The left splits over immigration

Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches. But some leading progressives say illegal immigration hurts American workers.

By Michelle Goldberg

Read more: Politics, Labor, Liberals, Michelle Goldberg, News, Immigration

Photos by Keri Pickett and Victor J. Blue

Left, an unemployed Minneapolis family; right, men scale a fence into the U.S. from Mexicali, Mexico, on April 14.

April 20, 2006 | Britt Minshall is a United Church of Christ pastor and a proud member of the religious left. A former civil rights Freedom Rider, he heads an interracial Baltimore congregation of 200, which has ministries that care for recovering addicts and for prostitutes. He also works in Haiti, and has written a self-published novel "to expose the pernicious effects of American foreign policy" on the people of that country. He calls the current administration "evil, wrong, treasonous ... a pack of monsters." And yet as he watched hundreds of thousands of immigrants march through the streets of America's biggest cities in the past few weeks, he found himself agreeing with some of the most right-wing Republicans. Most liberals are "dead wrong" on immigration, he says, arguing that social justice demands a crackdown on the undocumented. "I'm afraid the Minutemen have a point here," he says.

Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in them a new kind of civil rights movement. They've supported calls to legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right, where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are working against the interests of low-skilled American workers. "I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote last month. "But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration ... [W]hile immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration -- especially immigration from Mexico."

Minshall says he sees the pain every day. Baltimore, he says, is full of young, black men who are "unemployable because they won't work for $4.50 an hour." The influx of immigrants, he says, "is tilting everyone's wages down, except for the upper class." He says that one member of his church, the owner of a roofing business, recently fired his entire crew and replaced them with immigrant contractors. The man felt "pushed up against a wall," Minshall says, because he couldn't compete without using illegal labor. "The customer will always buy the $2,000 roof and not the $2,500 one," Minshall says, adding, "We've gotten so addicted to cheap goods."

As people like Minshall illustrate, the liberal debate over immigration isn't simply one between the left and the center. It cuts across ideologies. There are conservative Democrats, civil rights activists and leftist multiculturalists calling for legalizing undocumented immigrant workers, while figures including antiwar Air America radio host Thom Hartmann, writer Michael Lind and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., are urging much tougher restrictions. The central question is whether the interests of working-class Americans and those of immigrants, legal and illegal, are necessarily in opposition, and if they are, how progressives -- and the lawmakers they support -- should deal with it. What does it mean if the inspiring words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty -- "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me" -- can't be reconciled with the needs of this country's workers?

There are two bills at the center of the debate, though it goes far beyond them. The recent pro-immigration protests were galvanized by a stringent measure recently passed by the House that would criminalize illegal immigrants and those who help them. Many of those at the demonstrations supported a competing Senate bill put forward by Ted Kennedy and John McCain. That bill would create 400,000 temporary visas for low-skilled foreign workers, and would allow illegal immigrants who have been in the country for over five years to gain legal residency and start a path to citizenship after paying fines and undergoing background checks. A Senate compromise on the bill collapsed last week after Republicans failed to toughen it enough to make it palatable to some reluctant conservatives, and it's not clear whether any immigration reform legislation is going to pass. But the debate is almost certain to keep boiling, with another big day of nationwide pro-immigrant protests planned for May 1.

So far, the immigration protests have drawn support from both civil rights leaders and labor leaders. Some liberals, though, are urging progressives not to align themselves with a movement that could ultimately hurt Americans workers. Plans for a guest worker program are especially contentious because opponents argue that it would create a permanent underclass of disenfranchised labor.

In a March 29 column posted on the progressive Web site Common Dreams, Thom Hartmann described the fight between supporters of the Senate and House bills as one between "corporatist Republicans ('amnesty!')" and "racist Republicans ('fence!')." "Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages," he wrote. "If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways. Between the Reagan years -- when there were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce -- and today, we've gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result -- as Caesar [sic] Chávez predicted -- of illegal immigrants competing directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it's most obvious in the construction trades over the past 30 years, it's hit all sectors of our economy."

As Hartmann notes, Cesar Chávez, the legendary founder of the United Farmworkers Union, was at one point so opposed to illegal immigration that he was known to call the INS on the undocumented. "What he was trying to do was to stop growers from using immigrants to break the strikes," says Nestor Rodriguez, co-director of the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston.

There are, of course, many factors besides immigration leading to the long decline of labor unions. Globalization, the deindustrialization of the American economy and the antilabor policies of the GOP, at both the state and national level, have all played profound roles. But there is data to back up the claim that immigration drives down working-class wages. In a 2004 study, Harvard economist George J. Borjas wrote that by "increasing the supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4 percent." High school dropouts were more severely affected -- their wages were reduced 7.4 percent, Borjas found. "The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary," he wrote. "It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status."

"What immigration really does is redistribute wealth away from workers toward employers," Borjas told the Washington Post last month.

Next page: Why a reinvigorated labor movement is the only solution