After years of internal debate, labor union leaders have come to regard immigration as an inevitable consequence of globalization. Labor leaders have come to believe that restrictive immigration policies, which they once supported to protect their native constituencies, do little more than encourage illegal immigration. As a result, most labor leaders today support more open policies that promote legal immigration, creating an unconventional, unspoken partnership with employers. Julie R. Watts identifies globalization as the impetus behind the change in labor leaders' attitudes toward immigration. She then compares specific political, economic, and institutional circumstances that have shaped immigration preferences and policies in France, Italy, Spain, and the United States. In addition to revealing the unusual alliance between unions and employers on the immigration issue, Watts examines the role both groups play in the formulation of national policy.

Immigration Policy and the Challenge of Globalization: Unions and Employers in Unlikely Alliance

Watts, Julie R.

Reference

ILR PRESS

Julie Watts's research has turned conventional wisdom - that organized labor opposes immigration for fear that foreign workers will undercut the wages and working conditions of native workers - on its head. Her examination of labor unions in Italy, Spain, and France reveals that labor leaders actually prefer more open immigration policies. In an era of globalization, restrictive immigration policies that were originally designed to protect native workers can now produce the opposite result. Paradoxically, by forcing immigrants into a precarious legal and economic position, such policies can undercut the improvements in wages and working conditions that native workers were able to achieve as a consequence of shutting out foreign workers. Unions' growing support for more liberalized immigration policies have brought labor leaders into the political arena, where they engage in a variety of activities to influence their nations' policy making on immigration. In some cases, organized labor has also moved to provide essential support services to immigrants that their governments are unwilling or unable to provide. Watts's study has broad implications for labor-importing countries around the world, including the United States, where the labor movement is actively reassessing its positions on immigration control and amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

An Unconventional Brotherhood: Union Support for Liberalized Immigration in Europe

Business & Money

Economics

Center for Comparative Immigration

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