Sean Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has dismissed concerns about mass immigration, particularly illegal immigration at the southern border, and its historically devastating impact on labor unions.
in Interview Speaking to Axios, Fein said President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris 10 million The number of migrant encounters at the border since the start of 2021.
“They’re not invading our country,” Fain said of illegal immigrants. “They’re people.”
Fain’s comments highlight a major shift in U.S. labor unions on immigration policy that began in the mid-1990s.
Meanwhile, union leaders such as the AFL-CIO Samuel Gompers While William Lucey of the United Black Trade Unionists once lobbied against unlimited immigration to the United States, arguing that it would cut wages, weaken union members’ bargaining power and lower living standards, Fain and today’s union leaders downplay the impact of mass immigration on their members’ jobs and wages.
Decades of research have proven the opposite.
The late Cornell University labor economist Vernon Briggs Jr. spent much of his career documenting how low levels of immigration historically boosted union membership in the U.S. labor market, while high levels of immigration depressed union membership.
“By 2006, the foreign-born population had swelled to 12.1 percent of the population and nearly 15 percent of the workforce. Union membership continued to decline in 2006, falling to just 12 percent of the nonfarm workforce.” Briggs said House Immigration Subcommittee, 2007:
Of course, the resurgence of mass immigration is not the only explanation for the decline in trade union membership. There are multiple factors, all of which are beyond the scope of this testimony. Mass immigration, especially [sic] The vast majority of the total influx is illegal. (In 2006, the number was estimated at about 12 million, of which about 7.4 million were illegal immigrant workers.) [Emphasis added]
In 2001, Briggs Report A smaller foreign-born population in the United States indicates a higher rate of unionization in the workforce.
Briggs pointed out:
Since 1965, when policymakers inadvertently resumed mass immigration, the U.S. foreign-born population has grown 231 percent (from 8.5 million immigrants to 28.4 million) and the civilian labor force has grown 86 percent (from 74.4 million workers to 139 million). But during this same period, union membership has fallen 10 percent (from 18.2 million to 16.3 million members).
…
Declining trade union membership and the effects of mass immigration have both been identified by the Council of Economic Advisers as contributing to worsening income inequality in the country.
Economic liberals make it clear that their support for unlimited immigration is heavily influenced by research showing that high levels of immigration into the U.S. workforce weaken the bargaining power of labor unions.
“We find that immigration reduced union density by 5.7 percentage points between 1980 and 2020, accounting for 29.7 percent of the overall decline in union density over that period,” the Cato Institute researchers said. admit:
This effect was concentrated in the private sector and among male workers, with a smaller impact on female workers and no effect on public sector unionization. They found that this is because immigrants have a lower preference for trade unions and immigration increases the diversity of the workforce, resulting in less solidarity among workers. It increases the transaction costs of unionization. [Emphasis added]
German economists have found similar trends, 2022 Report“Immigrants are about 11 percentage points less likely to be union members than natives.”
This trend continues under the Biden-Harris administration, which despite claiming to be the most pro-union administration in American history, has seen union membership fall. Dropped It is expected to fall to a record low of 10.1% in 2022, followed by a record low of 10% in 2023.
At the same time that union membership is at an all-time low, the number of immigrants currently living in the U.S. is at an all-time high. As of March of this year, the foreign-born population reached 51.6 million. In other words, 3 out of every 19 people living in the U.S. were foreign-born.
At this rate, the foreign-born population could exceed 82 million by 2040.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter. here.
