Immigration Advocacy as Labor Advocacy (original) (raw)
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A New Approach to Migrant Labor Rights Enforcement
Labor Studies Journal, 2014
This paper examines the genesis and evolution of consular efforts to enforce the workplace rights of immigrant workers in the United States. We draw on a survey of 52 Mexican consulates in the United States, in-depth interviews with the initial cohort of 15 consular participants in the Semana de Derechos Laborales/Labor Rights Week, and several key informants who helped coordinate these efforts in the community. Our findings confirm a shift from "limited" to "active" engagement over the last decade on the part of the Mexican government (Délano 2011), placing special emphasis on the role played by non-governmental actors in producing this shift. We document how this new orientation evolved with respect to workplace rights, leading to the creation of an annual Labor Rights Week that today coordinates efforts between local consular offices, federal and state labor standards enforcement agencies, and other immigrant worker advocates. We argue that consular representatives, while endowed with unique resources and legitimacy, are constrained in their approach to defend the rights of immigrant workers. The configuration and extent of consular collaborations also depend on the maturity of local networks and on synergistic collaborations with local NGOs and labor unions to increase the efficacy and impact of their efforts in the communities they serve.
Is Immigration Policy Labor Policy?: Immigration Enforcement, Undocumented Workers, and the State
Human Organization, 2011
Enforcement-oriented immigration programs have spread rapidly from the United States-Mexico border throughout the United States interior in recent years, intensifying the vulnerabilities of undocumented workers. In this article, we draw on our ethnographic research with undocumented workers and activists in the Chicago area to examine the expanded use of instruments such as E-Verify, No-Match letters, and federal-local enforcement collaborations. We consider how accelerated enforcement-oriented immigration policies affect the labor relations of undocumented workers in the Chicago area, and we also explore how immigrant labor leaders help workers ward off the short-term effects of punitive immigration policies as they organize for long-term immigration reform.
Is Immigration Policy Labor Policy?
Enforcement-oriented immigration programs have spread rapidly from the United States-Mexico border throughout the United States interior in recent years, intensifying the vulnerabilities of undocumented workers. In this article, we draw on our ethnographic research with undocumented workers and activists in the Chicago area to examine the expanded use of instruments such as E-Verify, No-Match letters, and federal-local enforcement collaborations. We consider how accelerated enforcement-oriented immigration policies affect the labor relations of undocumented workers in the Chicago area, and we also explore how immigrant labor leaders help workers ward off the short-term effects of punitive immigration policies as they organize for long-term immigration reform.
This paper examines the genesis and evolution of consular efforts to enforce the workplace rights of immigrant workers in the United States. We draw on a survey of 52 Mexican consulates in the United States, in-depth interviews with the initial cohort of 15 consular participants in the Semana de Derechos Laborales/Labor Rights Week, and several key informants who helped coordinate these efforts in the community. Our findings confirm a shift from “limited” to “active” engagement over the last decade on the part of the Mexican government (Délano 2011), placing special emphasis on the role played by non-governmental actors in producing this shift. We document how this new orientation evolved with respect to workplace rights, leading to the creation of an annual Labor Rights Week that today coordinates efforts between local consular offices, federal and state labor standards enforcement agencies, and other immigrant worker advocates. We argue that consular representatives, while endowed with unique resources and legitimacy, are constrained in their approach to defend the rights of immigrant workers. The configuration and extent of consular collaborations also depend on the maturity of local networks and on synergistic collaborations with local NGOs and labor unions to increase the efficacy and impact of their efforts in the communities they serve.
Undocumented Workers: Crossing the Borders of Immigration and Workplace Law
Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 2012
Excerpt] This Article endeavors to comprehensively outline the emerging field of immployment law. As this Article specifies below, this field broadly includes empirical, legislative, administrative, judicial, and other analytical inquiries and trends involving workers who bridge the divide between immigration law and workplace law.
Jotwell the Journal of Things We Like, 2010
In Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court early on affirmed as "indisputable" the rule "that where there is a legal right, there is also a legal remedy" and "that every right, when withheld, must have a remedy, and every injury its proper redress." Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 163 (1803) (quoting 3 William Blackstone, Commentaries *23, *109). But while black letter law so instructs, employee status under the National Labor Relations Act does not always guarantee backpay to victims of unfair labor practices-or so explains Ellen Dannin in her well-documented review of the by now infamous labor-immigration case, Hoffman Plastics Compounds, Inc. v. N.LR.B., 535 U.S. 137 (2002). Her article, which was part of the University of San Francisco's symposium issue-The Evolving Definition of the Immigrant Worker: The Intersection Between Employment, Labor, and Human Rights Law-meticulously dissects the language of the Supreme Court's opinion and the oral argument to show that Hoffman Plastics' holding-that employers are not liable in backpay for violating the labor law rights of undocumented workers-is not an anomaly. Instead, it fits neatly into an historical trend of judicial amendments to the NLRA.
Studies in American Political Development, 2009
This article examines the American labor movement's struggles since the nineteenth century over how to respond to mass immigration. Labor's struggles have turned on whether it views new waves fundamentally as a threat, which elicits a strategy of restriction, or an opportunity, which elicits a strategy of solidarity. It also captures the advantages of a longue-duree approach for understanding the fraught and evolving relationship between American unionism and immigration. Rather than a Briggsian story of labor traditionally embracing a restrictionist position, our archival and interview research from the Reconstruction Era to present shows that labor's position on immigration has been in regular contention-with disagreements getting resolved in a restrictionist direction during certain periods and an expansionist one during others. Likewise, the familiar scholarly claim that an unprecedented "turnabout" in labor's response to immigration can be pinpointed to 1999 ignores more than a century of internal debate and variegated external activism on this issue. We lay out an analytical model for understanding why the labor movement has viewed new immigrant workers as a threat in certain contexts and an opportunity for growth in others. The model highlights how three external variables-the fluid structure of the labor market, immigration trends, and the state's disposition toward organized labor-establish either a secure or insecure environment within which unions respond to immigration. It also underscores the importance of how dominant modes of unionism within the movement interact with these external forces to shape its perception of "new" immigrants in restrictive or solidaristic terms. Significantly, the sequence and recombination of these forces during the past century or more have transformed how organized labor responds to new immigrant workers in an insecure environment today. Our research presents a diverse movement honestly wrestling with immigration's profound conundrums, including elemental issues of who it identifies as part of its fold (workers deserving of fraternity and sorority) and who it deems as permanent outsiders (workers who were a menace to the cause).
The Precarity of Temporality: How Law Inhibits Immigrant Worker Claims
Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 2017
In this article, we propose that temporary immigrant workers in the United States face unique law-induced challenges to claimsmaking when compared to other categories of workers with precarious immigration statuses, such as unauthorized workers and H-2 guest workers. We present a systematic comparison of each group, drawing on a review of the existing literature and a new pilot study, to examine how the challenges facing each set of immigrants overlap in some ways, but are unique in others. We conclude that particular differences in U.S. immigration law categories (unauthorized, H-2 guest workers, and temporary immigrant workers) may shape how immigrants on the ground interact with broader legal regimes, such as criminal, employment, and administrative law. In turn, these differing legal institutional contexts affect how immigrants weigh the prospect of coming forward with a workplace law claim against their employers.
Solidarities and Restrictions: Labor and Immigration Policy in the United States
In American labor's response to immigration over time, one can observe "a movement wrestling" between restrictionist and solidaristic positions. A crucial transformation of American labor's response to immigration occurred from the 1930s to the 1960s which is attributed to four factors: changes in the structure and composition of the labor market, shifts in immigration flows, shifts in the attitudes of the labor movement toward immigrants, and the changing disposition of the American state toward unions. In this article we look at the policy choices and dilemmas that have faced the American labor movement since the 1940's, putting forth a conceptual framework for understanding labor's shifting positions over time and identifying critical moments in American political development. Having laid this foundation, we move on to a consideration of labor's most recent positions concerning contemporary policy debates.
Recent geographic research on U.S. immigration policy highlights the devolution of policy formulation and implementation to local state actors. This study extends this research by analyzing how labor unions shape the implementation of state immigration policy and innovate institutional practices that affect regulatory spaces for immigrants at the local level. Using a case study of the hotel union in Chicago and Los Angeles, this article examines the origin, content, and implementation of immigration provisions recently negotiated in the union’s contracts. These contract provisions mediate the implementation of state immigration policies by specifying rules that govern employer actions in response to immigration enforcement activities by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, including admittance to the workplace, inspection of I-9 forms, and Social Security no-match letters. The contracts also establish nondiscrimination protections for immigrant workers, such as guaranteed leave to attend immigration proceedings. The legal codification of these protections and the robust practices of union enforcement yield “enclaves of rights” at the local level, further contributing to the highly uneven space of security for immigrant residents in the United States The article concludes by examining the possibility that unions—given their influence in local labor markets, their federated (or national) structures, and their role in the broader moral economy—could extend these rights beyond the confines of the enclave. Key Words: immigrant labor, immigrant rights, immigration policy, unions, worker rights.