The history of the US labor movement's relationship to immigrant workers has bent toward justice, but with many twists and turns. Until the year 2000, when the AFL-CIO took a decisive stance in support of immigrant workers’ rights and comprehensive immigration reform, the House of Labor was deeply divided over the issue. In a settler-colonial context, with a working class overwhelmingly composed of foreign-born workers and their descendants, US unionists debated whether their interests were best served by limiting entry into the nation of future migrants or, instead, by actively recruiting foreign-born newcomers into their organizations. Until the twenty-first century, advocates of immigration restriction largely prevailed in those debates.1
Employers routinely recruited immigrant workers as strikebreakers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That reality led most unionists—although many were themselves foreign born—to view ongoing immigration as a threat to organized labor's hard-won gains and to support restrictive...
