Editorial New York Times
IMMIGRATION and the UNIONS
The very idea that unions would endorse legalizing illegal immigrants, as the country’s two big labor federations did this month, strikes some as absurd. Americans have a hard enough time competing with cheap foreign labor. Why undercut them within our own borders? Especially with millions of citizens losing their jobs?

These questions deserve an answer since the bad economy will only strengthen the stiff winds of opposition that President Obama will have to fight if he is going to win the sweeping immigration overhaul he has promised. Legalization was already politically treacherous thanks to the tireless work of restrictionists who have spent years denouncing illegal immigrants as harmful to the country’s health. They have long compared the undocumented to invaders and parasites; it’s a very short distance from there to scabs.

To understand why that view is misguided, it helps to remember that the country has largely bought that argument and spent decades and billions to seal the border as tightly as possible.

It stages raids to pull people off assembly lines and out of their beds and cars. It has added hundreds of thousands of prison beds to hold illegal immigrants and enlisted local police officers to enforce federal laws. It has done everything it can to make illegal immigrants miserable in the hope that they will abandon their jobs, houses and citizen-children and tell everyone back home to forget about America. And how has that worked? It hasn’t.

The agricultural work force is still overwhelmingly undocumented, as are the workers doing other dirty or dangerous jobs in places like hotels, carwashes and restaurants. Soaring unemployment has hit both skilled and unskilled workers hard. But laid-off construction workers have not been lining up to plant onions or pick tomatoes, and a hidden population of 12 million undocumented immigrants has not begun a mass exodus anywhere.

Nor have the forces of global economic migration magically adjusted to fit the American mood. Thousands of workers still cross the border, although the numbers are down — a sign of the downturn, particularly in home building. When the economy recovers, the flow will revive. (Economic forces are dynamic, even if our immigration policies are not.)

The unions, at least, understand that there is a better way. They see immigration reform as an issue of worker empowerment. If undocumented immigrants undercut wages and job conditions for Americans — and many do, by tolerating low pay and abuse and bolstering an off-the-books system that robs law-abiding employers and taxpayers — it is because they cannot stand up for their rights.

“Workers don’t depress wages. Unscrupulous employers do,” said Terence O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. Unemployment in his industry is above 21 percent. Nearly two million construction workers are out of work. So what does Mr. O’Sullivan want? Reform that allows immigrants to legalize. “If we can free them so they can come out of the shadows, we can not only improve their lives, but all workers’ lives,” he said.

Eliseo Medina, the international executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, agreed. “First and foremost, this is an economic argument,” he said.

Making the pro-union case for reform is not necessarily going to be easy. Even as immigration has changed the face of many American unions, hostility to foreigners remains a problem among some of the rank and file. Mr. Medina said union leaders were going to have to work hard to make members understand that false populism was not on their side.

“You may not want to do this because you like José Rodríguez,” Mr. Medina said, “but this affects you. Your standard of living is not going to improve, and you’re not going to be in a stronger position to solve your problems as long as you have all of these people out there without any rights — without any ability to contribute. Things will only get worse, not better.”