Dissertation on Immigration Policy

Globalization Shaping State Immigration Policies

Globalization helps explain the union of leaders’ and employers’ immigration policy preferences and policy outcomes across countries. For example, Hollifield describes a convergence of immigration policies among industrialized democracies in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s based on a common understanding of rights-based liberalism and the globalization of markets (11-12). Likewise, Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield argue that the confluence of rights-based liberalism and changes in international political economy has led to a convergence of policies for controlling immigration among industrialized, labor-importing countries (23). This paper argues that globalization and global economic factors are crucial intervening variables that affect leaders’ and employers’ immigration preferences and their tactics for influencing policy.

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On the one hand, Collinson (211) and Baldwin-Edwards (204-206) state that regulatory influence on the immigration policies is influenced by numerous internal forces such as domestic immigration historical data, all sorts of labor market requirements and intra-country fiscal policy development, as well as differing degrees of organizational control of immigration processes.

On the other hand, globalization helps shape leaders’ and employers’ immigration preferences by facilitating migration through improvements in transportation and communication technology.

Fluctuations in the global economy also have amplified the demand for inexpensive, elastic immigrant force in difference industries such as hospitality services, building, real estate, and agriculture. Generally , government and the policymakers that try to confine immigration clash with applicable market forces. Even though the government may productively regulate official immigration policies, global migration trends usually work in favor of underground immigration patterns, thus limiting the influence of the official regulatory bodies. As a result, many internal and external state policymakers treat immigration as a direct result of the spreading globalization tendencies and are persuaded that means to limit it will not be successful.

Changes in the global economy also have affected employers’ policy preferences. In the 1950s and 1960s, the system of mass production— based on semi-skilled labor, assembly-line production, and economies of scale—dominated industrial organization in several European countries (Milkman, 45-49). During this period, demand for immigrant labor was concentrated in large manufacturing firms, which wielded considerable power at the national level. In the late 1970s and 1980s, technological advances and global economic competition lessened the importance of mass production systems (Lee, 90-93).

To increase profitability, many employers experimented with flexible and decentralized employment and production strategies, such as part-time and temporary contracts, and subcontracting to small enterprises. Other employers moved production to the underground economy, where labor costs are lower and labor regulations and unions can be evaded. Today, the demand for immigrant labor is still pervasive. But it is highly decentralized in secondary sectors, such as agriculture and domestic service, and in the underground economy.

Like their European counterparts, American leaders have to deal with a number of challenges caused by globalization. Globalization is challenging the U.S. ability to control its borders by making communication and transportation technology more accessible to migrants, and by opening developing countries’ economies to greater international trade and capital flows. Globalization also increases economic competition from low-wage countries, which in turn encourages employers in developed countries to seek out more flexible employment strategies. As a result, the number of contingent jobs has grown at the expense of permanent, full-time employment. This growth of the contingent work force in turn hurts union organizing efforts (Milkman, 45-49).

According to the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), contingent workers are difficult to organize because of legal impediments imposed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which presupposes stable employment relationships and a defined bargaining unit for union organizing drives (14). Organizing these “orphans of the law,” many of whom are immigrants, is one of the biggest challenges facing unions in a rapidly changing global economy (15). As a result, American policymakers are creating new ways to fight the ways globalization challenges their recruiting means. For instance, the AFL-CIO’s “Campaign for Global Fairness” insists that workers’ rights be included in all trade agreements and IMF and World Bank loan agreements (AFL-CIO, 15).The AFL-CIO’s new immigration platform was developed in the shadows of global economic changes that have weakened the state’s capacity to control its borders, threatened union organization, and marginalized immigrant workers.

In this context, the AFL-CIO’s starting points for immigration reform include:

• permanent legal status for undocumented immigrants through a new amnesty program;
• eliminating the current system of employer sanctions;
• full workplace rights for immigrant workers;
• cooperative mechanisms between business and labor that allow law-abiding employers to satisfy legitimate needs for workers;
• whistle-blower protections for undocumented workers who report violations of work protection laws;
• a halt to the expansion of guest worker programs (AFL-CIO, 16).

On the surface, it appears that globalization is causing U.S. labor leaders’ immigration preferences to converge with those of European labor leaders. However, domestic factors filter the effects of globalization so that labor leaders from different countries, and even different unions in the same country, form different immigration preferences.

One factor unique to the U.S. case is the highly decentralized structure of the AFL-CIO compared to European confederations. The seventy-two national and international unions, not to mention thousands of locals, represented by the administrative umbrella of the AFL-CIO are highly autonomous (Bronfenbrenner, et al., 67-69). As a result, initiatives often originate at the local level and work their way up to the national level.

The initiative for change also had a regional dimension. In 1994, two California regional labor confederations, Alameda and Los Angeles, called for an end to employer sanctions and a new amnesty for undocumented workers (Bronfenbrenner, et al., 73). These demands gradually worked their way up to the national level of the AFL-CIO, and were facilitated by a new leadership team elected in 1995 that was open to change and intent on increasing union membership.

This effect stands in contrast to the top-down structure of more centralized European unions. In Spain, Italy, and France, changes in labor leaders’ immigration preferences occurred first among the top leadership, at the federal level, and worked its way down to regional unions through educational initiatives for the rank and file, and through local provision of social and legal services for immigrant workers (Lee, 90-93).

Central to the AFL-CIO’s new immigration position is the belief that the current system of immigration enforcement is “broken and needs to be fixed” (Qtd in Labor Immigrant Organizing Network, 5). The AFL-CIO immigration reform program highlights several problems with U.S. law, such as flawed guest worker programs, delays in the naturalization process, and the failure to legalize thousands of undocumented immigrants who were eligible for the 1986 amnesty. However, the AFL-CIO believes the most egregious flaw in U.S. immigration policy is the failure of employer sanctions to reduce employer demand for illegal immigrant workers.

In the beginning of 1980s, the AFL-CIO took measures favoring regulatory means against those companies provided job to the illegal immigrants. The leadership believed that sanctions would protect American jobs by discouraging employers from hiring cheap, illegal immigrant labor. They also believed that sanctions would help reduce illegal immigration by cutting off the demand for foreign labor (Labor Immigrant Organizing Network, 5-7). Having obtained the solid support from the labor unions, regulatory measures against the companies hiring illegal immigrants became a major issue of the Immigration Reform and Control Act passed in 1986.

However, as mentioned previously, policy-makers lacked the political will to give teeth to the enforcement provision of IRCA. As a result, the INS did not have the legal or physical capacity to enforce employer sanctions successfully.

Not surprisingly, then, the employer sanctions provision of IRCA has not arrested the demand for, or supply of, illegal immigrants. In fact, after falling to between 1.8 and 3 million people after 1986, the undocumented population rose to between 2.7 and 3.7 million by 1992 (Labor Immigrant Organizing Network, 9). Nor have unsystematically enforced sanctions discouraged employers from hiring illegal immigrants. In fact, according to many labor leaders, rather than protecting the employment rights of native and legal immigrant workers, employer sanctions have been turned against workers. “On the surface this IRCA looks like an anti-employer law. In reality it’s an anti-worker law”(Labor Immigrant Organizers Network, 24).

The change in U.S. labor leaders’ immigration preferences has been heavily influenced by the desire to build union membership, which has declined steadily since the 1950s. After reaching a peak of about 35 percent of the workforce in 1953, by the late 1990s union density rates declined overall to less than 15 percent, and to about 10 percent in the private sector (Milkman, 11).

Many labor leaders were complacent about this loss of membership. But in the United States, where membership dictates union bargaining power with employers, the AFL-CIO does not enjoy an institutionalized role in collective bargaining at the national or local level, as unions often do in Europe. Likewise, U.S. collective bargaining agreements do not cover workers who are not members in a union. There fore, in contrast to their European counterparts, American labor leaders increasingly see immigrant workers as a crucial source of new membership to bolster union strength (Milkman, 12).

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, economic restructuring forced new immigrants, many of them undocumented, into peripheral jobs that lacked union representation. Because immigrant workers tend to be concentrated in the unskilled, contingent workforce, legal barriers imposed by the NLRB make traditional organizing efforts difficult (Milkman, 11). As a result, immigrant workers and local unions have devised new organizing strategies.

Also standing in the way of immigrant unionization is the fear of employer retaliation. The AFL-CIO wants to remove such barriers. First, labor leaders argue that the fear of employer retaliation must be eliminated by legalizing undocumented workers and granting immigrants and natives equal workplace rights. Second, they say that the current system of employer sanctions must end. Finally, labor leaders want whistleblower protections for undocumented immigrants who report employer violations. According to AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson, “Too often, immigrant workers’ rights are being routinely violated. Courageous undocumented workers who come forward to assert their rights should not be faced with deportation as a result of their actions”(AFL-CIO, 16).

Economic marginalization of undocumented immigrants is a recurring theme in the AFL-CIO’s immigration reform dialogue. However, U.S. labor leaders do not equate illegal immigration with the growth of the underground economy, nor do they see legalization as a means to shrink the underground economy.

Labor leaders in the United States favor open immigration policies and believe that restrictive policies fail to control illegal immigration. What’s more, they have resigned themselves to the fact that regulated legal immigration is better than unregulated illegal immigration. However, they reached these conclusions in different ways, ways that depend largely on the domestic pressures they are subject to. U.S. labor leaders place more emphasis on increasing union membership. Hence, they support legalization and an end to employer sanctions as a means to reduce the risk of immigrant-organizing drives.

Changes in the global economy have helped shape the immigration policy preferences of the European and U.S. employers. In Europe and the United States, employers, in response to increasing global economic competition, have discarded mass production models in favor of flexible and decentralized production and employment strategies, such as subcontracting, relocating production overseas, and temporary and part-time contracts. Likewise, global economic restructuring has encouraged a bifurcation of the labor market between highly skilled, information-based workers and low-skilled workers. Employers in the United States and Europe increasingly are looking abroad to recruit both skilled technology workers and unskilled workers.

In contrast to European national employers’ associations, many U.S. employers are openly pro-immigration. Most American employers, from growers to software manufacturers to restaurant owners, want more permanent and temporary employment-based immigration. A number of companies even support the idea of giving documents to the illegal immigrants. For example, the Essential Workers Immigration Coalition, a group of businesses and trade associations concerned with a shortage of semi-skilled and unskilled workers, wants undocumented immigrants who have been working in the United States to be allowed to legalize their status (Lee, 23).

One explanation for the differing attitudes of European and American employers is economic. The more flexible U.S. economy did not suffer as deep or as long an economic recession as Europe did after the 1973 oil crisis, so that employer demand for immigrant workers has been more prevalent and politically palatable in the United States. However, other explanations beyond economic cycles of growth and recession, such as differences in the policy-making process and the decentralization of business interests in the United States, help explain U.S. employers’ openly pro-immigration policy preferences.

The US regulatory measures taken in order to combat the illegal immigration differs, in general, from the European means of fighting the same problems. This is in part because for historical and cultural reasons the United States considers itself to be a country of immigration, whereas Spain, Italy, and France, etc do not. As a result, immigration policy debates in the United States almost always include discussion on whether to decrease, maintain, or increase annual immigration quotas. Even in the mid-1990s, when the public debate shifted to the provision of social welfare benefits for legal and illegal immigrants, the appropriate level of legal immigration was debated in Congress (Lee, 34, 63).

Also, the politicization of U.S. immigration policy is bound to the perceived social and economic costs of illegal immigration. Employers, who want access to immigrant labor, have therefore pursued a clever lobbying strategy of splitting the legal and illegal components of immigration bills. For example, an early Senate version of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act included a measure to reduce skill-based visas from 140,000 to 90,000. Many employers and employer groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, Microsoft, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, were outraged by these proposals (Lee, 109).

Business lobbyists mobilized to split the bill between its legal and illegal components, thereby maintaining legal immigration levels. This strategy, also pursued by employers with the 1990 Immigration Act, allows government to ease public concerns about illegal immigration by fortifying borders or restricting access to social services. At the same time, legislators can satisfy employer demand for immigrant labor by maintaining or increasing legal immigration levels.

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