State of the Unions
Why labor should oppose immigrant amnesty.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
November 29, 2001 4:10 p.m.

he AFL-CIO's annual convention gets started on Monday, presumably because members don't want to show up for work next week. One of the top items on the agenda will be support for an amnesty of illegal aliens. The union's executive council endorsed this idea last year; now the general membership must approve it.

Unions traditionally have opposed high levels of immigration on the understandable grounds that importing low-wage workers depresses wages for union members. This stance has wavered in recent years, perhaps because so many union members are now public-sector employees relatively isolated from these wage pressures. A formal vote backing the executive council, however, will mark the total collapse of Big Labor's historic position.

AFL-CIO president John Sweeney knows that he has to recruit about 400,000 more union members each year simply to avoid suffering net losses in union membership--and he believes immigrants represent an untapped pool of potential recruits. In recent years, about one-quarter of all new entrants to the workforce have been foreign-born. A substantial minority of these people have been illegal aliens. Legalizing them would make unionizing them much easier.

Yet Sweeney is making a strategic mistake, according to Cornell University's Vernon Briggs. He says that union membership typically increases during periods of immigrant restriction and decreases during periods of generous admissions (such as the current period). In a report published by the Center for Immigration Studies, Briggs warns the AFL-CIO against a pro-immigration policy: "It means that success in the organization of immigrants will not translate into any real ability to increase significantly the wages or benefits of many such organized workers. As long as the labor market continues to be flooded with low-skilled immigrant job seekers, unions will not be able to defy the market forces that will suppress upward wage pressures."

Native Spun Update
On Tuesday, NRO ran a story discussing a bill in honor of Native American Month. The bill falsely claims that "Native American governments developed the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers in government." The bill passed on a voice vote. During the "debate" preceding that vote, many congressmen expressed the earnest wish that all Americans would learn more about the history of Native Americans. Perhaps the congressmen should take their own advice.