The following speech was delivered by Avery Wear at the “Why Labor Must Oppose Deportations” meeting recently held in San Diego with the participation of 90 activists. It was co-sponsored by SEIU Local 221’s Labor History Caucus and the newly formed cross-union rank and file group called the Labor Solidarity Action Network.
Good evening fellow workers, we come together in dangerous times. I want to make 3 points as our class figures out how to defend ourselves. 1) Immigrant workers are leaders in our class struggle. 2) An attack on any worker is an attack on all of us. 3) Working class people never drain the economy- we are the economy.
It’s no secret, working class life is getting harder. In 1979 unions still organized 25% of the workforce. Today we’re down to 10% And yes, we’re definitely making a union comeback. But the damage suffered in the last 50 years has been immense. Working class people no longer expect to afford homes, or these days just about anything. Inflation adjusted wages peaked in 1973, and as of 2024 were still 2.8% below that level.
But the US economy grew from 6 to 24 trillion dollars in that same period. Yes, population grew by about a third, but even accounting for that, the economy more than doubled in size per-person. Think about that- there is now more than twice as much wealth to go around to every person. The wage earners, the working class, who make up 81% of the people, on average gained absolutely nothing. But the number of billionaires went from 13 in 1980 to over 700 in 2024. With a weakening union movement, we lost ground, and the wealthy literally took all the gains produced by our hands and our brains. And as the kicker, they lobbied to get their taxes lowered too.
As a result, there’s plenty of misery all around us. But today well-funded voices, paid by the very class that took all that new wealth we created, tell us immigrant workers are to blame.
Meanwhile working-class immigrant communities are quickly organizing defense networks and know-your-rights trainings in the face of the spectacular threat of “mass deportation” raids. These workers are creating the first grassroots opposition to Trump’s second-term agenda, leading border tsar Tom Homan to complain that too many people targeted by ICE know their rights. “They call it ‘know your rights.’ I call it ‘how to evade arrest,’” he said.
Trump is coming for immigrants, trans people, and federal employees first. Others will surely follow. Our labor movement and our class must stand with the resistance to this first wave of attacks, in order to build unity where division could reign, and to get ourselves in fighting shape for the battles to come. Because it’s no secret that Project 2025 lays out a laundry list of devastating attacks on labor rights, from the recent cancellation of Federal unions’ bargaining rights by executive order, to crippling the National Labor Relations Board, to legalizing retaliation against us for organizing, and much, much more. Before these attacks hit any and all of us directly, we must make sure Trump’s power is weakened from losing, not winning, the fights he’s in right now, and that by then we have more allies because we stood up for people.
So how can we win our fellow workers to unconditional defense of our immigrant comrades? To start, we must explain what is ignored by all sides in our national immigration debate, but what is vital for our class to know: immigrant workers are and always have been leaders in our class struggle.
We start with our history. The first organized national strike, the eight-hour day movement of 1886, was led by German immigrant workers. The first mass breakthrough into industrial factory unionization began in 1909 when 20,000 immigrant women struck in textiles, leading to the formation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union. The Industrial Workers of the World’s landmark 1912 strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts had daily strike meetings with translators speaking 25 different languages. The 1919 Great Steel Strike was led by Polish workers. And the turning-point struggles of the 1930s involved immigrant workers and their children in the millions.
My union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), became the fastest-growing union in the 1980s by organizing immigrant workers in the wake of the 1986 amnesty for 2 million undocumented workers. Others like UNITE-HERE and Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) also turned to immigrants. Our successes led the American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to reverse its historic opposition to immigration in the year 2000. Immigrant workers were the biggest source of hope in those years, when our movement overall was suffering setback after setback.
Now it’s true that things are different this century. When my Great-Grandparents came, from Italy, Poland and Russia, they just showed up at Ellis Island. That’s right, we had open borders for most of our history. But in 1924 the Border Patrol was formed, and in the following decades it was often used by employers to deport workers when they unionized or went on strike. The last immigrant amnesty bill was in 1986. And since 1994 the Border Patrol and now ICE have expanded dramatically. So it’s true that today’s increasingly closed borders place many new and dangerous obstacles in front of immigrant workers organizing- the employers want it that way. But does that mean, as many assume, that immigrant workers have become harder to organize?
Foreign-born workers, including the millions of undocumented, have a 10 percent unionization rate. That is the same as the all-worker figure. But foreign-born workers make up only 10 percent of public sector employees, where overall unionization is high at 32 percent. By comparison, 14 percent of all workers work in the public sector. That means the foreign born are overrepresented in private sector jobs, where the overall unionization rate is low- only 6 percent. How then do immigrant workers manage to keep up with the 10 percent overall unionization rate for all workers? By unionizing more readily than native born workers in the private sector.
Few recall the fact that the first general strike in the United States since the Oakland strike of 1946 happened in 2006. This was the May 1st “Day Without an Immigrant,” organized to protest the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill in Congress. This strike involved millions of workers shutting down entire industries, such as meat packing and the Los Angeles garment manufacturing district.
A few weeks ago, I attended a meeting in San Diego of 90 people, mostly immigrants, who formed an Action Network to prevent deportations- they are here tonight. A similar meeting in Los Angeles drew 300 people. Untold numbers protested against mass deportation nationwide on February 1, 2025. Together with Federal employees, are any other groups of workers currently organizing this actively?
Tenants’ unions formed in the last decade in San Diego and Los Angeles have a largely immigrant base. In the case of San Diego, the first tenant to engage in public protest (against a landlord who refused to deal with a roach and spider infestation) was an undocumented mother.
Undocumented workers face greater repression and have fewer legal rights than the rest of our class. But worse conditions sometimes press people toward struggle.
Immigrants also form tight communities, which assists them in organizing themselves. Some immigrants come from countries and communities with stronger traditions of unionism or militancy than the United States, bringing much needed class struggle experience to us.
All of this still doesn’t mean undocumented workers are more likely to organize. Instead, we should see our undocumented comrades as facing a harsh reality that produces an intense and unique set of organizing experiences. Their struggle experience is an aspect of our power. It is an asset to our class.
Recognizing immigrant workers in their role as a leading section of our class struggle opens the door to challenging the unchallenged lies assumed in Republican and Democratic discourse on immigration.
Our labor- the labor of the working-age population of our class, supports everyone else- we support the idle rich of all ages and the young and the old of all classes. And since undocumented workers come here in search of work, they are an overwhelmingly working-age population. So undocumented people, like all people, attend schools as children and require medical attention when retired. But they actually draw on these resources at a lower rate than the rest of our class—and they work more, too. In 2023, immigrants’ labor force participation rate (68 percent) outpaced the general population (63 percent). Undocumented workers, specifically, made up 5.2 percent of the workforce but only 3.3 percent of the population in 2023-4.
So, in fact, immigrants massively benefit, rather than drain, tax revenue. Undocumented workers paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. The Social Security Administration (SSA) receives tax contributions from undocumented workers using false numbers. Because the numbers are false, they don’t accrue to the future benefit of those workers. These funds go into the SSA’s “Earnings Suspense File,” helping to keep the fund solvent at a time when it is increasingly stretched by the outsized pool of retiring Baby Boomers (and Congress’ refusal to apply SSA tax to income over $91,000 per year). Social Security’s Earnings Suspense File now holds more than $2 trillion (yes, trillion). You want to save Social Security, let immigrant workers in.
And amazingly, over 5 million undocumented workers annually file voluntary federal income taxes, using Individual Tax Identification Numbers. They do this to increase their odds of a favorable decision from a judge if and when they apply for citizenship. But meanwhile, they are paying into a system whose full benefits they cannot access. They also pay higher than normal tax rates, since as undocumented people they’re not eligible for various deductions and since they are less likely to file for refunds. All of this without mentioning their contributions to profits.
By ignoring the fact that the undocumented are an overwhelmingly working age and working class population, the political class has tricked many of us into believing immigrants could somehow be bad for our class. By reminding our co-workers that our class can never drain the economy, that instead we are the economy, that our work supports everyone else, and that this is more true of immigrant workers than any of us, we help our class to reclaim our pride, our sense of ourselves, our class-consciousness. And we need that mindset to build our labor movement.
But don’t immigrant workers take jobs from other workers? Immigrant workers are often simply doing the hardest jobs that nobody else will take. And there is nothing unique about different sections of our class being materially pitted against each other in a system designed to create artificial scarcity, get us fighting each other, and divide and conquer our class. But in specifically immigrant vs. native worker narratives, the material conflict is often an illusion. Take local construction and janitorial industries, which in LA transitioned from native to immigrant workforces. This was not a matter of employers hiring lower-paid immigrants and firing citizens. No. What actually happened was that in the 1980s and 1990s employers busted unions and lowered pay. Workers then voted with their feet, gradually finding jobs elsewhere. Immigrant workers began to take those jobs at lowered standards, but then became prone to re-unionize and push standards back up. Immigrant workers did just that in LA’s famous Justice for Janitors union campaign in the 90s. We should see through the lies told to divide and conquer our class.
Class consciousness today also means awareness of our position in the world market. Capital crosses borders at will, while restricting workers within them. Even if they now have to start paying tariffs, they are still legally free to ship goods and set up operations across borders. We see the results of freedom of movement for capital but not workers in the NAFTA and CAFTA treaties. U.S. workers, especially in manufacturing unions, are painfully aware of the million jobs we lost to NAFTA. Yet neither political party will teach us that NAFTA also destroyed the livelihoods of millions of corn and other farmers in Mexico. NAFTA left in place an average $20K/year farm subsidy for US corporate corn growers, while abolishing the $700/year price supports received by family corn farmers in Mexico. The resulting sharp increase in worker migration from Mexico to the United States in the wake of the treaty, predicted at the time by Border Patrol head Doris Meissner, was really the result of a tri-national corporate-government conspiracy against the working people of the US, Mexico, and Canada.
Republicans absurdly accuse Democrats of supporting open borders. This is despite Bill Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper and the thousands of migrant deaths it has caused. Despite record numbers of deportations by Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Despite Biden building more miles of the border wall he claimed to oppose than Trump. Despite endless bipartisan increases in spending on border enforcement.
In my experience workers’ opposition to open borders collapses when someone makes the case for them. One Trump-influenced worker recently complained to me about the “costs of open borders.” She was surprised, and receptive, when I countered that the costs of closed borders— those exploding immigration enforcement budgets—are the actual problem.
Imagine no more border between Tijuana and San Diego. What would be the result for the labor market? Tijuana workers would seek jobs in San Diego without restriction. Tijuana employers would then be forced to raise wages to the average level for San Diego. Companies could then no longer threaten to move factory jobs from the United States to maquiladora plants in Tijuana on the basis of cheaper labor costs.
I’m not just making that up. We see this race to the top start to happen when immigration restrictions loosen. The Center for American Progress produced a 2021 study on the effects on the economy of the 1986 federal amnesty, which allowed two million undocumented workers to receive permanent resident status within six months. The enhanced bargaining power of those workers led to increased wages for them. Raising the floor of the labor market, in turn, caused a rise, not a decline, in the average wage for all workers.
Increased worker buying power also led to an increase in economic growth. The study used these results to predict the possible outcomes of different immigration policy scenarios—mass legalization, a new guest worker program, or mass deportation. Legalization was by far the best result for both our wages and for economic growth. All of this should be common sense for our class: the more freedom for all of our class, including the freedom to live and work wherever we want to, the better for our living standards and our class power.
Mass deportation is an attack on our class. It will weaken our class as a whole. And unopposed, it will give momentum to all of the other attacks in store. We must join the resistance now. Our class can never drain the economy, we are the economy. We can’t afford to lose immigrant workers because they are a leading section of our class struggle. And now more than ever, an injury to one is an injury to all.
