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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Strict immigration controls. Workers have the best leverage for negotiations when there are no alternative sources of labor for corporations to scab with, and what group makes a better scab than disorganized, desperate, immigrants who probably lack the qualifications (education, experience, language) to enter a proper union?
Make no mistake, no one wants mass immigration more than the owner class.
That seems to make sense until you think about the additional growth in demand required to avoid industry shutdowns that is almost solely down to immigration, since the US birth rate is like 1.8 per woman.
Multinationals are happy to move the jobs to Mexico or Vietnam or China; they don’t need to employ immigrants in the US to lower labor costs.
Immigrant labor is actually cheaper when immigration is tightly controlled, at least it is in the US where "restricted" really just means more illegal immigrants rather than fewer overall. When you let people in legally, they're documented, unions can actually reach out to them, and they are protected by things like minimum wage.
Illegal immigrants are not.
Something like 70% of "illegals" in the US are illegally here for less than half the year. It's agricultural workers who just don't go home when the season ends.
These people do nothing to harm the 7% of private employees who are already in unions.
I'm talking about the best interests of existing union workers.
Have you spoken to many on-the-ground union workers?
This is exactly what those people are opposed to. They want their Unions to be exclusive with a small labor pool. Less workers + good Union support = more money per worker. There are obviously some exceptions.
Fewer legal immigrants doesn't mean fewer workers, it just means fewer people being paid above board. That extra money doesn't go to union members, it goes to stock buybacks and CEO packages. The more of a company's workforce is part of the union, the stronger the union's negotiating position, and THAT'S how unions get more money for their members.
This is a notoriously difficult thing to prove out either way in data, and I'm sure it varies situationally.
The Mariel Boatlift natural experiment did not demonstrate a decrease in wages or increase in unemployment. It makes sense: immigrants both work and consume (i.e., create demand). Unless every immigrant happens to work in the same industry/union, the sum total of immigrants may create demand for labor equal to or greater than they fill.
It also may have the impact you're suggesting. But it doesn't have to be zero sum. And, understandably, people only remember when they lost a job potentially tied to immigrant labor. Nobody asks if the job they're applying to was created due to demand immigrants added to the economy (and how could a company know that?).