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A MOVEMENT-BUILDING STRATEGY FOR ALL WORKERS  
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David Bacon and Peter Olney
December 26, 2025
The Reality Check
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_ Workers are bombarded by false ideas about immigration and
immigrants, that hold immigrants responsible for poverty, lost jobs
and crime. To organize for political change, workers have to be
convinced to support the rights of all working people. _

Farmworkers, domestic workers and their supporters marched to call
for passage of the Registry Bill, which would allow undocumented
people to gain legal immigration status. , Photo: David Bacon

 

The night Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City he called
his triumph "the victory of the Bangladeshi aunty who knocked on door
after door until her feet throbbed and her knuckles ached. ... of the
Gambian uncle who finally saw himself and his struggle in a campaign
for the city that he calls home."  Countering arguments that
defending immigrants is an election loser, incompatible with fighting
for jobs and living standards of all workers, Mamdani answered,
"Dreaming demands solidarity  ... A life of dignity should not be
reserved for a fortunate few. ... We can be free and we can be
fed." "We can be fed" is a call, not just for municipal grocery
stores, but for attacking the corporate domination that keeps workers
hungry and angry.  To win an election, he says, candidates have to
defend workers' class interests.  But he combines this with "We can
be free," which means ending raids and detentions.  But divided
families also hear a call, and white workers with German or Italian
surnames should remember it from Ellis Island more than a century
ago.  On Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay those held in
detention by racist anti-Chinese restrictions heard it too. It was a
call to bring families together here, in the U.S. Mamdani's embrace
of immigrants recognizes a basic reality.  Modern migration is the
product of the exploitation of immigrant-sending countries, and the
wars that are both a legacy of colonialism and an effort to keep a
neocolonial system in place.  Enforced debt, low wages and resource
extraction produce displacement and migration, but also make countries
attractive to investors.  They relocate production, taking advantage
of the vast gulf created in the standard of living between the global
south and the global north.   This system criminalizes all people
who are displaced, migrants certainly, but also the unemployed and
homeless who lose jobs in rich countries.  Workers are pitted against
each other, and political defenders of the system use this competition
to keep them from changing it.   Militarism is the enforcer,
whether ICE on the border and in immigrant communities, or armed
intervention abroad and the threat of it.  Immigrant workers suffer
as a result, but so do workers in general.  Huge budgets for ICE and
"defense" soak up money for meeting social needs. Immigrant
communities and unions call instead for a freedom agenda, for family
reunification and legal status for people already here, for labor
rights for immigrant workers and ending mass detentions and
deportations. Migrants who depend on work in the U.S. want to make
legal migration possible, but without being forced into corporate
guestworker visa programs.  Those communities also seek political and
social change at home, and an end to treaties like NAFTA, so that
migration becomes voluntary, not a choice forced by hunger and
poverty. During the Cold War Chicano and Asian American communities
endured the greatest wave of deportation in history (1.1 million in
1954) and the largest recruitment of braceros (450,000 in 1955). 
Because the left had been expelled from most U.S. unions as the Cold
War began, the dominant rightwing ideology in many unions was
hostility to immigrants.  Eventually, that led to the support by the
AFL-CIO for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That law
included a limited legalization for some undocumented people, but it
also included poison pills that provoked fierce opposition by a new
wave of leftwing unionists and immigrant community activists.  The
law's worst feature, employer sanctions, made it a crime for an
employer to hire a worker without papers, and for that person to
work.  The AFL-CIO then supported the bill, asserting that if
undocumented immigrants couldn't legally work, they wouldn't come, and
those here would leave. Activists like Mike Garcia, became a national
leader of the janitors' union, warned it would be used to make
immigrant workers vulnerable to retaliation, and it did.  When
Garcia's union organized janitors cleaning buildings for Apple,
Hewlett-Packard and other tech companies in the early 1990's many were
fired.  Similar examples multiplied. Making immigrant workers more
vulnerable only made organizing harder.  Workers' standard of living
did not go up.   Labor opposition to the law grew and in many
unions immigrant workers became organizers and officers.  Finally in
1999, the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles called for repealing
sanctions, for another immigration amnesty, and for ending guestworker
programs.  Many immigrant communities began looking at unions as
defenders, and union organizing among immigrants mushroomed.  And
despite raids and firings under both Democratic and Republican
administrations, the political alliance of immigrants with the
communities around them has become an engine for social
change.   In Los Angeles' civil rights upsurge of the 60s, the
student and anti-war movements among Chicanos became a bedrock for
workplace organizing.  Many leaders from the left - from Bert Corona
to Maria Elena Durazo - fought to get the labor movement to accept the
growing movements of undocumented workers. Political change, they
argued, comes through their alliance with African American and white
workers. When Governor Pete Wilson won his 1994 campaign on an
extreme anti-immigrant platform the cost was high.  Hundreds of
thousands of immigrants became naturalized citizens, and with their
native-born children they became voters.  Non-citizen union members
went door to door urging support for political candidates they
couldn't vote for themselves, as they've done in every election
since.. Their alliance was sometimes difficult, but together they
transformed Los Angeles' city politics.  The bastion of the open shop
has become one of the country's most progressive city governments,
with an African American mayor from the left and four DSA members on
the city council.  The basic political dynamics underlying change in
other California cities are similar.  The most powerful union in San
Francisco today is Unitehere Local 2, where a Chinese and Latino
majority of hotel workers share power with smaller numbers of Black
and white members.  Their enemies today are the Silicon Valley
billionaires like Peter Theil, who spend vast amounts of money on
municipal elections.  Many of the groups doing the fighting are based
in immigrant communities, working in broad labor formations like Jobs
with Justice that ally them with unions and workers across the
board. This is not a simple-minded argument that changing
demographics is destiny.  Immigrant radicalism has changed this
country's politics throughout its history.  And while California has
always had a working class with a large percentage of immigrants, most
states have a history of immigration as well.  In the midwest and
south similar alliances are becoming more important politically.  The
current raid regime is driving support for them, rather than the
hostility and division Trump and Steven Miller hope for.  In Omaha,
Nebraska, and many small meatpacking towns, the number of Mexican
immigrants has increased substantially in the last three decades. 
ICE raided one company, Glen Valley Foods, earlier this year, and
threatens to build the Cornhusker Clink, while the state is building
its own detention center.   Last year Margo Juarez, born and
brought up in Omaha, was elected to Nebraska's unicameral State
Senate, its first Latina, representing the historic South Omaha
barrio.  After the Glen Valley raid she visited the detainees in
detention, and emerged in tears after talking with women who had
decided to self-deport to Mexico, leaving their U.S.-born children
behind.  She then made an unannounced attempt to inspect the
Cornhusker Clink, and slammed Governor Jim PIllen and U.S. Senator
Pete Ricketts for supporting ICE's raids.   Juarez is a Democrat,
but in 2024 Dan Osborn, a strike leader who jettisoned the Democratic
Party in 2024, almost beat Republican Deb Fischer for Senator as an
Independent.  Now he's running against Ricketts, attacking the
corporate money behind him, but also appealing to anti-immigrant
voters with an ad offering to help Trump build the border wall.  Even
in conservative Nebraska, however, the room for this kind of campaign
is shrinking.  In rural meatpacking towns immigrants are now
sometimes the majority, and their children will soon be
voters.   Meanwhile the UFCW has mounted organizing drives whose
success depends on uniting meatpacking workers across the lines of
race and nationality.  Nebraska was once a stronghold of the CIO's
radical Packinghouse Workers, and could rediscover its radical roots
in a new era. Campaigning by telling immigrants that they are not part
of Nebraska's working class, is a strategy that puts a progressive
future in jeopardy, not one that brings it closer. In rural North
Carolina the same tables are turning.  The huge Smithfield
slaughterhouse in Tar Heel was organized a decade ago after a battle
of almost two decades.  That victory began to seem possible when
immigrant Mexican workers stopped the lines and marched in one of the
huge May Day rallies of 2006.  African American workers, seeing their
action, then shut the plant to demand a holiday for Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King's birthday.  Many Mexicans were driven from the
slaughterhouse in mass firings and raids, but that in-plant alliance
and broad community support finally won a union contract. This fall,
when notorious Border Patrol head Greg Bovino terrorized Charlotte's
streets with bands of militarized agents, community activists formed a
broad network to monitor their movement, calling their
immigrant-protective effort "bless your heart."  As Alain Stephens of
The Intercept recounted, when the Border Patrol moved into Appalachia,
agents were met with organized hostility in Harlan County, famous in
labor history for its militant coal strikes.   In rural Boone, after
they picked up workers at two Mexican restaurants, 150 local people
held signs saying "Time to Melt the ICE!" ICE has announced it will
continue targeting Southern communities, with raids in Mississippi and
Louisiana called Swamp Sweep, and in New Orleans, called Operation
Catahoula Crunch.  Here too they've met community opposition.  Even
in conservative areas the raid regime is closing the political space
for campaign formulas attacking corporations and restricting
immigration. Bernie Sanders slammed the Democrats after the 2024
election, accusing them of abandoning the working class, and many
workers know the sorry history.  Bush negotiated NAFTA, but Clinton
signed it.  Obama campaigned on opposing NAFTA while telling Canada
he had no intention of changing it.  Nevertheless, Democratic Party
centrists still argue that candidates in 2026 should attack Trump and
corporate economic policies, but call for restrictions on immigration
and more immigration enforcement. This was the tactic used by Biden
and Harris.  Centrist Democrats and Republicans negotiated an
immigration bill in 2023, and then campaigned against Trump from the
right, attacking him for telling Republicans in Congress not to vote
for it.  That bill would have made it much harder to apply for
asylum. It proposed $3 billion for adding more detention centers to
the 200 existing ones run, for profit by private companies like the
Geo Group (formerly the union-busting Wackenhut security
company).   A recent NYT article by Christopher Flavelle, "How
Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans' Faith in Immigration,"
argues that these measures weren't anti-immigrant enough.  The
proposal responded to a media-driven frenzy (in which the NYT
participated) that constantly referred to an immigration "crisis,"
that called the border "broken," and treated migrants as criminals. 
Political operatives in Washington then took polls, announcing that
the public wanted draconian enforcement, and advised candidates that
going against this tide would lead to election losses.   In the
end, faced with a choice between Biden/Harris' and Trump's rhetoric
demonizing migrants, many voters, workers included, opted for the real
thing.  The strategy cost the votes of large numbers of Latinos,
Asian Americans and immigrant rights and labor activists.  As a
strategy for Democrats it was a bust, and demobilized the party when
Trump used the hysteria to justify even greater immigration terror.
Over half the people who voted for Trump cited immigration as their
top issues, but only 3% of Harris voters did, according to a Navigator
post-election survey. Politically self-interested polls by media are
a trap for progressives, because fighting for social change requires
an organizer's methods.  When unions start an organizing drive, they
don't poll workers to find out if a majority supports the boss.  Fear
of the boss often affects the majority. The organizer's job is to help
people lose that fear, find those workers who want to fight and build
a majority organization to fight with.   Workers are constantly
bombarded by false ideas about immigration and immigrants, that hold
immigrants responsible for everything from poverty and lost jobs to
crime.  They then hear appeals to support anti-immigrant
enforcement.  Just as unions do in organizing drives, progressives
have to fight on the terrain of ideas, telling the truth about the
causes of migration, plant closures and poverty.  To organize for
political change, workers have to be convinced to support the rights
and welfare of all working people, not just some.   NYC's election
was not a poll.  It was a radical education in what's possible, what
workers really want and who the working class really is.  It was an
education about capitalism that workers need. As Education Director
for the AFL-CIO, after John Sweeney dumped the cold warriors in 1995,
Bill Fletcher tried to meet that need.  He developed a program,
Common Sense Economics, that unions could use to develop a deep
understanding, and language for communicating it in the workplace. 
  Working class communities need a political education program. 
Instead, centrists would tell them there's not enough to go around,
and to vote for politicians who will make sure they get their share,
against other workers.  But the future is with Steve Tesfagiorgis,
who helped lead Teamsters Local 320 to a contract at the University of
Minnesota.  "There are more than 600 African immigrant workers at the
University," he says. "Every one of us came to this country afraid. We
were told to work hard and keep our heads down. Teamsters for a
Democratic Union showed us we can fight back. No one is coming to save
us. If we want respect, we need to fight for it ourselves."  

 

[[link removed]]Migrant
farmworkers, domestic workers and their supporters march through San
Francisco's Mission District to call for passage of the Registry Bill,
which would allow undocumented people to gain legal immigration
status.  The march was organized by the Northern California Coalition
for Just Immigration Reform. Photo: David Bacon.  

This article was also published in The Nation:
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_David Bacon is a journalist and photographer covering labor,
immigration, and the impact of the global economy on workers. He is
author of several books, including Illegal People: How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2009)._

_Peter Olney is retired Organizing Director of the International
Longshore & Warehouse Union. He has been a labor organizer
for 50 years working for multiple unions before landing at the ILWU
in 1997. For three years he was the Associate Director of the
Institute for Labor and Employment at the University
of California__. _

 
 

* immigrant workers
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* immigrant rights
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* Labor Movement
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* Labor strategy
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* union organizing
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* Farmworkers
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* Zohran Mamdani
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