Footnote ²⁶

At the time, some within labor's ranks, like H.C. Bennett, argued fervently that anti-Chinese efforts diverted the labor movement from fundamental working-class issues. “The poor Chinese are set up as a decoy,” he declared, “to draw attention from the real evil.” Bennett reminded Irish workingmen that they “were for centuries held as an inferior race by their Saxon rulers,” and warned that “the very same men who are now leading the Irishmen against the Chinese, were the leaders of the know-nothing party.”Footnote ²⁷ However, Bennett's views of racial solidarity were rare among California labor leaders. As labor historian Lucille Eaves has observed, union organizers recognized that anti-Chinese agitation “contributed more than any other factor to the strength of the California labor movement.”Footnote ²⁸

Strikingly, NLU members were not initially unified on Chinese exclusion. Some of the labor federation's leaders contended that anti-Chinese campaigns served the interests of unsavory employers by dividing workers from one another. Sounding cosmopolitan themes, they urged union members to welcome all newcomers: “Chinaman, African, or native of any country coming voluntarily to this soil.”Footnote ²⁹ Yet many NLU voices drew a sharp distinction between European immigrants with whom they could share fraternity as part of a common producer class and Chinese newcomers who they saw as repugnant economic competitors and racial inferiors. The initial solution to this debate at the 1869 NLU convention was to prohibit servile “coolie” labor while affirming that “voluntary Chinese immigration ought to enjoy the protection of the laws like other citizens.”Footnote ³⁰ Yet, after seventy-five “free” (non-contract, non-coolie) Chinese workers were used by a shoe factory owner in North Adams, Massachusetts to break a strike in 1870, the NLU and eastern workers joined their California counterparts in rallying for sweeping Chinese exclusion, encompassing both free and contract labor.

During the summer of 1876, as grassroots pressure for Chinese exclusion gained momentum, leaders of the Democratic House and Republican Senate raced to create a Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration.Footnote ³¹ It predictably concluded that Chinese newcomers were economically harmful to working-class citizens and incapable of sharing social and political institutions established by the “Aryan or European race.” “The deduction of testimony,” the report noted, “would seem to show that there is not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese race … for self-government.”Footnote ³² Its majority report called for the Burlingame Treaty to be renegotiated and for new prohibitions on Chinese immigration to be enacted.

In 1878, an unemployed Irish immigrant, Denis Kearney, drew white laborers into a new Workingmen's Party with demagogic speeches linking working-class insecurity to an evil marriage of corporate privilege and servile Chinese labor. The new party spread rapidly across the state, establishing major branches in forty of the state's fifty-two counties.Footnote ³³ In statewide election, Workingmen's Party candidates won key legislative seats, mayoral races, and 50 of 153 delegate slots for a special convention to revise the California Constitution. California ultimately adopted a new constitution that contained sweeping anti-Chinese provisions.Footnote ³⁴ By the late 1870s, labor organizations across the country presented Congress with numerous petitions protesting “the systematic importation and immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States, to be employed at rates of wages ruinous to the free labor of our citizens.”Footnote ³⁵ Chinese exclusion became an article of faith for American labor during the Gilded Age, and even well after Congress enacted draconian prohibitions on Chinese immigration in the 1880s and 1890s, unions and labor federations continued to send anti-Chinese petitions to lawmakers.

The Knights, European Contract Labor, and Chinese Exclusion

Formed as a secret society in 1869 by six Philadelphia garment cutters disgusted with their craft union, the Knights aspired to construct a “labor fraternity” that first would organize members of individual trades and then bring workers together across trades to pursue a republican economic vision. They believed that the difficulties workers faced as the pace of industrialization quickened—most notably declining wages and the loss of autonomy on the shop floor—were tied to a larger political problem. As the Knights' George McNeill summarized the organization's position, there was “an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage system of labor and the republican system of government.”Footnote ³⁶ The Knights argued that, to ensure the conditions of self-government, citizenship required the inclusion of a basic set of economic rights for wage earners, including the right to reasonable hours of work, to membership in unions, and to the union pay scale. Beyond guaranteeing a just wage and the right to organize, the Knights called for industrial democracy. The organization espoused a producers' vision of a decentralized economy in which production and distribution of goods would be carried out by small local firms and entrepreneurship would be supported and encouraged through easy access to credit.Footnote ³⁷

For a short time, the Knights were able to create a structure that was capable of overcoming the occupational, ethnic and geographic fragmentation that was the hallmark of the American working class. Knights' local assemblies brought skilled craft workers together with less skilled workers across a variety of industries, as well as ethnicity, race and gender. As Voss explains,

By the mid-1880s, there were members in every American city and town with a population over 8,000. In a single year, 1886, membership grew seven-fold from 100,000 to 700,000, and the Knights had local assemblies in every state.Footnote ³⁹

Amid immigration swells and economic depression in the 1880s, labor unions clamored for federal legislation to prohibit industrial employers from importing immigrant workers to break strikes and hold down wages. Although the Democratic Party cast itself as the traditional defender of European immigrants, it also nurtured close ties with labor unions, especially the Knights of Labor. To avoid offending either constituency, House Democrats assailed only that European immigration which resulted from “greedy capitalists” importing foreign laborers under contract.Footnote ⁴⁰ Party leaders proposed an Anti-Contract Labor Bill in 1884 that solely prohibited prepaid passage and contractual arrangements for the recruitment of unskilled alien workers. Lest foreign-born voters view the bill as restrictive, Democrats emphasized that it “in no way seeks to restrict or prohibit voluntary or free immigration.”Footnote ⁴¹ During the 1884 election campaign, the Republican Party also endorsed a ban on contract labor. By 1885, a federal contract labor ban was enacted.

The Knights of Labor welcomed distinctions between old and new European arrivals. Indeed, Knights leaders such as Terence Powderly praised “voluntary immigration” from Europe, and assailed contract labor as a monopolist perversion of the nation's traditional commitment to unrestricted immigration. One Knights' publication decried “the stupendous folly of an industrial system which makes so naturally beneficent a thing as an increase in population a menace to the welfare of the wealth producers.”Footnote ⁴² Like the NLU, then, the Knights struck an ambivalent, if not tolerant, posture toward large-scale European immigration.

Toward Chinese workers, however, the Knights' arguments for restriction were fervent. Powderly, Master Workman of the Knights, openly criticized the Chinese as unassimilable. “[T]he Chinese never associate with other people,” he complained, “never adapt themselves to our habits, modes of dress or our educational system; they carry their pagan idolatry into every walk of life; never pay heed to the sanctity of an oath; see no difference between right and wrong …”Footnote ⁴³ Yet not all Knights embraced restriction on the basis of race. After the massacre of Chinese workers at Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885 during which white miners who were members of the Knights attacked the Chinese section of town, setting fire to homes, killing twenty-eight and wounding fifteen, some within the Order took strong objection to the leadership's weak repudiation of the miners and called for a re-evaluation of the Knights' policy toward the Chinese. Timothy Quinn, the Socialist leader of District Assembly 49 of New York, organized two groups of Chinese workers in New York City but was refused charters for them as regular local assemblies by the General Executive Board. According to Foner, “a minority of the board: Thomas B. Maguire, Captain Mazzi an Italian exile and Master Workman of an Italian local, Victor Drury, an active New York Socialist, and Frank J. Ferrell, also a Socialist and the most famous Negro of the Knights of Labor, spoke out in favor of the request.” Charters were again denied when two groups of Chinese workers in the Philadelphia area applied.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Powderly, when that resolution was introduced, “a point of order was raised that there was nothing in the Constitution to prevent the organization of Chinese. The General Master Workman decided that the point of order was not well taken, as three previous sessions of the General Assembly had adopted resolutions unfavorable to the residence of the Chinese in America, and, not being considered worthy of residence in America, they could not be regarded as proper persons to become members of the Knights of Labor.” A final resolution denying the charters was adopted by a vote of ninety-five to forty-two, reflecting a surprising level of dissent from restriction on the basis of race.Footnote ⁴⁵

With their mixed assemblies of skilled and unskilled workers, small business owners, women and African American workers, the Knights of Labor have won praise from labor historians for their unusually open structure and ideology that transcended traditional lines of difference—including those of ethnicity. Yet, when push came to shove, during the Gilded Age, arguments for restriction on the basis of defense of labor standards easily melded with racist rationales for exclusion.

Ultimately the NLU and the Knights, as the leading labor federations of the day, viewed voluntary European immigration as a virtuous and beneficial force in American national development. The labor insecurities introduced by new European immigration, they concluded, were the product of unscrupulous employers exploiting the nation's open gates to import contract laborers. Given the limitations posed by the American state at the time, the NLU's solution was to pursue international cooperation among unions. The Knights, by contrast, took advantage of a rare Congressional opening to secure legislation banning contract labor. The problem was that the vast majority of European newcomers who undermined union efforts were not contracted laborers but unskilled immigrants who had immigrated voluntarily. This reality eventually unleashed new internal struggles.

By contrast, Chinese exclusion initially drew opposition within the NLU, but racial and economic antipathies ultimately overwhelmed calls for colorblind solidarity when Chinese were used as strikebreakers. More than many have recognized, the Knights also debated Chinese natural rights and the possibilities of labor solidarity across racial lines, but they too ultimately embraced draconian restrictions on both economic and racial grounds. The federal government, so often frustrated by union demands for better hours and even the right to exist in this period, proved exceptionally amenable to the demands of Sinophobic western voters and labor activists in the competitive elections of the late nineteenth century.

“Restrictions … with a bribe”: Closing the Ports and Opening the Borders

Restrictionism took on a new shape with the arrival of Mexican migratory labor in the 1920s. The diverse nativist coalition that emerged from the Progressive Era was united in its hostility toward Asian and southern and eastern European immigration, as well as in its acceptance of eugenicist principles of racial order, providing what Gompers called “scientific means” of resolving the immigration question.Footnote ⁶⁵ Mexican labor flows, however, were another matter. The AFL, the IRL, patriotic societies, and a number of northern lawmakers favored stringent limits on Latin and South American immigration. By contrast, southern and western restrictionists favoring national origins quotas for overseas immigration also extolled the virtues of a cheap and flexible Mexican labor force. Representative John Nance Garner (D-TX) explained, “the prices that [Mexicans] charge are much less than the same labor would be from either the Negro or the white man.”Footnote ⁶⁶ He assured his House colleagues that Mexican laborers were by definition temporary and easily expelled. The Grange and the American Farm Bureau Federation weighed in. “We do not want to see the condition … when white men who are reared and educated in our schools have got to bend their backs and skin their fingers,” the Great Western Sugar Company told Congress. “You have got to give us a class of labor that will do … back-breaking work, and we have the brains and ability to supervise and handle the business part of it.”Footnote ⁶⁷

By contrast, AFL leaders campaigned for legislation that would place national origins quotas on Mexico and other Western-Hemisphere countries. In 1924, the AFL's Washington office vigorously pursued legislation that would establish an annual quota of 1,500 Mexican immigrants. However, it failed to build a broad coalition of support, and they faced insurmountable opposition from the House and Senate Immigration Committees dominated by southern and western legislators who favored European and Asian restrictions but welcomed Mexican labor migration.Footnote ⁶⁸

Clearly the uneasy 1920s coalition of northern nativists, organized labor, and southern and western restrictionists was deeply divided over Mexican labor. The controversy seemed to place in jeopardy the national origins quota system begun in 1921. Faced with stalemate or defeat, restrictionists called for a compromise on Mexican labor. As a prominent nativist declared, “I want the Mexicans kept out, but I do not want this bill killed by men who want these and all others admitted in unrestricted numbers.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The Immigration Act of 1924 ultimately erected formidable barriers to southern and eastern Europeans and reinforced Asian exclusion, but was decidedly permissive on Canadian and Mexican admissions. Aliens with ten years of continuous residence in a Western-Hemisphere country could enter the U.S. as non-quota immigrants. “Restrictions of immigration and setting up of un-American racial tests has been enacted through a fusion of northern Republicans from urban districts with southern Democrats, with a bribe tossed to the latter by keeping Mexico open,” observed one pro-immigration lobbyist.Footnote ⁷⁰ As nativist reformers prepared new quota legislation in 1928, they agreed to treat Mexican inflows as a distinctive issue. “These two kinds of restriction are quite separate and independent,” New York nativist Demarest Lloyd declared in reference to overseas versus Western-Hemisphere migration. “We all agree that unity of restrictionists is desirable.”Footnote ⁷¹ Recalling the potential split in 1924, the IRL also urged coalitional comity on “the National Origins–Mexican Quota situation.”Footnote ⁷² It even expressed sympathy for the dilemma faced by Southwesterners. “Although the West has become racially conscious and wants to be a white civilization, it also wants to develop and to develop rapidly. For this it needs unskilled labor of a mobile type, like the Mexicans, for it cannot get white labor to do its unskilled work.”Footnote ⁷³ The 1928 law codified this compromise, reaffirming a bifurcated system that imposed draconian restrictions on European and Asian immigration while remaining open and flexible toward labor inflows from Mexico and other Western-Hemisphere countries. The growers' success in gaining a flexible immigration policy toward Mexico signified the first of several double-crosses labor would experience on Mexican migration policy at the hands of southern and western lawmakers.

Similar to the NLU, the AFL responded to state resistance to policing Mexican labor though labor diplomacy. Most notably, they entered into direct negotiations with Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), the Mexican labor federation with close ties to the ruling party.Footnote ⁷⁴ At a 1925 conference held in Washington, CROM asked the AFL to pledge to defend the economic and social rights of the Mexican workers in the United States and address discrimination against them by AFL unions. CROM proposed the establishment of an international union card, which would “guarantee a unionist membership with full rights in the counterpart to his union if he moved across the border.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In addition, CROM wanted the unions to organize workers in their home countries before they emigrated. The AFL wanted CROM to engage in “voluntary self-restraint” to discourage Mexican workers from emigrating and push the Mexican government to place significant restrictions on emigration to the United States. Although both labor federations emerged from the conference satisfied that they had gotten what they came for, they turned out to be mistaken. The Mexicans denied that they had agreed to pursue a policy of curtailing Mexican immigration and focused instead on what they saw as the AFL's agreement to implement a policy within its member unions of treating Mexican workers equally. The AFL downplayed that part of the agreement, focusing instead on CROM's commitment to voluntary restriction of Mexican emigration to the United States.

Meeting again in 1927, the AFL took a hard line: If CROM would not lobby its government on voluntary restriction, then the federation would pursue Mexico's inclusion under the quota provisions. CROM agreed to this demand and also agreed to urge members who did emigrate to join the appropriate American unions or lose their Mexican union card if they did not. The AFL agreed to work with its member unions to ensure equal access and membership to Mexican workers. However, political events in Mexico led to CROM's loss of power and a subsequent rapid decline. The AFL effectively ended its partnership with CROM and redoubled efforts to include Mexico in the quota system, to no avail.

Mexican Braceros and Undocumented Aliens

At the start of the Second World War, southwestern growers and other business interests, joined by their legislative champions, complained to executive branch officials that war-induced labor shortages necessitated a new Mexican temporary worker program. In response, an interagency committee was formed to facilitate the importation of Mexican guest workers, or braceros. In 1942, the State Department negotiated a special agreement with Mexico establishing the Bracero Program that Congress swiftly approved. Under the bilateral agreement, the U.S. pledged that wages, living conditions, workplace safety, and medical services would be comparable to those of native workers. In turn, the Mexican government was to supervise the recruitment and contracting of braceros.Footnote ⁸⁹ Once the Bracero Program began, neither employers nor federal administrators saw to it that the negotiated protections of Mexican laborers were honored. Mexican braceros routinely received much lower wages than native workers and endured substandard living and working conditions. Contrary to the bilateral agreement, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) permitted growers and other employers to directly recruit braceros at the border. If the INS resisted direct employer recruitment, one INS official recalled, “… a good many members of Congress would be on the Service's neck.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Tellingly, the Bracero Program endured for almost two decades after the war ended. Guarded by a “cozy triangle” of agribusinesses, southern and western congressional “committee barons,” and a lax immigration bureaucracy, roughly 4.2 million Mexican workers entered the U.S. Unauthorized flows across the southern border also continued apace.

Earlier labor federations had seen “new” immigrant workers—from the Chinese to southern and eastern Europeans—as undermining labor standards and threatening the nation's racial stock. Organized labor's reaction to the Bracero Program as both exploitive of Mexican guestworkers and detrimental to the labor standards of native workers had evolved. The AFL warned, “The same elements that have always exploited illiterate Mexican labor have used the war emergency as a special plea to waive restrictive immigration laws.”Footnote ⁹¹ The CIO worried about “the vicious exploitation and discrimination directed against the Mexican workers” and, in contrast to the AFL, welcomed them “into the ranks of organized labor in the United States for the improvement of their conditions.”Footnote ⁹² At its 1950 constitutional convention, the CIO walked a fine line. On the one hand, it called for migrant workers' unconditional coverage under the Fair Labor Standards Act, resolving that the CIO and its unions should seek representation on “all federal, state and other public bodies that deal with the problems of those workers and the drafting, execution and supervision of their contracts.” But restrictionism was also on display, when, for instance, the CIO resolved that “effective measures be taken by the appropriate authorities to bar illegal entry of migrants and that foreign migrants should only be admitted in cases where domestic manpower is not available for the work to be done.”Footnote ⁹³

During the war's waning stages, the AFL recognized that “the march of dictatorships in the world” subjected both “free trade unions” and “racial and religious minorities” to vicious suppression. Its leadership later urged members to “wage an unrelenting struggle against groups … spreading the poison of anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Negroism and other forms of racial prejudice.”Footnote ⁹⁴ However, the AFL was not yet willing to sacrifice national origins quotas, resolving that “any lowering of the immigration bars be opposed, and … all phases of traditional immigration policy be maintained.”Footnote ⁹⁵ It was more open when it came to special refugee admissions after the war. To aid European Jews and other Displaced Persons (DPs) who crowded into Allied-controlled zones in 1946, American Jewish groups spearheaded the creation of a nonsectarian and bipartisan Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons (CCDP) comprised of the AFL and the CIO, as well as Catholic and Protestant leaders, captains of industry, social workers, public officials, and academics. To gain AFL support, the CCDP separated the plight of displaced persons from broader immigration reform efforts. The strategy proved successful, as delegates at the 1946 AFL convention endorsed “the immediate entry of immigrants composed of displaced persons in Europe of whom the Jews are a large number,” while still opposing broader immigration reform.

Although supportive of liberal efforts to assist European refugees, the AFL staunchly backed postwar legislation, such as the McCarran–Walter bill that sought to maintain stringent limits on Asian, African, and southern and eastern European immigration. The CIO denounced the bill, labeling it “one of the most severe blows to civil liberties, as well as to American relations with citizens of foreign nations” and called for its repeal.Footnote ⁹⁶ National immigration policy, a CIO resolution declared, “should be liberal and democratic and make no distinction among immigrants on grounds of race, religion or color.” The same resolution called for taking in more displaced persons: “We can be proud that our country has already given refuge to large numbers of those displaced by World War II, but we should not rest until the problem is completely solved. We can no longer leave these people in temporary refuges …”Footnote ⁹⁷

As it had in the past, the AFL pledged support for the national origins quotas but joined other labor organizations in expressing alarm that Mexican braceros and unauthorized migrants had “depressed wages and destroyed working conditions.” In 1951, the AFL proclaimed that the presence of hundreds of thousands of braceros coupled with an estimated 1.5 million undocumented aliens compromised the “security” of American workers. That same year, CIO president Philip Murray denounced INS failures to prevent illegal immigration from Mexico in his report to the convention. “As long as the Mexican border remains ‘an open sieve,’” he warned, “the influx of wetbacks will continue to displace hundreds of thousands of American agricultural laborers and seriously lower working standards.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The CIO also called upon the Department of Labor (DOL), then operating the farm placement service and Mexican contract labor agreement, “to carry out more effectively its solemn responsibility to protect American standards of living and to prevent exploitation of citizens of friendly nations.” It was adamant that the DOL provide labor representation on advisory committees and other bodies “dealing with the need for bringing in foreign workers and the conditions under which they are admitted.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Their appeals fell on deaf ears. In 1951, restrictionist legislators, including McCarran (D-NV) and Eastland (D-MS), shepherded passage of Public Law 78, reauthorizing the Bracero Program, claiming that to do otherwise would be “unfair to the farmer and the Mexican involved.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The AFL's failure to curb Mexican temporary worker programs had no bearing on its support of the McCarran–Walter bill. Indeed, the AFL lobbyist Walter Mason, following the direction of the AFL, denounced an expansive Humphrey–Lehman–Roosevelt Bill because it promised to undermine “the spirit of the Quota Act of 1924” and “disturb the ethnic equilibrium of this country.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Early in 1952, Mason privately noted that the Executive Committee fully supported the racial basis for restricting immigrant admissions. “The pooling of unused quotas would be in direct conflict with the national origin principle … which seeks to maintain the general racial composition of our population,” he averred. “The effect of pooling of unused quotas would be not only to increase substantially the number of people coming to the U.S. but would, in the course of a generation or so, change the complexion of the population of this nation.”Footnote ¹⁰² In its defense of the national origins quotas, the AFL stood by an immigrant admissions system premised on racial and ethnic bias.

After failing to terminate legal guest worker programs, organized labor and the Truman administration urged Congress to impose legal sanctions on those who illegally smuggled aliens into the country and on employers who intentionally hired undocumented aliens. Senator Paul Douglas (D-IL) worked with labor activists on a proposal to “reduce the volume of … illegal entries by imposing penalties upon those who knowingly employ illegal entrants.”Footnote ¹⁰³ But opponents successfully evaded this intent. As passed, the McCarran–Walter Act made it unlawful to transport or harbor undocumented aliens, but not to employ them.

This “Texas proviso,” as it later became known, highlighted the lengths to which congressional champions of national origins quotas were willing to go to preserve Mexican labor immigration, both legal and illegal. Despite this bitter pill, the AFL continued to endorse the legislation because it sustained restrictive quotas. Delegates at AFL conventions as early as 1950 endorsed “the immediate enactment of legislation to bar the illegal entries of aliens … [stipulating] further that such legislation provide a criminal penalty for employers who hire such labor.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 1954, a frustrated AFL Executive Council resolved to give “unceasing publicity” to the “wetback problem.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The CIO, by contrast, opposed the racist quota system and temporary Mexican labor. Condemning the suffering of migrant laborers, the CIO declared that since World War II, “the problem has been made worse by the growing flood of illegal Mexican ‘wetbacks.’ Driven by need, lured by false propaganda, they swarm across our Southern border to accept work in this country at wages and conditions far below the minimum standards tolerated by U.S. workers. Bad as conditions have been for U.S. migrant farm workers, those of the wetbacks are worse.” Sympathy for the plight of these workers did not blunt their frustration that U.S. farmworkers “have found themselves steadily replaced by Mexicans in those areas where cheaper ‘wetback’ labor is abundant. In turn their enforced unemployment has been used by employers to lower the standards of employment for other U.S. farm workers in jobs where they are still employed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Despite organized labor's frustration with Mexican labor migration, both legal and unauthorized, this period marked a transformation in the movement's stance on immigration. The rise of industrial unionism reflected a new relationship with the national state and a new orientation toward unskilled workers. At a time when the nation's gates were all but closed to newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, unskilled workers who had arrived earlier in the century were incorporated into unions as never before. Within this exceptional environment, the CIO's approach to immigration and refugee policy provided a foundation for strikingly expansive, solidaristic approaches toward Asian and Latin American newcomers in the decades that followed.

The Merger and Immigration Reform

The 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO brought about an enduring shift in organized labor's role in national immigration politics. In contrast to the AFL, the CIO and its affiliated unions were long-time supporters of both refugee relief and the dismantlement of the national origins quota system. As Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and CIO explained to Congress in 1955, “… many thousands of members of CIO unions themselves immigrated to this country, including Philip Murray, the late President of the CIO.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Because of its rich ethnic tradition, he observed, the CIO was offended by the preferential treatment of northern and western European immigrants and the idea that an “ideal racial composition can be frozen.”Footnote ¹¹² Although the AFL had traditionally taken a more restrictionist stance, especially on the necessity of quotas, even before the merger with the CIO, during the early 1950s, state-level Federations of Labor in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and other northern states had challenged the AFL's position on immigration policy. The ascendance of George Meany—who favored both the AFL-CIO merger and liberal immigration reform—to the presidency of the AFL in these years, was also significant. No sooner had Meany assumed the helm of the newly merged labor organization in 1955 than he promptly purged the AFL's director of legislative affairs, a long-time defender of immigration restriction.Footnote ¹¹³

Soon after the merger, the AFL-CIO Executive Committee made immigration reform one of its top priorities. Demands included increased annual admissions to 250,000 and the “abolishment of the national origins quota system entirely.” Under Meany's leadership, the AFL-CIO worked closely with other liberal groups to champion expansive immigration reform. In sharp contrast to labor activists of earlier decades, AFL-CIO leaders, like lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder, assailed the intellectual underpinnings of the existing policy, which “runs contrary to the democratic philosophy that people ought to be judged as individuals” (emphasis original).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Organized labor's defection from the restrictionist camp leveled a serious blow at postwar nativists.

In 1963, during the Kennedy administration, organized labor finally fulfilled a longstanding wish. Joining with religious groups and welfare organizations, it helped terminate the Bracero Program, which, since its creation, had authorized exploitation with the complicity of the INS, the Labor Department, and other government officials in a system that reformers described as a “broken down … state of corruption.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

On the heels of this success, in 1965 the AFL-CIO joined a variety of ethnic, economic and human rights groups to work closely with the Johnson White House and pro-immigration reformers in Congress to dismantle the national origins quota system. “[T]he true image of America is the kaleidoscope. It is a mosaic of human beings that is always changing but encased in a basic framework of freedom, of brotherhood, of tolerance, of creativity,” the AFL-CIO lobbyist told lawmakers. “The national origins quota system has no place on the American statute books.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ It was a clear renunciation of organized labor's earlier endorsement of restriction on the basis of race. Sweeping immigration reform in 1965 dismantled national origins quotas in favor of a new preference system that emphasized family-based immigration, but it also placed an annual ceiling of 120,000 on Western-Hemisphere visas.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Reformers did not anticipate that this new ceiling and the end of the Bracero Program would swell unauthorized Mexican inflows.

Illegal Immigration and Employer Sanctions: the 1970s Logjam

The end of the Bracero Program did not stem Mexican labor recruitment. Instead, the program's demise combined with new Hart–Celler limits on Western-Hemisphere immigration sent Mexican labor flows largely underground where they soon thrived and expanded. The dramatic rise in apprehensions and deportations of unauthorized migrants was unmistakable and troubling to decision makers. For labor, finding a solution to unfettered Mexican immigration was unfinished business, tracing all the way back to bargains in national origins quota legislation of 1924 and 1928 and to the Texas Proviso in the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act.

The progressive character of fighting illegal immigration in the 1970s was confirmed for many liberal Democrats by the struggle of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Association (FWA). The movement focused on winning decent wages and working conditions for Mexican American agricultural workers. When Chavez and the FWA organized a grape-pickers' strike in Delano, California in 1965, it soon was heralded as a new movement for Mexican American civil rights. Grape pickers were joined on the picket line by students, clergy, and national labor leaders, as well as members of the Congress on Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The campaign to organize farmworkers focused attention on undocumented aliens who were imported by growers to break the grape-pickers' strike. In 1968, Chavez urged Senator Robert Kennedy (D-NY) and other lawmakers to pressure INS officers “to remove Wetbacks (illegal entrants) … who are being recruited and imported to break our strike.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ At congressional hearings and in publications, Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW), a new AFL-CIO affiliate that succeeded the FWA, assailed the INS for doing little to discourage illegal immigration during harvest seasons.Footnote ¹²⁰

Liberal Democrats led the assault on illegal immigration. At Senate hearings on the problem in 1969, Senator Walter Mondale (D-MN) warned that if the federal government did not “stop that hemorrhaging … along the Texas border and along the California border,” labor protections and antipoverty programs would be compromised.Footnote ¹²¹ During the early 1970s, the AFL-CIO's Legislative Department mobilized broad support in the House for employer sanctions legislation. Employer sanctions appealed to many liberal Democrats because they promised to discourage illegal entries by targeting unscrupulous employers rather than pursuing mass-deportation tactics that threatened the civil liberties of Latino citizens and legal permanent residents. If employers could be dissuaded from hiring undocumented aliens, so the argument went, fewer foreign workers would be drawn illegally across national borders by the magnet of American jobs. The AFL-CIO worked closely with pro-labor Democrats in the House on employer-sanctions legislation. They forged an especially strong alliance with Peter Rodino (D-NJ), chair of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration.Footnote ¹²²

In 1971, Rodino's subcommittee held extensive hearings on illegal immigration across the country in which employer sanctions were endorsed by leaders from the NAACP, League of United Latin American Citizens, and other liberal groups.Footnote ¹²³ Most House members followed the lead of House liberals like Rodino, Henry Gonzalez and Emanuel Celler who linked sanctions to the postwar struggle against the Bracero Program and worker exploitation. Rodino's employer-sanctions legislation initially passed the House in 1972 but languished in the Senate where Eastland refused to allow the Judiciary Committee he chaired to take action.Footnote ¹²⁴ Labor leaders fumed. In a tersely worded statement on illegal immigration, the AFL-CIO Executive Council assailed Eastland: “His intransigence has blocked all efforts to erect barriers to the importation and employment of low-paid foreign workers at the expense of American workers. The AFL-CIO demands that Eastland abandon his effort to impose a new ‘bracero’ program… . We call for prompt, final Congressional action.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Eastland ignored the demand. When Rodino reintroduced his bill a year later, new resistance emerged in the House from fellow Democrats who warned that the measure would lead to job discrimination against Latinos, Asians, and anyone who looked or sounded foreign.Footnote ¹²⁶

As the 1970s progressed, new Latino and Hispanic lobbies vigorously opposed employer sanctions. In 1975, the UFW and Chavez were persuaded by Latino groups to oppose only undocumented aliens who engaged in strikebreaking activities. The UFW also announced new support for a generous amnesty program.Footnote ¹²⁷ The same year, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) served notice that it was campaigning to unionize undocumented aliens because of their enduring presence in the garment industry. ILGWU officials publicly explained that their new policy toward unauthorized workers reflected an inability on the part of the federal government “to do anything about illegal immigrants.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Among prominent Latino labor groups, only the AFL-CIO's Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) remained stridently opposed to illegal immigration. For its part, Congress was deadlocked for the rest of the decade. With immigration reform mired in conflict, a bipartisan Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP) was formed in 1979 to study the controversial illegal immigration problem, to study all other facets of U.S. immigration and refugee policy, and to issue recommendations for future reform.

From Employer Sanctions to Comprehensive Reform: Labor's Change of Position

To some national unions, immigrant workers toiling under difficult conditions for low wages in overwhelmingly private sector jobs represented the possibility of a large new constituency that could be brought into a union membership that had declined to 8 percent of the private sector workforce by 2005. For national unions, the priority was to pursue immigration policies that could help facilitate organizing these workers. Indeed, a 2004 Migration Policy Institute analysis concluded that between 1996 and 2003, the number of foreign-born union members had increased by 28 percent, whereas the number of native union members had declined by 6 percent during that same period.Footnote ¹³⁷ Unskilled immigrant workers were now viewed as an opportunity rather than a threat by several of the nation's largest labor unions. It was in the context of this massive wave of immigration and the unprecedented numbers of undocumented workers that the AFL-CIO reversed course in 1999 and called for the repeal of the employer sanctions provision it had strongly supported as part of IRCA. In adopting the new position, the AFL-CIO had come to the conclusion that employer sanctions were a failed strategy. The same Executive Council resolution that forswore opposition to employer sanctions also called for expanding the organizing rights of immigrant workers, a broad amnesty for the undocumented, and immigrant admissions based upon family reunification. The comprehensiveness of this approach represented the culmination of a shift in the federation's outlook and strategy, which had begun in the 1970s when the federation provided strong support for farmworker organizing and, later in that decade, came out in support of a broad amnesty program. It also reflected efforts by important international unions throughout the 1990s to organize the undocumented while disavowing employer sanctions. It was a gradual, but ultimately decisive, shift away from viewing unskilled foreign-born Latino and largely undocumented workers as unorganizable and pursuing policies to exclude them, to seeing these workers as instrumental to building the membership of the labor movement and pursuing policies to extend them legal status.Footnote ¹³⁸

The AFL-CIO's opposition to employer sanctions only deepened with the Supreme Court's 2001 Hoffman Plastics decision, which found that undocumented workers fired for their union activism were not entitled, as other workers are, to backpay awards.Footnote ¹³⁹ The federation's new position spurred increased activism on behalf of an expansive immigration policy, but there would be tremendous division within the house of labor over specifics. In the fall of 2003, the hotel workers took the lead in organizing the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a national mobilization meant to evoke the 1961 freedom rides of the civil rights movement. With strong support from the AFL-CIO, close to a thousand immigrant workers, many undocumented, boarded buses in cities across the United States and rode cross-country, ending in Washington, DC to call upon elected officials for a broad-based amnesty program. However, whereas some segments of the labor movement were mobilizing to support low-wage immigrant workers in their quest for legalization, others grew concerned about white-collar immigrant workers being brought in by corporate America through the H1B/L–1 temporary worker program. Writing to his members in December of 2004, Department of Professional Employees (DPE) president Paul Almeida contrasted the AFL-CIO's strong activism on behalf of low-wage immigrant workers with its quiescence on the issue of outsourcing of American white collar jobs. “[W]hen the issue first hit the nation's economy with hurricane force beginning in the fall of 2003, where was the AFL-CIO?” he asked. “Fully engaged and investing significant staff, financial, public relations, grassroots and other resources in the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. That's not to say that defending immigrant workers isn't the right thing to do but why wasn't there an equal investment in and concern about domestic white collar workers who were being ravaged by off shore outsourcing and the guest worker tidal wave?”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Although the federation did eventually take a position advocating for reform of the program, the DPE felt it was too little, too late.

Labor's increasing activism in favor of expansive immigrant admissions and rights provided a rare moment of agreement with an administration widely viewed as hostile to its aims. In January of 2004, President George W. Bush took another pass at immigration reform after his earlier bilateral foray into the area with Mexican President Vicente Fox was derailed by the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. The centerpiece of the Bush plan, however, was a new guest worker program that the AFL-CIO immediately opposed. The primacy of opposition to guest worker programs within a larger package of immigration reform would become a significant subject of struggle within the movement. In the summer of 2005, five AFL-CIO member unions accounting for more than a third of American union membership formally left the federation and formed a new labor coalition, Change to Win.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The loss was quite dramatic: Between 2005 and 2006 the federation lost 4, 476,375 members due to this split.Footnote ¹⁴² Although unions had left the AFL-CIO for periods of time before (including the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, and the Carpenters), a rift of this magnitude had not taken place since 1935 when John L. Lewis led four major unions in bolting the AFL to create the CIO.Footnote ¹⁴³ As discussed earlier, the CIO split was motivated by those unions' desire to organize the largely unskilled immigrant workforces of the new mass production industries and the unions' impatience with the AFL craft-union approach. The contemporary split was largely over political control of the federation, but it also had to do with impatience over the pace of organizing and the AFL-CIO's unwillingness or inability to hold affiliates accountable for making it their top priority.

Although not the main cause of the rift, struggles within the federation over immigration policy were a vibrant subplot. Four out of the five founding unions of the new Change to Win Coalition had the largest numbers of foreign-born workers in their membership bases and an ambition to organize millions more.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ SEIU's signature campaign of recent years was Justice for Janitors, which focused on organizing low-wage Latino janitors. In 2006, UNITE-HERE, the merged union of hotel and garment workers, launched the Hotel Workers Rising campaign, which focused on Latino maids and other “back of the house” workers. Unlike construction and manufacturing unions which were rooted in older sectors of the economy and whose memberships were less reflective of the new immigration, these labor organizations focused on the newer, less organized sectors of the economy, and their memberships included many new immigrants. Weeks before the five unions left the AFL-CIO, HERE president John Wilhelm resigned as chair of the AFL-CIO Committee on Immigration, complaining of staff domination. “Rather than union leaders working hard to overcome differences and find common ground,” he protested, “16^th Street [the address of the national AFL-CIO headquarters] has taken over … The predictable result is that we head into the AFL-CIO convention with division on immigration after five years of unity.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Wilhelm, the labor leader who led the campaign to reverse the federation's position on employer sanctions, had come to the conclusion that the federation's hard-line opposition to a guest worker program prevented a workable policy compromise with business.

AFL-CIO president John Sweeney responded forcefully, arguing that HERE's shift on the guest worker issue and its aggressive advocacy of this position “prevented a consensus from forming around early drafts of the McCain–Kennedy immigration reform legislation,” which the federation was working hard to influence in a prolabor direction. Sweeney went on to charge Wilhelm with having “acquiesced to the corporate demands of the Republican sponsors of the bill, making it difficult to secure meaningful protections in the final form of the … bill.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

In the months following their institutional rift, the AFL-CIO, HERE and SEIU all deepened their immigration work. Top-level AFL-CIO staff, working out of the general counsel's office as part of the Immigrant Workers Project,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ pursued several strategies, including: lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform legislation, working with its affiliates to strengthen local union representation of immigrant members, and building partnerships with grassroots, community-based immigrant worker organizations. The AFL-CIO worked closely with the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the National Employment Law Project (NELP) on efforts to blunt the impact of the Hoffman decision and to oppose legislation that threatened the workplace and civil rights of immigrant workers. Furthermore, in August 2006, the AFL-CIO announced the establishment of a national political alliance with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), an umbrella organization of day laborer centers sometimes viewed as competition by the building trades and other unions. The alliance came at a time when day laborer centers across the country were coming under attack from anti-immigrant organizations seeking their closure. NDLON, stretched thin defending the centers in numerous courts, city councils, county and state legislatures, desperately needed the support.

For the federation, the worker center alliance represented another significant step toward an expansionist approach to dealing with immigration. For the AFL-CIO's fragile internal consensus, however, the alliance was fraught with danger. Some building trades unions strongly opposed the NDLON agreement. Steps like this one always had to be combined with reassurances that the federation would defend their interests. Within certain core constituencies of the AFL-CIO, especially white collar and construction unions, opposition to any bill that included expansion of guest worker programs was absolute. The Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO came out with its own comprehensive statement on immigration reform, for the first time declaring support for earned legal status for undocumented workers and, like their white collar brethren in the DPE, opposing an expanded guest worker program.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ “A new temporary worker program would be particularly harmful to the long-term interests of the building and construction industry,” it announced. “A new temporary worker program will permit employers to meet labor shortages by importing temporary non-immigrant labor instead of investing in recruitment and training of new US workers. This is particularly true in the building and construction industry where employment is characterized by its intermittent, temporary and transitory nature…”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The AFL-CIO adopted the position that once a labor market shortage and legitimate employer need for new immigrant workers was established, it should be met by raising the number of green cards, or legal permanent resident (LPR) visas, rather than expanding temporary programs.

SEIU and HERE ratcheted up their work as well but in a decidedly different direction. Moving closer to business, they began to work closely with the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC), an alliance of immigrant-dependent industry associations headed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, including the American Health Care Association, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, National Council of Chain Restaurants, the National Retail Federation, and the Associated Builders and Contractors (the trade association of aggressively anti-union construction companies). EWIC was initially formed by meatpacking conglomerates to advocate for expansion of guest worker programs. It counts many of the nation's largest anti-union employers as members, including Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and Marriott.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

As the outlines of a bipartisan bill took form, the two unions concluded that passage of immigration reform hinged upon inclusion of a temporary worker program. Liberated from federation constraints, they embraced this trade-off. In exchange for some form of legalization for the twelve million undocumented workers currently residing in the United States, they acquiesced to an expanded temporary worker program that would no longer be limited to modest numbers of seasonal workers but which included a pathway to citizenship for these workers. They differed with the AFL position on two counts. First, they believed that the numbers of new workers had to be based not only on certification of domestic labor market shortages but also on the supply of workers currently entering the United States annually. In order to clear demand, their view was that the number of visas would have to be much higher than what the federation was proposing. Second, they believed that handling all future flow through increasing the number of green cards was politically unfeasible.

SEIU vice president Eliseo Medina, a veteran organizer from the UFW who had been one of the leaders of the Justice for Janitors campaigns, became the public voice of the union's initiative for immigration reform. Medina, himself the son of a bracero, acknowledged the troubling history of guest worker programs but insisted that a temporary worker program was the price of amnesty for the undocumented. He saw AFL-CIO opposition to any bill with a temporary worker component as stonewalling and argued that the federation was refusing to participate in the legislative process at a time when undocumented workers desperately needed relief. By accepting some form of temporary worker program, Medina believed his union and its allies could shape it into a “break-the-mold program” that avoided the most egregious problems of the past by insisting on portability between employers and a pathway to citizenship.

In the winter of 2005, HB 4437, a punitive bill focused on border enforcement, narrowly passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. It proposed for the first time to make illegal presence in the United States a felony and made it a crime for any persons or organizations to lend support to undocumented immigrants. The bill was also a direct attack on day laborer centers. From March through May 2006, demonstrations against the bill by largely Latino immigrants and their supporters, unprecedented in number and size, took place in a wide array of cities and towns across the United States.Footnote ¹⁵¹ SEIU, HERE and other unions provided crucial financial support and troops, and the AFL-CIO worked closely with NDLON to oppose the bill legislatively. During that spring, opposition to the punitive House plan offered a divided labor movement an opportunity to stand united, but it was a unity that would not last.

Three distinct Senate bills emerged in the spring of 2006: the first, a bipartisan effort of Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ); the second from the Judiciary Committee chaired by Arlen Specter (R-PA); and a third from two border state Republicans—John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ)—that focused primarily on expanding resources for border and worksite enforcement but also included a temporary worker program. The McCain/Kennedy and Judiciary bills both attempted to satisfy disparate camps by including tough new language on border and interior enforcement, employment verification, and an expanded guestworker program, along with earned legalization for millions of undocumented workers, a reduction of the family immigration backlog, and a modified version of AgJOBS, a bill that provided legal status for a significant portion of undocumented agricultural workers. The AFL-CIO ended up opposing all three bills, reiterating its opposition to an expanded guest worker program, whereas SEIU and HERE supported McCain/Kennedy and the Judiciary Committee bills.Footnote ¹⁵² The Senate Judiciary bill passed the full Senate that spring, but died in the House. With a majority of the House supporting a law-and-order approach to the issue and the Senate, on the other hand, favoring a more liberal bill, immigration reform was tabled until after the election. In November, Democrats gained control of both the House and Senate. President Bush, viewing the new Congress as an opportunity, began speaking of “a bipartisan effort” on immigration reform.

As the federal debate intensified, the Bush administration turned up the pressure for legislative action. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), after having all but abandoned large-scale workplace raids as an enforcement strategy since 1999,Footnote ¹⁵³ launched an aggressive worksite enforcement campaign. The number of undocumented workers arrested on administrative immigration violations during worksite enforcement investigations increased from 485 in FY 2002 to 3,667 in FY 2006 and, five months into 2007, had already reached 3,226.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ If the Bush administration's increased enforcement efforts were designed to dramatize the need for comprehensive immigration reform, it fueled grassroots opposition led by restrictionist groups and right-wing talk show hosts who were angered by the huge immigration marches the previous spring.

In March and April of 2007, Kennedy resubmitted the Judiciary Committee bill as a starting point for Senate discussion, while Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) submitted his own immigration bill. Both were liberal Democrats, and Kennedy had long been labor's leading ally in the Senate, yet both men incorporated guest worker programs in their proposals despite AFL-CIO opposition and Democratic control of Congress. The Gutierrez bill included earned legalization for the twelve million undocumented, as well as a large new temporary worker program. Nevertheless, it was embraced as a starting point by SEIU, HERE, NCLR, the National Immigration Forum, and other allies. The White House also promulgated a proposal, although not in legislative form. By May, a bipartisan Senate coalition led by Kennedy negotiated behind the scenes and eventually put forward the Border Security and Immigration Act of 2007, a “grand bargain,” which had the support of President Bush and became the focus of all meaningful subsequent discussion.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The grand bargain included significant new funding for border security and other interior enforcement measures. It imposed criminal penalties for illegal entry, which had previously been a misdemeanor offense, and proposed to replace the current family- and employment-based admissions system with a “merit-based” system. The bill provided a new Z visa for undocumented immigrants that covered “a principal or employed alien, the spouse or elderly parent of that alien and the minor children of that alien” currently living in the US, provided they pay fees and penalties that could total as much as $8,000 and a “touchback provision” that required the leader of the household to return home before applying for legal permanent residency status. It also contained a temporary Y worker program of about 200,000 that would allow workers to be admitted for a two-year period that could be renewed twice, as long as the worker spent a period of one year outside of the US between each admission (which eventually had a five-year sunset provision). Incorporating the White House proposal, the bill contained triggers to be met before the Z or Y visas could begin. These triggers included: the hiring of 18,000 border patrol, construction of 200 miles of vehicle barriers and 370 miles of fencing, resources to detain up to 27,500 persons per day on an annual basis, and the use of secure and effective identification tools to prevent unauthorized work.

The AFL-CIO and many other unions opposed the legislation, and they played a prominent role in successfully blocking cloture, as desired by the bill's Senate supporters.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ When it looked as though the measure would die, the SEIU, HERE and UFW along with many business organizations and the White House worked behind the scenes to resurrect it. Labor's divided house was engaged in open battle.

When the bill was reintroduced in mid-June, the AFL-CIO reiterated its opposition but was not pulling out all the stops to mobilize opposition, whereas the Building Trades Council actively worked to defeat it. Also, three Change to Win member unions, the Laborers, Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers ultimately joined the federation in opposing the bill, whereas the other three—SEIU, UNITE-HERE and the Farm Workers—pressed on. Despite expressing major problems with some of its features, those unions believed the best strategy was to push the bill forward and try to improve it when it went to the House. “We think burying the issue and ignoring it would be a terrible mistake for the country and the economy,” Wilhelm told reporters. “We don't support the bill in its present form, but we think that the process is best served if the bill passes out of the Senate and the legislative process continues.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Eliseo Medina added that “it will allow workers who want to organize to do so without the fear of deportation, and that helps unionization drives; it's not just a question of helping us as labor; it helps all workers because if you have a significant number of workers without any rights, that suppresses wages for everybody.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸

On 28 June 2007, the grand bargain was defeated for the second and final time.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ To be clear: The defeat came not at the hands of the labor unions but at the hands of a powerful grassroots anti-immigration mobilization that ultimately blocked the business lobbies from mobilizing the necessary Republican votes. The bill's defeat, although clearly a loss for the unions that had supported it, was but a Pyrrhic victory for the AFL-CIO. If anything, the split within the federation and the loss of so many of its strongest immigrant-friendly unions galvanized the AFL-CIO to demonstrate support for low-wage immigrant workers in other ways. It had invested time and money in an invigorated immigrant worker program that included aggressively working toward comprehensive immigration reform. It did not want the defeat of the Kennedy bill to be immigration reform's last gasp.

The 2007 debate represented a unique moment in the American labor movement's struggles over immigration. Rather than a clear-cut division between restriction versus solidarity within organized labor, both sides in this debate pursued solidarity and championed immigrant rights. The differences within the movement over the amnesty for guest worker tradeoff, although bitter, were a portrait of a labor movement wrestling over the best strategy to defend labor standards while welcoming new immigrant workers as the lifeblood of a revitalized labor movement.