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Immigration and American Labor Friday, November 30, 2001
Moderator:
Panelists: Thomas Palley, Ph.D., Assistant Director of Public Policy, AFL-CIO Jared Bernstein, Ph.D., Economist, Economic Policy Institute Proceedings DR. CAMAROTA: Well, I
think we should get started here. Maybe I need a microphone, though my wife
tells me I don't. I want to thank everyone for coming to I think what will be
a fascinating and interesting discussion from diverse perspectives on an
important issue. I'm Steven Camarota and I'm Director of Research at the
Center for Immigration Studies here in Washington, D.C. The Center is a
nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank. It's actually the only one in the United
States devoted exclusively to studying the impact of immigration on America. Now, as many of you are aware, next week at its biannual
convention in Las Vegas the AFL-CIO will take up the question of immigration.
In particular, it will decide whether to endorse the decision made by its
leadership over the course of the year calling for an amnesty for illegal
aliens currently in the country, as well as an end to a ban on hiring illegals
in the future. So this represents an important change in its thinking, or
evolution perhaps in its thinking. Joining us to discuss this issue as well as generally
American unions and immigration is Dr. Vernon Briggs. Dr. Briggs is seated to
my far right. Dr. Briggs is a Professor of Labor Economics at the New York
State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. His new
book and sort of the focus of our discussion is "Immigration and American
Unionism," and it's from Cornell University Press. In any event, the book examines the historic position
taken by American unions over the years towards immigration policy, and he
talks also about how this issue might change. Dr. Briggs is also the author, now in its second edition,
of "Mass Immigration and the National Interest." In addition to
writing extensively on the subject of immigration and being a full-time
professor, he is also a member of the Center for Immigration Studies Board of
Directors, and we're delighted to have him. Now, in your packet you have an excerpt of Dr. Briggs'
new book. As I said, the book explores American immigration and unions. In
general, Dr. Briggs finds that immigration tends to weaken unions. He shows
that historically unions have generally done best when immigration was low and
have generally done worst when immigration was high. We see one graphic representation of that in the first figure over here, looking at immigration over roughly the last 70 years, as well as the share of the work force that is unionized. One would seem to be – the two appear to be inversely related. In other words, immigration is bad for the union movement. At least that seems to be the historical trend.
In addition, we have another figure here, also to my left, that shows how immigration increases the supply of labor disproportionately at the bottom end of the labor market. That 14 percent increase in the supply of labor over the last 10 years is in the supply of people with less than a high school education. Its impact on other educational categories — these are individuals in the labor market — is of course much more modest. This is an issue Dr. Briggs talks about as well in his book.
Also joining our discussion is Dr. Tom Palley and we're
delighted to have Tom. He is Assistant Director of Public Policy at the
AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. He holds a B.A. degree from Oxford University and
an M.A. degree in international relations and a Ph.D. in economics, both from
Yale University. He has published extensively in numerous academic journals,
focusing on monetary policy, the relationship between inflation and
unemployment, and other issues affecting American workers. Dr. Palley has published two books: One,
Post-Keynesianism, Debt Distribution and the Macro Economy; and I have
in front of me Plenty
of Nothing: The Down- In addition to Dr. Palley, we have Jared Bernstein to my
left. He is an economist at the Economic
Policy Institute, also here in Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in social
welfare policy from Columbia University. He has published extensively in
popular and academic journals on income and wage inequality, as well as
technology's impact on wages and employment and low-wage labor markets, as
well as issues surrounding poverty. Between 1995 and '96 he held the post of Deputy Chief
Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. Also, he has co-authored five
editions of the book State
of Working America, put out by the Economic Policy Institute, and,
most interestingly, according to the International Economy in 2000, Dr.
Bernstein was one of the most-cited economists in the world. So, after that nice introduction, why don't we go with
Dr. Briggs. PRESENTATION
OF VERNON M. BRIGGS, JR., PH.D. DR. BRIGGS:
Thank you very much, Steve. It's a pleasure to be here to speak to
you this morning. This topic, Immigration and American Labor, is one that I
feel very closely since I first started you career back in the 1960's. As a
young professor, my first exposure was going to teach at the University of
Texas in Austin and being invited to go down to the border with a group of
students. We were involved with the efforts of Caesar Chavez to organize farm
workers in south Texas. I went there. I was educated in Michigan, actually
born here in Washington, grew up in this area. I had never seen the border
before. Once I was there, it was clear that this strike was a
lost cause. I spoke with Caesar Chavez later when he came to Austin,
particularly about the situation at the border. He was optimistic that it
could be overcome, the march to Austin, what have you. The big issue at the time the AFL-CIO was fighting was
border commuters. I didn't even know what border commuters were or how they
evolved until I went down one morning at 5:00 o'clock in the morning to watch
the crossing, people being picked up by bus and driven right through the
picket lines to the farms in the grape strike. It was at that moment it was
clear there was something about the border I didn't understand. So for the next 30 years I've tried to understand various
facets of immigration policy and how it impinges on the labor market. By the
way, those workers are still not organized and they never will be as long as
the border immigration policy continues to be as it is, and the poorest
workers in terms of income level in the United States are in that county, one
of the most impoverished counties of the United States. The broader issue which I have spent most of my life
working on, and coming back to the union issue, I find that there's no issue
that's caused the American labor movement more agony than immigration from its
very beginning, because immigration can affect the size, the distribution, the
composition of the labor force, local labor supplies, wages. It can have
impact on especially local labor markets that are significant to the labor
movement. It also supplies strikebreakers, as it did in south Texas and
continues to do to this day if there are a sufficient number of people willing
to do the work in low-skilled work, and quite often that's possible. The irony, of course, is that the labor movement has had
to face the immigration issue, because most immigrants come in as workers.
Relatively few come in as employers, and so it's a direct labor issue. For the
long run, most immigrants will work all their lives and be part of the labor
movement, and the labor movement has got to have interest in it. It's interesting that as you study the history of
American labor and immigration together, that the labor movement up through
the mid-1980's is basically responsible for every immigration policy we have,
that its fingerprints are on every piece of immigration legislation without
exception, the good and the bad, involved in all the history of the
immigration policy. They were a key player, not the only one, but a key, key
factor. It's interesting that right from the beginning, when
Samuel Gompers, the most influential labor leader in American history,
president of the AFL for 38 years, noted after becoming president in 1886 of
the Federation, in 1892 the Supreme Court for the first time made it clear
that the Federal Government has responsibility for immigration policy, not the
states and local governments, it's purely a federal responsibility, that in
his autobiography he wrote that: "The labor movement was among the first
organizations to urge that immigration policy obtain limits and be accountable
for its consequences." As he put it so boldly: "We immediately realized
that immigration is in its fundamental aspects a labor issue." That fundamentally, that's what immigration is all about.
You can cast it in a lot of other things and there are a lot of other
dimensions of immigration policy, but fundamentally it's a labor issue. Most
immigrants work and it's what they do by their presence themselves or how
others are affected by their presence that has been of importance to labor. So labor right from the beginning has sensed that there
was some inverse relationship. I'll put this chart up here. This is up here
already. This was passed out. It's from the book, showing basically the
segment of the labor force that's foreign-born, which is roughly — the percent of the population that's foreign born, and
I've used the foreign-born from the census data because every 10 years you get
the best count of immigration and of the foreign-born population.
This is the percent of the labor force that is unionized.
They have tended — there are
some exceptions back here that are covered in the book, but by and large
they've tended to move inversely. I think it's especially interesting to note that in 1965
— and we'll get to the present —
or let me say, from 1924 through 1965 when immigration was finally restricted
— we forget that immigration has not been a continual pattern. We've
had growth of immigration, but for a good part of the twentieth century
immigration was in decline, from the twenties through to the 60s. In 1965 when the Immigration Act of 1965 led to the
renewal of mass immigration again, only 4.4 percent of the population was
foreign-born. That was the lowest in all of American history in 1965. That
same year, the percentage of the labor movement, of the labor force, who were
union was over 30 percent, one out of every three workers, just about the time
I was entering my career, one of the most dominant, influential movements in
the American labor market, the union movement. These were, as you see it, quite opposite pictures on the
spectrum. Since then the labor movement has gone into a tail spin and
immigration has taken off, and we're now in the midst of the largest
immigration in American history. We know that since 1965 the foreign-born
population of the United States has increased by 231 percent, from 8 million
to about 28 million. That's conservative. The civilian labor force has grown
by 86 percent, from 74 million to 139 million. But union membership has fallen
by 10 percent, from 18 million to roughly 16 million. So that there has certainly been an enormous change in
the picture in the fate of labor since the revival of mass immigration in
1965, which the labor movement played an influential role in passing the
Immigration Act of 1965. I am old enough to have supported the passage of that
legislation, too, to get rid of the national origin system. But all the
rhetoric, all the political language, used to support, to package that
legislation, promised that immigration was not going to increase, that that
was not the whole purpose. That was the exact year that the post-war baby boom hit
the labor market. There was no shortage of labor in 1965. What we were trying
to do, everyone was trying to do, including the labor movement, was to end the
national origin system. That was the assumption of what we had done. No one
realized we had opened up a new era of massive immigration which we now
continue to be a part of. Every study that I know of that has looked at the effect
of immigration on the labor market has shown that the impact is the most
severe on low skilled workers; low skilled workers bear most of the impact,
and they have borne most of it. We can talk about some of that perhaps later,
but every study that I know of has shown that the increase of immigration is
disproportionately low skilled workers, as it has always been. The difference is that the labor market today is much
different than it was at the turn of the century, when we desperately needed
low skilled workers, as opposed to today, when the low skilled labor market is
increasing slightly, but not very much —
that is, the number of jobs for low skilled workers
— and the supply, however, of low skilled workers is increasing
dramatically, due largely to immigration, since about 40 percent of the adult
foreign-born population do not have a high school diploma and pretty close to
60 percent have a high school diploma or less. That is, they're heavily
concentrated in the low skilled labor market. Unfortunately, there are large numbers of other citizen
workers in the low skilled labor markets, too. They've not all gone away,
especially minority workers —
chicano workers, Puerto Rican workers, black workers, and certainly white
workers in those low wage labor markets. The stock answer is that they're actually taking jobs
that no one else will do. We can talk about that a little bit later. But the labor movement has always been the strongest
advocate of immigration policy that we have had up through the 1986
Immigration Reform Control Act, which they supported enthusiastically, but
after that began to change their position and are now poised to radically
change their position. The question to me basically is why would they want to
do this? I think it's partly
— this is speculative partly, but most of it is based on historical
reality, economic studies of who wins and what loses in the immigration
battle. But as you get to why would they want to change their position, it
seems to me it's partly an effort to try to become part of a rainbow coalition
with progressive forces, and that rainbow coalition on immigration issues has
had some tough times. That is, the rainbow coalition as I see it is a way in
which basically groups join together knowing that they're going to have to
give up on some things that they favor in order to get other things that they
want, and hopefully they'll come out better off by joining with other forces
and won't be hurt too much. I think, with respect to immigration, this is a real
gamble because I think it is likely to affect desperately a citizen work force
who has to compete, especially in the low skilled labor markets, with the
growing immigrant work force. Especially as we relax the restrictions on
illegal immigration, they're going to bear the costs. I think when the AFL-CIO Executive Council says that they
stand firmly on the side of immigrants now
— that's what the declaration of February 2000 said — who's on the other side? The other side has to be the
native-born. So there's an old labor song, "Which Side Are You On?"
If you're going to take the side of immigrants, it defies basically the
history of all the earlier labor leaders of this country, what were immigrants
themselves, many of them, but always understood that you cannot be for the
American worker and be for immigration simultaneously. You can be for one or
the other. That doesn't mean you're anti-immigrant. It just means you're
interested in your policies, but you're interested in the American worker
first. The interest of the American worker can't possibly be in
increasing surges of unskilled workers into the bottom of the labor market.
There are people who do benefit from that in business, and that's part of the
strange coalition, people who enthusiastically welcome the change in position
of the AFL-CIO. You may begin to wonder why, why would such friends who are
otherwise your enemies be so enthusiastic about what you're trying to do? I think this is part of the danger, that you're going to
alienate the workers and many other citizens who are beginning to realize that
the labor movement is shifting its position on this issue, who are harmed by
the labor movement. Also, I think more seriously, if you really take this
policy to its logical conclusion and you abolish employer sanctions and
endorse mass amnesties, which means amnesties forever after this, you're
basically going to swell even more the low skilled labor market of the United
States, which means you're going to find yourself in a situation where, even
if you get them into the unions and you get your numbers up and the numbers
look like you're doing a lot, you're not going to be able to do anything at
the bargaining table because you're going to swell the supply of workers in
those low skilled labor markets and it's going to make it more difficult, I
think, to actually show gains. Well, there was a lot more I was going to say, but I
think I'd rather share it with the others. Thank you. DR. CAMAROTA: Thank
you, Vernon. Next will be Tom Palley of the AFL-CIO. PRESENTATION
OF THOMAS PALLEY, PH.D. DR. PALLEY:
Thanks very much, Vernon. A couple of points. To start with, what you're going to hear from me today
are my views and not those of the AFL-CIO. I have brought along, though, with
me — unfortunately, following
the announcement I got some calls from people thinking that we had reversed
policy as it currently stands. I want to emphasize that that is not the case
and there is indeed a resolution at our upcoming convention that is going to
further solidify the position that we currently hold. I brought along 50 copies of our very good resolution
passed by our Executive Council in July of this year. It's available at the
table outside, so please do pick it up out there and then you can really read
what AFL-CIO policy is about. I've called my talk "Making Labor Whole Again,"
which is what I think this issue is all about. It's about solidarity. I would say, first of all, immigration is just an
enormously complex and difficult issue. There are underlying economic
complexities, which in fact I think are what most of today's panel will be
about. There are huge political complexities in all of this. Sort of into the
mix, there is always a danger of political opportunism that can really poison
the debate and take the rationality out of it. I don't believe there's any of
that in this room today. My own job is to talk about the economic complexities and
that's what the focus of this talk is going to be. We've got to begin with an assessment of today's policy,
and I believe today's policy can be best described as a lose-lose situation.
The policy is broken. The bottom line is American workers, citizen workers,
are losing because they're threatened by increased employment competition,
which is having a negative impact on wages, and undocumented workers are
losing because they are prone and subject to really terrible exploitation.
That is the condition that we as public policy people have to address and try
and remedy. I think it's useful to sort of dig below: Why are we even
interested in immigration? By the way, this is a slide that is taken a little
bit, borrowed from a EPI's own economic data, and you can find this slide in
slightly different form in this book. There are two books I say you should
always carry around if you want to know the economy. One is "The State of
Working America." Of course, the other is "Plenty of Nothing"
because it gives an interpretation of what's in "The State of
America." The bottom line we're interested in this problem is that
there has been tremendous wage stagnation over the last 25 years, and
productivity growth and compensation have just broken apart. Abby Stern,
president of SCIU, calls this diagram "the snake." The top line is
productivity growth — not
growth; productivity, index 100 in 1973 and growing steadily through time, a
steady increase in productivity in the American economy. The middle line here
is the median compensation for all workers, men, women, the whole labor force.
Then the bottom line there is the median wage for a male worker, which is
actually now below what it was in 1973. If you can break it out, if you broke it out by skill
levels, it might be even worse. But a complete disjunction beginning basically
early 80s, late 70s, between productivity and compensation. That is the reason
why immigration is such a huge problematic issue. I believe if this wasn't
here we wouldn't be talking about immigration in these kinds of poisonous
terms. That is out there. We have to solve this problem. I want to confirm again - I picked out some data from
"The State of Working America" and put it into table form. That kind
of confirms that slide we just saw. Everyone is losing, or at least most are
losing. Those at the bottom are losing most. You can really see it by educational attainment. This is
folks with less than a high school education, very severe erosion in the
decade '79 to '89, continued erosion in the decade '89 to '99. Even those with
high school, some erosion, at least in the first decade. They didn't get any
of the productivity gain of the new economy in this last expansion, and over
the 20-year period negative. Those with some college, they actually lost in
'79-'89 and they again didn't participate in a great new economy of this last
decade. Then finally, those with college and advanced degree
groups, and those are the people, us in this room, who have done pretty well.
This is related to the immigration issue and it goes to show why immigration
is such an important issue. I'm an economist. I have to bring in a supply and demand
curve. What I want to say here is that the type of policy — if you want to understand today's failed policy, you have
to understand the framework that is generating an interpretation of the world.
Here we have on the vertical axis wages and the
horizontal employment, the labor demand schedule. As wages command more,
there'll be more demand from employers as the supply schedule. This is the
citizen labor supply. The wage in the economy is determined by the
intersection of supply and demand. What immigration is supposed to be doing is pull down the
labor supply curve, shift it down, and therefore wages are falling even as
employment is growing. That's the interpretation that this framework has. Of
course, to the extent that the increase in supply is concentrated at the
bottom end of the labor market, low wage, low skill, those groups have
suffered more. Now, this model has a clear policy prescription. What you
want to do is try and drag this supply curve back. So what do you do? You try
and reduce the supply of undocumented workers. You have penalties on them. You
make it difficult for them to find jobs. You drive them underground. You do
everything you can, and hopefully that will provide the incentive for them not
to come, for them not to be in the labor market, and pull this supply schedule
to the right. Well, I'm going to say that that framework has failed.
There are millions of undocumented workers in America. Wages have been driven
down. It hasn't worked. But it hasn't worked and basically it leads you to the
wrong type of policy prescription. The supply and demand framework is appropriate if you're
looking at the market for currencies. If you want to understand the
euro-dollar exchange rate, that would be the right model to use to understand
that phenomenon. But it's not the right model for understanding labor markets,
and that is what's absolutely key. The critical thing that is important in labor markets is
bargaining power. We all know that. Vernon knows that, too. The interesting
thing about the supply and demand model is that there is absolutely no
bargaining power. That is the core assumption of that model. It's called the
price-taker assumption. Both buyers and sellers in the market are price-takers
and have no bargaining power. This is a model that therefore cannot possibly
represent what is going on in labor markets. It is completely absent. So what do you need? You need an alternative analysis.
The way that I see this — and
we'll talk about it — is that
the wage settles somewhere between – there is indeed a maximum wage that
firms will pay based on productivities, and that's why productivities are
important, and there's also a wage floor, and that wage floor is determined by
such things as the minimum wage, by pay norms, by social norms, whatever. Then that leaves us a bargaining zone between the maximum
amount a firm will pay and the wage floor. The actual wage then depends on
bargaining power, where it settles in between in that bargaining zone. I think that sort of framework
— again, very sort of framework, your policy prescription is going to
come out of your policy framework. That framework comes up with a completely
different policy description. The diagnosis is that the problem is coming from the
impact of immigration, which is supposedly having an impact on the bargaining
power because it is exposing domestic workers to a pool, creating with this
policy of driving workers underground, you're creating a pool of workers, a
very large pool of workers that are open to exploitation. In a sense, you have split labor. Labor is no longer
whole. You have domestic workers and you have these undocumented workers who
are apparently, because of the legal policy framework, at odds with each
other. If you want to understand what's going on, see the movie
"Bread and Roses." It's quite clear the filmmakers understand the
labor market better than our Nobel Prize-winning economists from Chicago. This
tells you exactly what the problem in labor markets is about. The prescription is to make labor whole. We need to take
away employers' ability to exploit this pool of workers. That involves, among
other things, legalization, possibly trying to give safe harbor to
undocumented workers where they are employed in – for employer violations of
labor law. So if you're trying to form a union and the employer brings up the
INS and says, you're an undocumented worker, you've got to give that
undocumented worker safe harbor. That is the type of thinking that is behind
the AFL-CIO's policy. That leads us to the next question: Will legalization
create a flood of new undocumented workers? This is the kind of great scare
tactic that's thrown out there. I want to point out a couple of things. First
of all, we already know the current policy is not working. I want to point out
that the existing system of immigration controls
— we're not going to get rid of the Border Patrol, we're not going to
get rid of the procedures for applying for immigration and coming into the
country. But we will be dealing with legalization and we will be giving
undocumented workers now and in the future this kind of safe harbor from
exploitation. Finally, behind the sort of scare tactics, some
economists would call it a moral hazard. You're changing the rules and giving
people an incentive to come into this country. I know of no evidence that
immigration is drawn by a chancy prospect of legalization at some future
distant time. Again, if you want to see a great movie from the 80s,
"El Norte." That's the sort of issues that are driving immigration.
It's not that they're making some kind of calculation that we're going to get
legalized 10 years from now. Again, the film makers understand the issue
better than do our economists. We want to get —
also in this debate, we need to get the immigration and wages debate in
perspective. Just what is the role of immigration in causing these problems,
this dysjunction between productivity and wages and compensation? How much is
immigration really contributing to falling compensation? Well, I think most
studies show that it only in total explains a small part. Again, I refer to
some studies that the NBER put out, a couple of papers, Milan and Topol and
then Altoni and Cart, an important volume in '91 looking at it. Empirically, the effect is quite small. A one percent
increase in the share of non-native-born workers results in somewhere between
a one percent decline and a Secondly, it cannot explain why wages are disconnected
from productivity growth for everyone. You saw that chart that shows with high
school degrees, those with some college, and even more recently those with
college are not getting much of a raise. There is a disconnection. That has
nothing to do therefore with immigration. That really is the real causes. If you have this bargaining zone model, what's clearly
going on is something has changed about bargaining power and something has
changed about the wage floor that sets the bottom for the size of the
bargaining zone. Those things are the erosion of the minimum wage, we have a
slashing of the safety net that takes away alternatives from people, therefore
making them more vulnerable to threats of being dismissed. We have a complete
Swiss cheese UI system that is currently part of the debate in the stimulus
package, trying to make our UI system whole. And we have a decline in union
density. I think those are the factors, if you want to look at it,
what is going on. These are the factors to concentrate. This is the basis of
the problem, and if labor's not whole you can't fix these types of problems.
If this is where the action's at, we've got to make labor whole again. That then brings me to Vernon's hypothesis about
immigration being bad for unions. My view is, after reading the book, that his
argument simply doesn't stack up. The first point, unionization density peaked
in 1953 at 32.5 percent and then started steadily, slowly declining throughout
the 50s and the early 60s. So way before the so-called 1965 cutoff — and even then it was gradual; immigration didn't
accelerate very much in the late 60s —
we had already a declining union density. A major factor for me is shift away from manufacturing.
Look at these numbers. There's an interesting correlation here. Manufacturing
share of employment in 1950, 33.6 percent; union density, 31.6 percent.
Manufacturing share of employment in 2000, 14 percent; union density, 13.5
percent. That is an absolutely key factor, the changing composition of the
U.S. economy, the move away from manufacturing where unions were concentrated. Then let's go to the next point. Unions under the current
arrangements are blocked from organizing at the new places of employment.
That's critical. Our labor laws are inadequate. Where a union shop exists
today, it can basically sustain itself. Employers can't break it. What they
can do, though — unless they
close the factory down and move the work away completely. Very little in the
way of decertification elections, very few in number, affecting a very small
number of workers. But the labor law is so weak that employers can stop
unions and workers from exercising their right to organize. That's key. Labor
law reform is key. Taft-Hartley and right to work is a problem. We have the
runaway shop problem and employment moving South to right to work states to
try and escape unions. Then I think there's a more general issue. I think the
unions are partly responsible here, but it plays into a very much bigger
picture about U.S. sort of intellectual understandings. I think there's been a
failure to educate about the mission, function, and contribution of the
unions, particularly for middle class folks. I really am very critical of
economists. Economists always describe unions as a market distortion and
obviously that's the public perception that's out there. More and more people
go to college, 50 percent of high school folks, 18 year olds, now end up at
college, get some college exposure, get this type of poison about what unions
do. We really haven't been able to counter that. That is a huge issue. This is the sort of thing that we should be discussing,
the press should be discussing: Why is the public mind so poisoned against it?
In "Plenty of Nothing" again, I talk about some of these issues: the
postwar history, we thought we had solved the economic problem through
Keynesianism, that unions were part of the past, a fundamental
misrepresentation of the economy to people that then informs the public
understanding, the public debate. Immigrants and unions. I believe there's no evidence that
immigrants have a lower desire for union representation. Here again, we see
it: the percent of union membership by Hispanics. They don't cut things out by
native-born and not born and I don't do the sort of micro analysis that Steve
does, but in 1985 6.9 percent of Hispanics are union members and in 2000 9.6
percent are. This is not surprising. Unions have always had the most appeal
for those who are most exploited and these are the most exploited workers in
the economy. So in conclusion, I think Vernon's book is indeed a
useful summary of history of U.S. immigration policy and labor's relation to
that history. So the historical piece of the book is kind of useful. I think
it is a fundamentally flawed account of the relation between immigration and
declining union density. Declining union density has nothing to do with
immigration. It has everything to do with much more sub-structural,
foundational factors. Then finally, I think there's absolutely no foundation to
the charge that the AFL-CIO position is a betrayal of citizen American
workers. Far from it, making labor whole will correct the problems that they
have had to confront these last two decades. Thanks. DR. CAMAROTA: Thank
you, Tom. Now we'll hear from Jared Bernstein of the Economic
Policy Institute. PRESENTATION
OF JARED BERNSTEIN, PH.D. DR.
BERNSTEIN: I'm really going to try to talk for 10 or so minutes,
because I'm very interested in what the audience has to say. As Tom correctly
pointed out, I think Vernon as well, you can step into a lot of mud puddles
pretty quickly on this issue, and I would love to mix it up with the folks
here. So let me try to be brief. Also, I think my views fall somewhere in between the two
approaches, so maybe I can skip over some of the points that I wanted to make. Vernon presented his argument, Tom presented kind of a
counterargument. I'd like to focus on the book a little bit more and suggest
where I think Vernon has it right and some areas where I think it's
questionable. Then I want to finish by talking about the strategy that the AFL
is talking about pursuing as, in Vernon's phrase, a real gamble, but a real
gamble that's maybe worth taking. I think the message of the book is a little more subtle
than it probably will be interpreted. This is not a book that's anti-union.
This is not a book that doesn't think unions should organize immigrants, and
Vernon's very clear about that, and I would initially put that on the table. When I heard about the union leadership changing its view
on this point — and it's one
that, as Vernon points out, it's a really fairly important and significant
change — to me it was
interesting, it was understandable, and it was positive, in the following way.
As Vernon takes you through in great, excruciating detail, there's an ugly
history here and there's a great deal of racism and there's a great deal of
stuff going on between unions and foreign people in this country that I think
many of us would find distasteful. Secondly, the view struck me as understandable that, if
you can't beat them, organize them. Here I think Tom Palley makes really a
point that you just can't get away from. If they're already here and we've
organized them, that can only raise wages. If they're already here and they're
putting downward pressure on wages because they're undocumented and because
they're exploited, that's clearly, as Vernon points out, lowering wages. I think Tom overestimates the importance of studies that
— let me take a few negatives out of that. I think it's very clear
that increased immigration lowers wages, that the increased supply effect of
his diagram actually plays into the lowering of wages. I think there's a few
studies that you mentioned that go the other way that are outliers. The vast
majority of the research shows that immigration, especially at the low end,
does lower wages. But these folks are already here and they're having that
impact already. If we organize them, if we make sure that labor standards and
perhaps union power applies to them, their wages are going to go up and low
wages will be higher, wages will be higher in the low wage sector. So I think
that comes out of Tom's analysis and I think it's really key. The question is, and Tom and Vernon both spoke to this,
is what effect does that have on bringing more folks here, if you give
amnesty? I think one of the big questions about amnesty that really isn't
picked up in the boom — and Tom
dismissed it and I don't know enough about it to know if that's correct
— if you give amnesty to those immigrants who are currently here
illegally, what does that do to the flows of immigration into this country? I agree with Tom that there's not much evidence on it,
but I can't believe it would go to zero. But even if it goes to zero, that
doesn't mean it's a mistake. You need to know the magnitude of that particular
effect. Thirdly, I thought it was a good idea because it would
strengthen the low wage labor market in the way that I just mentioned. So those are the reasons that I thought the change in the
union's position is important and positive. But of course, I also have some
concerns. It's the amnesty effect, which I just mentioned, is worsened to me.
If amnesty increases the flow of illegal immigration, we've got to be mindful
of that because that reduces wages in the low wage sector just like Vernon
says it does. However —
and here's something that hasn't come into the discussion yet — the 1990's —
and I have a couple of my own slides, but I won't show them in the interest of
time. The 1990's saw a couple of very important trends relative to this
debate: a significant increase and even an acceleration in the rate at which
immigrants were entering the labor force; and a significant increase in the
wages of low wage workers. So any correlation that says increases immigration
equals lower wages was broken in the 1990's. Here you have me saying that
correlation is true historically. Well, the reason it was broken in the latter 90s is
because labor demand increased far more than labor supply. Labor demand for
low wage workers was really strong in the latter 90s. We got to full
employment and that drove up the bargaining power and wages of low wage
workers. So the demand side of the story is also really important.
It's not just supply. it's not just bargaining power, although I think both of
those are important. it's also labor demand. So this lockstep view between
supply and wages has to be filtered through that observation. The other concern I had about this is the alliance with
pro-immigration groups that are also anti-union groups, and Vernon documents
just who those groups are in the book. But I think Vernon makes an excellent
point: You do have to be concerned about who's on the other side of this
debate if labor joins forces with the National Association of Manufacturers
and the Americans for Tax Justice and some other groups that are not really
happy about unions. Lots of times politics makes strange bedfellows in this
town, and every time it does I think you need to look at it and try to see
what it smells like. Now, Vernon's concerns about more immigration and less
unions, this kind of correlation, I share Tom's view that that correlation is
not really much evidence of causation. Another way to look at it is, to think
about it, if you look at the statistical relationship between state-level
union shares and state-level immigration, and Steve Camarota is just the kind
of guy who could do that, because I have done it. But I suspect you wouldn't
find that great correlation at the state level, because you've got lots of
states with high levels of immigration and high levels of unions. I'm thinking
of New York and L.A. and places like that. You've also got states with very low levels of unions and
low levels of immigration —
Oklahoma, Arkansas. These are some right to work states. Oklahoma is now.
These are states with right the work laws and so they tend to have fewer
unions. They also tend to have fewer immigrants. The only point is that this relationship, whileI disagree
with Tom that it's nonexistent, there are lots of other factors playing a
role, and Vernon takes us through some of those in the book. This brings me to the question: So, what's the union's
rationale for this? It's kind of a Willie Sutton approach. He's the guy who
said: Why do I rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Well, why do you
organize services? Because that's where the workers are. The Willie Sutton approach: that's where the workers are.
Tom made that case. If unions are going to be viable, they have to organize
workers and services. Some unions, thankfully, the SEI unions, have really
been aggressive about that and really successful about that. By the way, one of the things you see in that graph is
that the rate of union density actually continues to decelerate, but to
decelerate at a slower rate, in the 90s than it did in the earlier decades,
partially because of this initiative taken by labor. Meanwhile, that
deceleration coincided with an acceleration in immigration. So another point,
that the correlation between those two lines is not as strong as I think
Vernon might make it out to be. But unions have to organize workers in low
wage services. I'm going to wind down here. I have lots of reasons why I
think that's difficult. I am sure some of the organizers who may be in the
audience can tell us more about that than I could, but in the interest of time
I'm not going to go through that. I think I'll actually kind of wind down by pointing out
that I think one of the points that Vernon makes really kind of struck me as
compelling towards the end of his book. He points out that he's not against
immigration or against unions organizing immigrants; he's against unions
promoting immigration, especially illegal immigration. He says let's leave the
promotion of immigration to others, and others whose interests don't typically
coincide with unions. I think that's a point that we who are very supportive
of union movements, very supportive of Tom's point of making labor whole, need
to take seriously. Why then are unions doing this? Well, it's a strategy
that, in Vernon's words, is a real gamble. Unions are trying to appeal to new
members, many of whom are immigrants and many of whom work in the low wage
sector where they're being exploited on a daily basis, and unions can do
something about that. Vernon's right, it's a real gamble. But is immigration bad for the union movement, as he
said? I don't see. There may be some evidence for that historically, but the
world has changed. Particularly the industrial structure has changed and it's
far from clear to me that immigration and the unions' approach to immigration
is bad for the union movement. It seems to me in a "Bread and Roses"
sense that a rainbow coalition could be exactly the kind of strategy for
moving forward such that we apply union power and union standards to
everybody. That said, I think the key thing that you need to worry
about here is the extent to which amnesty brings more illegal immigrants into
this country. I said it before and I'll say it again because I think it's the
key of the debate that isn't emphasized. At least I didn't — if it's in the book, I didn't see it. I paid more
attention to the 11-page summary actually of the book, but I did try to read
some of the book as well. I didn't see this taken up in the book. If one can make a case
— and I'm interested in the panel's discussion to this point. If one
can make a case that amnesty leads to a sharp
— and I would say a sharp, not just an increase, but a sharp increase
-– and we can talk about what that means
— influx of more illegals, then I think the unions need to think more
carefully about the implications of being pro-amnesty and joining some
typically strange alliances to do so. I'll stop there. Question and Answer Session DR.
CAMAROTA: Thank you, Jared. Thank all our panelists. We're running
tight on time, so I kind of would like to open up, unless somebody has
something very specific they want to say quickly. Let me also make one point. There actually has been a
fair amount of research done, primarily by Robert Warren at the INS as well as
Hans Johnson at the Public Policy Institute of California, looking at the
question of whether the last amnesty caused a surge in illegal immigration. I
would say there's a consensus that it did cause a significant jump, maybe a 50
percent increase. But it also doesn't appear that that lasted for an extremely
long period of time. So in other words, it just remained at a very high level
there after. So the number of new illegals entering may have gone up after the
last amnesty by 50 percent or maybe more, 75 percent, and then it dropped down
and then it stayed higher than it previously was. But whether that higher
level was associated with the amnesty is a matter of debate. I think it is,
but that's open to question. But there is consensus among immigration researchers that
the last amnesty did cause a surge. Maybe a million, a million and a half
extra people came in associated with that amnesty. Of course, how could it be
otherwise, as all the family and friends and relatives and so forth of the
newly legalized coming in to join them. So it's not really a surprise. People
talked about it and I think there's a consensus on that point. Now, I want to take questions from the audience. In the
back there. QUESTION: Yes. For
Dr. Palley: You said initially that you didn't feel as though this policy of
the union, of AFL-CIO supporting amnesty, was a new policy. I don't know where
you're coming from with that because it seems to me that AFL-CIO until just
recently has always taken the position that illegal aliens take jobs away from
Americans, so therefore the government should try to keep them out. DR. PALLEY: I didn't
say that. I said there is a policy I place and that policy is not being
reversed now. I was just answering. Some folks called me up and said they had
read this announcement of policy reversal. They had misinterpreted what Vernon
meant by it. They thought that there was some change regarding the January,
the February and July resolutions, and those are in place and unchanged. QUESTION: Okay, but
that does represent a reversal from previous years? DR. PALLEY: Yes. QUESTION: Okay, fine.
QUESTION: First, I
want to thank the CIS and the panelists for what I think has been an excellent
presentation of the opposing views on this. I think it's just marvelous to
have this kind of opportunity. But I also want to —
when we're talking about why the unions have changed their position, one of
the things that you can't ignore about how the unions have changed in the last
40 years is that the composition of the unions has become increasingly
dominated by the public sector. I think it's like 43 percent of the unions
today are government unions. It strikes me that one of the things, when you
think about the interests of government unions, since immigrants — and illegal immigrants when they are legalized would fall
into this category – are disproportionately high consumers of government
services, that part of the reason for the shift inside the AFL-CIO has been
the rising influence of the public sector unions that see this increase as an
increase of growth or an increase of their potential market for their
services, as opposed to the manufacturing unions and the private sector unions
who are damaged and hurt by this thing. So I'd like the perspective particularly of Dr. Bernstein
and also the other panelists on this question, if this might also be an
explanation for this shift of the AFL-CIO. DR. BERNSTEIN: You
mean that the AFL may be shifting its position because the largest group of
unionized workers are providing services to more and more immigrants? QUESTION: Immigrants
are disproportionately consumers, according to national research, of
government services. We begin with school teachers. DR. BERNSTEIN: I'll
tell you, it's a reasonable hypothesis and you might be right. I don't know
that there's any evidence for that. It doesn't resonate with me right off the
bat, though, because I've seen most of the activities around immigration as
organizing — although I do
think AFSCME is interested in organizing immigrants as well, I think that the
organizing tends to be more in the private sector services. I'm thinking of
Justice for Janitors, by the way. So I don't know that you're right. I think it has more to
do with a kind of a solidarity with the low-wage labor market, as Tom was
discussing. Can I just say one thing about this Justice for Janitors?
There's a case study in here of Justice for Janitors and people in the room
like John Hallen might know a lot more about this than me, so John, please
correct me if I misspeak. Vernon talks about how what you had here was a
movement wherein a group of workers who were in a low skilled job unionized
and were making wages closer to middle class wages than those jobs paid now,
were displaced by immigrants and wages tanked in that industry. Justice for Janitors comes along and organizes these
immigrants who are really being exploited and their wages go up, and that's
great. They go up to around half the level that they were before, and that's a
problem. Now, you can do the mental processing as to where you go
with that, but I thought that was a great example of the costs and benefits of
this strategy. DR. PALLEY: I would
say that's way too Machiavellian an idea of what's driving this thing. I've
never heard anyone talk about how we've got to increase demand by increasing
the clientele for government services. It's making labor whole. It's a
solidarity issue. You can't put a wage floor in place, you can't have
bargaining power, when labor is divided with itself, as current law has it. DR. BRIGGS: I tried
to find out something about that question because I wondered about it, too. I
couldn't in this particular book, but it is interesting to note that the
public sector is one of the most difficult ones for immigrants to get into.
Theoretically, if that were the case, because in most cases you must be a U.S.
citizen — we're even seeing it
now with the inspectors at the airports; they're now talking about federal
employees and it's one in which even legal immigrants, if you're not a U.S.
citizen, not naturalized, you can't be employed in many, many, federal
government offices. QUESTION: They're
protected in the government. DR. BRIGGS: That's
right, they're protected. In New York State where I am, you can't teach in the
public school system if you're not a U.S. citizen. So if it is the case, it is
Machiavellian, but I'm hoping that's not the case. DR. CAMAROTA: Mark. MR. KRIKORIAN: I have
a question about the two components of what the AFL-CIO called for, because
this isn't sort of an all or nothing. There's two parts to what the AFL-CIO
called for. I have a question about some of the moral implications. The
AFL-CIO called for legalization, amnesty for all the illegal aliens who are
here, but also an end to the ban on hiring illegals, in other words making it
legal again to hire illegal aliens, so that employers would not suffer any
penalty if they hired illegal aliens. Those are the two parts of the policy
change. Now, assuming —
Jared raised the question about whether amnesties bring in more illegal
aliens. Let's assume that the level of illegal immigration doesn't change,
just for the sake of argument. But if border enforcement remains in place as
you've suggested and as the AFL-CIO statement suggests
— in other words, it's not open borders; we still have border
controls, but we now have essentially an invitation for workers to come across
the border and get legalized or work legally
— isn't there a moral problem with that in that we force these
workers to run a gauntlet of enforcement, to pass through the desert, to risk
their lives, to get past the border enforcement which the AFL-CIO has not
called for ending, in order to get the legal job they can now receive? My point is isn't there a problem there, and isn't the
AFL-CIO — wouldn't it be more
appropriate for it to embrace fully the Cato Institute, National Association
of Manufacturers position and call for open borders altogether? The analogy I
use here is Samuel Gompers statue downtown is on Massachusetts Avenue across
the street from the Cato Institute. Isn't it more appropriate for Samuel
Gompers just to cross the street and embrace entirely the open borders
position, because without doing so you create an immoral situation where
workers have to risk their lives before they can get here and join the union? DR. PALLEY: Well,
civil penalties would remain in place on employers who knowingly hire
undocumented workers. I think it's sort of a sophistic argument that you're
putting up there. We have in place —
added to the moral, the fact is under the current law, under the type of
arrangements that Vernon would propose continuing with, that same problem is
going to have to be. You're going to have to cross a dangerous border. That
border is not going away. MR. KRIKORIAN: I
understood quite explicitly from the Executive Council's statement that
employer sanctions altogether were to be erased. There are only civil
sanctions now. You only get criminal sanctions if you have a pattern, if
you're an employer and you hire them all the time. The employer sanctions, which is the ban on hiring
illegals, is now the civil fine. It's sort of a big traffic ticket. I
understood the Executive Council statement in February specifically called for
the repeal of those. DR. BRIGGS: It did. DR. PALLEY: As I
understand our position, it's a new law bringing penalties for employers who
seek to violate labor laws based on an employee's immigration status. MR. KRIKORIAN: That's
different from fining someone because they're hiring illegals. DR. PALLEY: And
providing swift penalties for smuggling, document fraud, and for those
employers who break labor laws as a matter of business practice. I think
that's the same. You still have — if you have an undocumented worker and you knowingly hire
them, I think you're subject to civil penalties. DR. CAMAROTA: I think
what they're saying is that we're going to enforce the labor laws, but we're
not going to enforce the immigration laws any more. Isn't that the position? DR. PALLEY: You have
to look at the statement there. I think the principles are laid out there.
It's a statement of principle. DR. CAMAROTA: Go
ahead, in the back. QUESTION: I wonder
whether any of the panelists could speak to the global aspect of migration,
because migrant flows have increased all over the world. Desperate people are
moving across the border from the poorest countries to the slightly richer
countries in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. Everybody's not just going to
Europe and to the United States. So has anyone looked at the economic impact of migration
in these other countries, where there are also unions and plenty of low wage
workers? DR. BRIGGS: Let me
just say that's a big, big issue beyond what this panel is really concerned
with. But the United Nations Population Council, I think correctly, two years
ago, three years ago, said that immigration is the crisis issue of the 21st
century. There's no doubt that, despite the fact that neither of our political
parties will discuss immigration, we cannot have a frank discussion of it in
the political economy. That is the issue for exactly the reason you said
before. As you pointed out, we now have boundaries everywhere. It used to be
if you didn't get along, you had a fight, you could move off to someplace
else. Today you're stuck where you are unless you begin to force yourself into
other areas. It is the crisis issue. That's the real issue that
bothers me most about this issue, is that immigration does not get discussed
by either of the political parties. Some of the issues that were just raised a moment ago, I
just want to respond to one of them, the idea that immigration doesn't affect
wages. The National Research Council did find that in the aggregate, but
that's the aggregate. When you look at low wage workers, where most of the
immigrants came, they found a massive effect. They said that 44 percent of the
suppression of wages of the low skilled workers in the United States since
1978 up until the time of the report in 1997 was due to immigration — not racism, not family structure, not human capital
deficiency, but immigration. It is a major force affecting low skilled workers, the
wages of low skilled workers in this country, is oversupply. Yes, if you throw
in a big model of the whole economy immigration doesn't look so big. It
doesn't affect my wage at all. It's probably not going to affect your wage. If
you're a low skill worker today, it affects it a lot. This is what we should
discuss. The point —
I'm trying to get to your question here —
is immigration can't, however, be the answer to every question: If people are
starving to death, a riot here, a civil war, come to the United States. We've
got to take the immigration policy to the next level, but we're still stuck
back here on the kindergarten issue about whether or not people coming into
the United States illegally, violating our laws
— maybe we should just do away with the laws and let them come. Until we get an immigration policy in place, which every
country has, then we can move to the next step about how we can deal with
what's pushing people out, what's pushing people into these things –
population issues, corruption issues, human rights violations, these things
which all in my sense can be linked together, and we'll get to that next
level. But we can't simply let the labor market be the escape
valve in which everybody who's suffering on the planet comes to the United
States and say there's not going to be some kind of impact on the low skilled
labor market. So that's part of what I would say. QUESTION: I just
wanted to reiterate, my point is everybody's not coming to the United States.
Lots of people are going to just the next nearest place. DR. BRIGGS: Two-thirds
of all people coming for permanent settlement anywhere in the world, permanent
settlement, are coming to the United States. It is a movement everywhere. It's
going to get bigger everywhere else. DR. PALLEY: I agree
with Vernon. I would say this is a tremendously important issue. It ties in
also with our international agenda, why things like labor standards are
needed, why a development agenda rather than a trade agenda, dealing with
income inequality within and between countries. Those are the issues that are
our international agenda, that are completely not part of the sort of trade
promotion type of agenda that we have. So we do see this thing globally in exactly those sort of
terms. There's a U.S. piece to it and there's a global piece to it and policy
has to be integrated seamlessly across those pieces. DR. CAMAROTA: Here. QUESTION: It seems
that there's an agreement on the panel that everyone thinks that illegal
immigration is harmful, and there seems to be also a concession that it cannot
be controlled. Am I right? Is there just surrender here to illegal
immigration? What should we do about it? DR. CAMAROTA: One
thing you do hear often is that we have tried employer sanctions and we
failed, but I think any fair look at that same we didn't try and fail. Now,
they might fail if we try. That's a fair point. It does seem, though, in the
position for an amnesty and an end to employer sanctions there's a sense that
we tried and failed. But I don't think anyone involved in enforcement
— as you know, there are only 300 INS inspectors devoted full-time to
work on illegal immigration, just a little tiny group of people. They don't
even work full-time on it, but that's if you put them all on full-time. In addition to that, we don't have the kind of employer
database system that will be critical to identifying employers who hire
illegals. So we never tried and failed, and maybe if we tried we would fail.
But it would appear that the argument for it suggests that we just can't do
it. You're right, there is sort of a sense – the amnesty
argument and the end of employer sanctions sort of takes as a supposition,
that I think is undemonstrated certainly, that we tried and failed. But I
think that's true. DR. BERNSTEIN: I
maybe didn't totally understand your question. I thought you were saying we're
all against illegal immigration, but what's our position on legal immigration? QUESTION: No,
illegal. It would appear to me that you're saying, that you're throwing up
your hands and saying, we can't control it. DR. BERNSTEIN: No,
I'm closer to Steve on that. I'm closer to Steve on that. I don't know as much
as he does about how hard we've tried or not tried, but my position, and I
think probably shared by the panel, is that the thing wrong with illegal
immigration is that it's illegal and I don't see anybody arguing that we
should support illegal immigration. I think the amnesty question doesn't say, as Steve
pointed out, that we should open up the borders. It's just saying that they're
here already, so let's join with them. QUESTION: It's just
that I don't hear any proposal for controlling illegal immigration. DR. BRIGGS: This is
part of the issue. There's a lot of things we don't discuss today. I'm worried
about the change in the position of the AFL-CIO on a whole range of
immigration issues dealing with legal immigration and with illegal
immigration, but we got off on the issue of illegal immigration. The AFL —
and I strongly supported it —
supported in 1986 an amnesty and employer sanctions together, a one-time
amnesty and never, ever again. That was supposedly ground rules, because our
laws were not clear in 1986. It was not illegal for an employer to hire an
illegal alien in the United States. It was really hard for us to say we didn't
want them to come. As of 1986 we have said that, they're not supposed to be
here. There should never be the expectation of another amnesty again under any
circumstances. That was part of the understanding. The second understanding was employer sanctions would go
into effect and hereafter we're going to demagnetize the labor market. They're
not going to have the attraction. There's no sense coming here; you're not
going to get a job. So then we deal with the question you were raising about
what can we do with the people who stay in the country. But because the employer sanctions were found to have an
enormous loophole — that is,
the verification loophole, which the Jordan Commission recommended we try to
stop, and the AFL-CIO supported a lot of these movements in the Immigration
Act of 1986, that stripped away all those efforts to make the immigration laws
enforceable, and it means that we never really tried to stop illegal
immigration. We thought we were. It turns out we didn't, and in fact we did
not make employer sanctions meaningful and that means you're not dealing with
the verification issue. The big hangup with the verification issue is it's a form
of national identification. As long as it was us people talking about it, no
one was talking about it. I heard Alan Dershowitz last night talking on
television; he's all for a national ID card, not because of immigration but
because of all these other things now that have taken place, and we now
understand in the electronic age people are stealing people's identification
records, all these other things. We're going to have to have some sort of
national identification card, which by the way could be used to verify the
authenticity of who you are when you apply for a job as a little ancillary
thing to national security and the security of all your personal possessions. It's going to come. It's going to have to. It's the age
we live in. This is the kind of step we've got to take to stop illegal
immigration. In my view, when you say you're doing employer sanctions
and you're going to keep giving amnesties, you're encouraging more people to
come here and being supported by the worst elements of American society. I
think it's the seamier side of American society today which would seem to
tolerate this idea that we've got the immigrant labor force, we know they're
down there, we know they're being exploited, and we just sort of turn our face
away and say, oh, we don't want employer sanctions or enforcement on the
borders or to make our employer sanctions strong enough with the proper
verification. There's a lot more to say on this, but understand that I
want to stop illegal immigration. I think it's the key litmus test for people
who are concerned about low skilled workers in this country, is immigration,
and that's supported in the Bureau of Labor Statistics study, the Department
of Labor. The Department of Justice triennial study says
— it's in this paper here; you ought to read it
— immigration is affecting unionism. That's the conclusion. The Council of Economic Advisers has made it clear. It's
all in here in the document. You can read it yourself. It is affecting the
distribution of income. It's the reason a lot of the things that Tom talks
about here, why the income redistribution is taking place, the infusion of low
skilled workers, of which immigration is part. Is immigration the only issue? No. Is it one of the
issues? Absolutely, that's making poor people poorer in this country. DR. CAMAROTA: Another
question? QUESTION: Yes. A
terrific panel discussion. As a former union organizer, I would have to
challenge the idea that immigration, large flows of unskilled workers, is bad
for unions. If you look at the turn of the century when the unions enjoyed
their biggest surge of growth, that was the period of very high immigration. I think the reasons for unions are a whole huge variety
of factors. It has to do with what unions brought with them in ethnic
solidarity, European history, and unionism, density of employment, but
particularly the way that unions function, and it had much less to do with
whatever position AFL was taking at the time on paper, a lot more to do with
the fact that unions were perceived as effective advocates of immigrant
workers. However, I do agree with the point, the rather subtle
point made by Dr. Briggs, in that if the AFL-CIO becomes perceived as a
promoter of immigration rather than a champion of immigrant workers or trying
to regularize employment and therefore prevent exploitation, that would be
bad, because my experience living in a community in Arlington which is very,
very high immigrant, and I think there is a valid point that those working in
the public schools are exposed to this every day. They know the kids are here.
You have to work with it, and I think that's what the AFL-CIO is saying. But the immigrants themselves, those who are getting
green cards, those who aren't, tend to be very much against further flows
because they believe that people take advantage of the system and making the
pull too hard is hurting their interests. So the Camarota study on that that's
in the package I think is right on. I have a question about amnesty, to any of the panelists.
What chance do you really think there would be an amnesty in the present
climate, post 9-11? Nobody has commented on that. I'll just comment related to
the questions on the Cato Institute that the coyotes are not sending people
across the border. Immigration has stopped, and it's not stopped there because
of the perceived view — this
very much supports Dr. Palley's position
— a perceived view that amnesty is going to come the next day or it's
going to come next month or not, because we know it's going to be pretty hard. It's stopped because of the border controls and because
the job pull is not there. They know what's happening in the economy. Thank you. DR. CAMAROTA: But that would also sort of suggest that you could stop illegal immigration if you want. It's not like the weather. Just the Border Patrol, without any sort of interior enforcement, which we all sort of think, those of us who want to control illegal immigration, t |
