Immigrants Are Leaders in Our Class Struggle

Working-class immigrant communities across the United States are quickly organizing defense networks and know-your-rights trainings in the face of the spectacular threat of “mass deportation” raids. These workers are creating the first grassroots opposition to Trump’s second-term agenda, leading border tsar Tom Homan to complain that too many people targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) know their rights. “They call it ‘know your rights.’ I call it ‘how to evade arrest,’” said Homan.

Trump is coming for immigrants, trans people, and federal employees first. Others will surely follow. Our class must stand with the resistance to this first wave of attacks, building unity where division could reign, and preparing ourselves for the less predictable but nauseatingly inevitable waves ahead.

How can we win other workers to unconditional defense of our immigrant comrades? Suzy Lee’s recent Jacobin piece, “Defend Immigrants from Scapegoat Politics,” makes a welcome contribution to the discussion. But it fails to recognize immigrant workers’ central role in the class struggle in the United States. As a result, it concedes ground to the lie that immigrants hurt other workers. Specifically, Lee claims immigration “has the potential to impede the development of the kind of labor movement we…need” because “immigrant workers are harder to organize.”

Lee correctly notes the strong historic role of foreign-born workers in this country. It is worth remembering that the first organized national strike, the eight-hour day movement of 1886, was led by immigrant German workers. The first mass breakthrough into industrial factory unionization began in 1909 when 20,000 immigrant women struck in textiles, leading to the formation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union. The Industrial Workers of the World’s landmark 1912 strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts had daily strike meetings with translators speaking 25 different languages. The 1919 Great Steel Strike was led by Polish workers. And the turning-point struggles of the 1930s involved immigrant workers and their children in the millions. Also, foreign language federations made up the largest membership of the Eugene Debs-era Socialist Party, as well as the early Communist Party.

My union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), became the fastest-growing union in the 1980s by organizing immigrant workers in the wake of the 1986 amnesty for 2 million undocumented workers. Others like UNITE-HERE and Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) also turned to immigrants. Their successes led the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to reverse its historic opposition to immigration in the year 2000, sponsoring the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride. Immigrant workers were the biggest source of hope in a labor movement otherwise in decline.

Today’s undocumented workers (unlike previous generations of immigrants who benefitted from open borders or amnesty programs) face the constant threat of deportation. “The current configuration of immigration law,” Lee says, “leaves them extremely vulnerable to employer pressure.” She is certainly right that undocumented status is a formidable barrier to organization. From the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924, it has often operated at the direction of employers, invited in when firms want to break strikes or union drives. But does this mean immigrant workers today are “harder to organize”?

Foreign-born workers, including the undocumented, have a 10 percent unionization rate. That is the same as the all-worker figure. But foreign-born workers make up only 10 percent of public sector employees, where overall unionization is high, 32 percent. By comparison, 14 percent of all workers work in the public sector. That means the foreign born are overrepresented in private sector jobs, where the overall unionization rate is only 6 percent. How then do they manage to keep up with the 10 percent overall unionization rate for all workers? By unionizing more readily than native born workers in the private sector.

Few recall the fact that the first general strike in the United States since the Oakland strike of 1946 happened in 2006. This was the May 1st “Day Without an Immigrant,” organized to protest the anti-immigrant Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act in Congress (known as the “Sensenbrenner Bill,” after Wisconsin Republican Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, its sponsor). This involved millions of workers shutting down entire industries such as meat packing and the Los Angeles garment manufacturing district.

A few weeks ago, I attended a meeting in San Diego of 90 people, mostly immigrants, who formed an Action Network to prevent deportations. A similar meeting in Los Angeles drew 300 people. Untold numbers protested against mass deportation nationwide on February 1, 2025. Is any other group of workers currently coming together this broadly?

Tenants’ unions formed in the last decade in San Diego and Los Angeles have a largely immigrant base. In the case of San Diego, the first tenant to engage in public protest (against a landlord who refused to deal with a roach and spider infestation) was an undocumented mother.

Undocumented workers face greater repression and have fewer legal rights than the rest of our class—and, as Lee points out, employers benefit. “Capital,” she says, “wants workers…under conditions that limit their ability to organize for better wages and working conditions.” True. But worse conditions can press people toward struggle, as well as quiescence.

Immigrants routinely create collective institutions and social networks for survival, and these connections can facilitate self-organization for struggle. Some immigrants come from countries and communities with stronger traditions of leftist or militant politics than the United States.

All of this still doesn’t mean undocumented workers are more likely to organize in every instance. Instead, workers should see our undocumented comrades as facing a volatile reality that produces an intense and unique set of organizing experiences. And that is an aspect of our power and can be an asset to our class.

Recognizing immigrant workers in their role as a leading section of our class struggle opens the door to challenging the lies assumed in Republican and Democratic discourse on immigration.

The working-age population of our class supports both the idle rich of all ages and the young and the old of all classes. Since undocumented workers come here in search of work, they are necessarily a disproportionately working-age population. So undocumented people, like all people, attend schools as children and require medical attention when retired. But they actually draw on these resources at a lower rate than the rest of our class—and they work more, too. In 2023, immigrants’ labor force participation rate (68 percent) outpaced the general population (63 percent). Undocumented workers, more narrowly, made up 5.2 percent of the workforce but only 3.3 percent of the population in 2023-4.

So, in fact, immigrants massively benefit, rather than drain, tax revenue. Undocumented workers paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. The Social Security Administration (SSA) receives tax contributions from undocumented workers using false numbers. Because the numbers are false, they don’t accrue to the future benefit of those workers. These funds go into the SSA’s “Earnings Suspense File (ESF),” helping to keep the fund solvent at a time when it is increasingly stretched by the outsized pool of retiring Baby Boomers (and the legislature’s refusal to apply SSA tax to income over $91,000 per year).

The ESF now holds more than $2 trillion (yes, trillion). And amazingly, over 5 million undocumented workers annually file voluntary federal income taxes, using Individual Tax Identification Numbers. They do this to increase their odds of a favorable decision from a judge if and when they apply for citizenship. But meanwhile, they are paying into a system whose benefits they cannot access. They also pay disproportionately high tax rates, since as undocumented people they lack eligibility for various deductions and since they are less likely to file for refunds.

Immigrant workers are often simply doing the hardest jobs that nobody else will take. And there is nothing unique about different sections of our class being materially pitted against each other in a system designed to leverage artificial scarcity into working-class disempowerment. In specifically immigrant vs. native worker narratives, this is often an illusion. Take local construction and janitorial industries, which in some areas have transitioned from a native to immigrant workforce. This was not a matter of employers hiring lower-paid immigrants and firing citizens. Rather, in the 1980s and 1990s employers busted unions and lowered pay. Workers then voted with their feet, gradually finding jobs elsewhere. Immigrant workers began to take those jobs at lowered standards, but then became prone to re-unionize and push standards back up.

Class consciousness today means awareness of our position in the world market. Capitalists cross borders at will, while restricting workers within them. We see the results of freedom of movement for capital but not workers in the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) treaties. U.S. workers, especially in manufacturing unions, are painfully aware of the million or so jobs lost to NAFTA. Yet neither political party, nor most of their unions, will teach them that NAFTA also destroyed the livelihoods of millions of corn and other farmers in Mexico, as their national market was opened to massively subsidized products from agribusiness. The resulting sharp increase in worker migration from Mexico to the United States in the wake of the treaty, fully anticipated at the time, is the result of the tri-national corporate conspiracy against the working people of each of their respective nations.

Republicans absurdly accuse Democrats of supporting open borders. This is despite Bill Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper and the thousands of migrant deaths it has caused. Despite record numbers of deportations by Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Despite Biden building more miles of the border wall he claimed to oppose than Trump. Despite endless bipartisan increases in spending on the immigration carceral state.

In my experience workers’ opposition to open borders collapses when someone makes the case for them. One Right-influenced worker recently complained to me about the “costs of open borders.” She was surprised, and receptive, when I countered that the costs of closed borders—exploding immigration enforcement budgets—are the actual problem.

Imagine no more border between Tijuana and San Diego. What would be the result for the labor market? Tijuana workers would seek jobs in San Diego without restriction. Tijuana employers would then be forced to raise wages to the average level for San Diego. Companies could then no longer threaten to move factory jobs from the United States to maquiladora plants in Tijuana on the basis of cheaper labor costs.

This is not mere speculation. We observe these effects when immigration restrictions loosen. The centrist liberal think tank Center for American Progress produced a 2021 study of the effects on the economy and labor market of the 1986 federal amnesty, which allowed two million undocumented workers to receive permanent resident status within six months. The enhanced bargaining power of those workers led to increased wages for them. Raising the floor of the labor market, in turn, caused a rise, not a decline, in the average wage for all workers.

Increased worker buying power also led to a substantial increase in economic growth. The Center extrapolated this result to consider the possible outcomes of different immigration policy scenarios—mass legalization, a new guest worker program, or mass deportation. Legalization was by far the best result for both workers’ wages and economic growth. All of this should be common sense for our class: the more freedom for all of our class, including the freedom to live and work wherever we want to, the better for our living standards and our class power.

Lee’s opposition to the H-1B and other guest worker programs is spot on and timely. But we underestimate our class in making an unnecessarily defensive argument for immigrant workers. My experience in workers’ education in my own union is that a fully developed case for immigrant workers’ freedom, framing immigrants as workers helping vitally to lead our class struggle, persuades and inspires. It helps train workers in a class-conscious worldview, which can generalize to other issues—the class-conscious inspiration we need as the fundamental basis of broader labor movement combativity.

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