Abstract
National labor unions in the United States have formally supported undocumented immigrants since 2000. However, drawing on 69 interviews conducted between 2012 and 2016 with union and immigrant rights leaders, this article offers a locally grounded account of how union solidarity with undocumented immigrants has varied notably across the country. We explore how unions in San Francisco and Houston have engaged with Obama-era immigration initiatives that provided historic relief to some undocumented immigrants. We find that San Francisco’s progressive political context and dense infrastructure of immigrant organizations have enabled the city’s historically powerful unions to build deep institutional solidarity with immigrant communities during the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA [2012]) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA [2014]) programs. Meanwhile, Houston’s politically divided context and much sparser infrastructure of immigrant organizations made it necessary for the city’s historically weaker unions to build solidarity with immigrant communities through more disparate channels.
Introduction
In 2012, President Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program following prolonged congressional inaction on comprehensive immigration reform. While achieving a path toward citizenship for at least some of the country’s then nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants had been one of Obama’s promised reforms, DACA would be his only success and the last major piece of inclusive immigration reform to date. DACA, which has provided temporary deportation relief and work authorization to nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants in the United States, was realized only following the tireless advocacy of diverse national and local coalitions that came together in solidarity with undocumented immigrants. In 2014, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program succeeded DACA and would have provided relief to an additional 4.5 million undocumented immigrants. DAPA was eventually struck down in court and never implemented.
In recent decades, organized labor has demonstrated several—often contested—forms of solidarity with immigrant rights. As unions now see immigrant rights as integral to the struggle of workers and their organizations, the DACA and DAPA programs offered them important opportunities to build solidarity with undocumented workers. One aspect of this shift has been to center immigrant rights as a core labor issue, a reversal from a long history of antagonistic stances toward immigrants (Fletcher and Gapasin, 2008; Hamlin, 2008). A second form of union solidarity has focused on coalition building with nonunion organizations, even outside the traditional scope of a labor organizing campaign (de Graauw, 2016; Fine et al., 2018). Third, union platforms increasingly rally for the entirety of working-class individuals, many of whom are not union members and increasingly nonwhite and immigrant (Milkman, 2020; Milkman and Ott, 2014). This has also meant that unions have been more willing to take on new functions such as providing “know your rights” trainings and legal aid to immigrant union and nonunion members alike (Bacon, 2018).
Other scholars have examined these new forms of transversal solidarity, especially in efforts to promote national immigrant rights policy campaigns to bring about new congressional laws or executive initiatives (e.g. Gonzales, 2013; Nicholls, 2013; Zepeda-Millán, 2017). We know less, though, about their role in implementing key immigration victories such as DACA and DAPA and how unions’ efforts to build transversal solidarity with immigrant communities through such implementation efforts might vary across local communities. Not only does organized labor have greater power in some places than others, but unions also deploy distinct strategies in different political and civic contexts (de Graauw et al., 2020). Just as past research has shown that local context is consequential for when and how immigrant rights advocacy occurs (de Graauw and Vermeulen, 2016), we argue that local context also matters for how unions go about building transversal solidarity such as through their role in implementing the DACA and DAPA programs.
Through a comparison of labor unions in San Francisco and Houston, this paper shows how local political and civic contexts matter for how unions have attempted to build solidarity with undocumented immigrants in the wake of DACA and DAPA. Labor unions in both San Francisco and Houston are publicly committed to advancing the rights of undocumented immigrants. San Francisco unions, however, have been historically powerful actors in local politics, and they operate in a local political and civic context that facilitates deep transversal solidarity building. This helps explain why they have played a significant and direct role in implementing the DACA and DAPA programs. Most notably, they developed their own center to offer immigration legal services to immigrant union members and their families. Houston unions, in contrast, are notably weaker political actors in a more moderate political context with fewer immigrant organizations. This has posed significant challenges to their ability to build lasting transversal solidarity, and as a result they have focused primarily on DACA and DAPA outreach, legal service referrals, and strategic media coverage. In both cities, local context has clearly determined the trajectory of union solidarity with undocumented immigrants.
US Labor Unions and Solidarity with Undocumented Immigrants
The labor movement in the United States has had an uneven relationship with undocumented workers. Rampant xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment among leadership and rank-and-file union members are well documented, stemming from racism, fears of labor competition, and an aversion to the challenges of organizing undocumented and other immigrant workers. Undocumented immigrants also cannot vote and thus play a secondary role in the political machine of the labor movement (Hamlin, 2008). Yet unions at various points in history have been, and are now, central actors in the immigrant rights movement (Burgoon et al., 2010). Two decades after the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)—the biggest labor federation in the United States—declared solidarity with undocumented immigrants, unions today are vocal allies for immigration reform that includes a legalization path for undocumented immigrants (Jacobson and Geron, 2008). While several unions such as those representing the building trades are far more moderate, the AFL-CIO’s solidarity with undocumented immigrants reflects a move away from the immigrant threat narrative and toward a critique of neoliberal policies that have degraded the labor conditions and rights of all workers in the United States (Milkman, 2020).
Yet this new solidarity with undocumented immigrants, while a far cry from unions’ hostile position in the mid-1980s and before, remains uneven. Some argue that the US labor movement represents the inner establishment of reformist immigrant organizations (Gonzales, 2013), while others highlight the central role of many “immigrant unions” (Ness, 2010) in recent mass mobilizations, especially following a shift to “social movement union strategies” that produced key union victories on the West Coast during the late 1990s and early 2000s (Zepeda-Millán, 2017). This vocal grassroots support for undocumented immigrants laid the foundation for later national solidarity declarations and the heavy lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform. After years of congressional gridlock and following a split in the US labor movement around issues central to immigrant organizing, the AFL-CIO eventually endorsed a more narrow strategy that summoned President Obama to exercise discretion to create the DACA program (Nicholls, 2013). Two years later, these same unions collaborated with major worker center alliances such as the National Day Labor Organizing Network (Sarmiento et al., 2016) to advocate for the DAPA program, which the courts eventually blocked.
Scholarly accounts of labor unions’ work on immigration often focus on the US labor movement’s national strategy. In reality, however, the AFL-CIO is comprised of dozens of state federations and thousands of central and regional labor councils, each with a distinct immigrant base and facing varied local conditions that shape their work. The same is true for the remaining Change to Win coalition members that broke away from the AFL-CIO starting in 2005. For a more comprehensive understanding of unions’ immigration advocacy, we therefore must look to the local contexts in which unions are organizing, forming coalitions, and serving their members, and not just the larger historical and structural determinants (Fine and Tichenor, 2012a). Indeed, we know that local “battlegrounds” shape union strategy (Turner and Cornfield, 2007) and that local politics are increasingly relevant for immigrant life and organizing (e.g. Varsanyi, 2010).
Local context is not simply a determining factor of union solidarity with immigrants, but likely also a strategy in itself. In their book A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement, Dean and Reynolds (2010) document the ways in which the labor movement has leveraged coalitions with community organizations to pursue a progressive agenda rooted in the local concerns of working people. This has inevitably included thinking through immigration not solely as a distant federal policy, but also a local reality that requires investments such as in organizing local protests to denounce anti-immigrant federal policies, efforts to coordinate and provide legal advice, and immigrant leadership training. The labor movement has built on these local investments to push for national reform, within the labor movement but also in Congress and the White House. In many ways, labor unions’ engagement with the DACA and DAPA programs—the dimension of union solidarity with undocumented immigrants we focus on in this article—is an outgrowth of this local and regional activism in the labor movement.
This article shows how local context shapes unions’ varying hand in implementing the DACA and DAPA programs. Indeed, unions’ ability to build solidarity with undocumented workers importantly reflects the political opportunity structures they face (Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996) and the broader ecology of civil society organizations in which they operate (Bada et al., 2010). More specifically, in politically progressive places where local government officials have enacted pro-immigrant legislation, built municipal institutions designed to promote immigrant integration, and invested in immigrant services, unions can leverage these local government efforts to build solidarity with undocumented immigrants, opportunities that often are absent in places where local government officials are more tepid about or outright opposed to immigration. Similarly, in places with a lot of active immigrant organizations that have long been fighting for the rights of undocumented and other immigrants, unions have ready opportunities to collaborate with and learn from them as they develop their own solidarity strategies. Such opportunities for cross-organizational solidarity building are scarcer in places with relatively less developed infrastructures of immigrant organizations.
Methods and Data
The DACA and DAPA Programs
We examine union solidarity with undocumented immigrants through the lens of the 2012 DACA and 2014 DAPA programs, two of President Obama’s executive actions that provide 2-year and renewable deportation relief and work authorization to undocumented youth and the undocumented parents of US citizen and legal permanent resident children, respectively. President Trump has repeatedly attacked the 2012 DACA program. Though in June 2020, the US Supreme Court overturned Trump’s 2017 decision to rescind the program and ordered the administration to resume processing new applications, the Trump administration refused to back down and began granting only 1-year renewals. The 2014 DAPA program was first blocked in court in February 2015, a decision left in place by a split 4–4 US Supreme Court decision in June 2016. The DAPA program never went into effect, but during the three months between the program’s announcement in November 2014 and the initial court injunction in February 2015, community organizations, labor unions, and other immigrant allies worked to defeat the court challenge, issue legal advice, and ready immigrants to apply for DAPA in case the program would move forward.
There are various ways that unions could have responded to DACA and DAPA, given the labor movement’s history of immigrant solidarity. At the very least, labor unions could simply inform their members and other undocumented immigrants of these programs, the benefits they could reap, and the risks they could face in applying. Given the relationships unions have built with immigrant advocates, they could also refer immigrants to community organizations for help in applying for DACA or DAPA. Taking an even further step, some unions could provide such support in-house, or make their staff, resources, and union halls available for DACA and DAPA information sessions and application workshops. Beyond direct service provision, labor unions could pressure local governments to invest in DACA and DAPA implementation. How unions engaged in transversal solidarity under DACA and DAPA ultimately depended on their specific characteristics and the local political and civic contexts in which they operated.
Research Sites
We explore how unions engaged with the DACA and DAPA programs in San Francisco (CA) and Houston (TX), two cities with very different political and civic contexts. As Table 1 also shows, these are two cities with large immigrant populations, though unions in these cities have developed distinct levels of political and economic clout
Local Context in San Francisco and Houston, 2016.
Notes:
All population data, unless otherwise noted, are city-level data from the 2015 American Community Survey, 5-year estimates. Percentages are rounded.
Sources: Migration Policy Institute (2016a, b) for San Francisco County (San Francisco) and Harris County (Houston).
Election data are for San Francisco County (San Francisco) and Harris County (Houston). Percentages are rounded. Source: Politico (https://www.politico.com/mapdata-2016/2016-election/results/map/president).
Number of registered nonprofits per 10,000 residents in 2016. Data are for San Francisco County (San Francisco) and Harris County (Houston). Sources: National Center for Charitable Statistics (http://nccs.urban.org/sites/all/nccs-archive/html/tablewiz/bmf.php) and 2015 American Community Survey, 5-year estimates.
Percentage of private sector workers in the larger metro area who are union members. Source: 2016 Current Population Survey (http://www.unionstats.com).
San Francisco is the 14th largest city in the United States and home to about 840,000 residents, 35% of whom are foreign born, including an estimated 49,000 undocumented immigrants (MPI, 2016a). San Francisco is at the leading edge of social, economic, and political change. The vast majority of San Franciscans have supported Democratic candidates in recent presidential elections, and most, if not all, local government officials have publicly declared support for protecting undocumented immigrants. Since the late 1990s, city officials have enacted ordinances addressing the language access, labor protections, health care, municipal identification, civic participation, and legal and due process rights for immigrants. San Francisco created the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs in 2008, which promotes immigrant integration initiatives and funds local immigrant organizations. Led by a politically influential central labor council, unions in San Francisco are vocal and politically active (Voss and Sherman, 2000). California labor protections surpass federal standards, and in 2000 San Francisco created its own Office of Labor Standards Enforcement to enforce even stronger local wage and labor laws. San Francisco has a thick and robust organizational landscape that some have called “hyperpluralist” (Coyle, 1988), and immigrant organizations are numerous and very active in local politics (de Graauw, 2016).
Houston is the fourth largest city in the country, with about 2.2 million residents. Twenty-nine percent of Houstonians are foreign born, including an estimated 412,000 undocumented immigrants (MPI, 2016b). The balance of power in Houston oscillates, though Democrats have gained ground in recent elections. Local immigration policies reflect the area’s partisan divisions and the vocal advocacy of conservative and anti-immigrant lobbies. For much of the last decade, for example, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office participated in a controversial 287(g) agreement, which permitted local law enforcement to collaborate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, Mayor Sylvester Turner recently declared Houston a “welcoming city” and disavowed Texas’ 2017 anti-immigrant “show me your papers” legislation. Overall, Houston officials have created fewer immigrant protections and benefits than their counterparts in San Francisco, and the city office dedicated to promoting immigrant integration is much smaller in scope and has been restructured and renamed twice since its creation in 2001. Located in a “right-to-work” state that weakens labor power, union density in Houston is among the lowest in the country. The local labor federation in Houston recently reorganized as the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation in an attempt to consolidate regional power. Compared to San Francisco, Houston has a less developed and sparser infrastructure of civil society organizations with fewer (though a growing number of) immigrant organizations.
Data
We draw on 69 interviews conducted between 2012 and 2016 to examine unions’ transversal solidarity with undocumented immigrants. We interviewed representatives of 11 different unions (five in San Francisco and six in Houston) and leaders of 33 different immigrant organizations (16 in San Francisco and 17 in Houston) who often collaborate with unions. On several occasions, we interviewed more than one individual with the same union or immigrant organization, and we also conducted several follow-up interviews with the same respondent to take stock of changes over time. We queried both labor and immigrant rights leaders about their organization’s responses to the DACA and DAPA programs, including how they had collaborated with other local stakeholders, and the challenges they faced along the way. We also interviewed four representatives of national labor unions, including the AFL-CIO; Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees – Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (UNITE-HERE); and United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), to help us contextualize the union-immigrant solidarity dynamics in San Francisco and Houston. We transcribed and systematically coded all interviews to find distinctive patterns and trends in union solidarity with undocumented immigrants. We complement our interview data with field observations at labor and community events, newspaper reports in local media, and documentary evidence from labor unions and immigrant organizations.
San Francisco Unions: Deep Solidarity with Undocumented Immigrants
San Francisco unions have built deep solidarity with undocumented immigrants during, and well before, DACA and DAPA. The San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC)—the countywide federation of local AFL-CIO unions—publicly acknowledged its common interests with all immigrant workers in 2006 (de Graauw, 2016). Yet, several unions—notably HERE, SEIU, and UFCW—recognized, as early as the 1970s, the need to mobilize immigrant workers in efforts to revitalize the San Francisco labor movement (Voss and Sherman, 2000). In fact, San Francisco unions helped lead the organizing responsible for the national AFL-CIO’s changed stance on immigration (Zabin et al., 2001). Since the late 1990s, unions with notable numbers of immigrant members have led local campaigns to improve the rights of immigrant and other low-wage workers, resulting in new local minimum wage, paid sick leave, and universal health care policies. They have also supported immigrant organizations in advocacy to secure language access protections, municipal ID cards, and some noncitizen voting rights (de Graauw, 2016). In 2015, the SFLC and SEIU (the key union in the breakaway Change to Win Coalition) worked together to create the We Rise SF Labor Center for Immigrant Justice (hereafter We Rise Center) to provide legal services to immigrant union members and their families. To explain how and why San Francisco unions have advanced this transversal solidarity with immigrant communities, we must account for the local political and civic context in which they operate.
Progressive City Government Facilitates Transversal Solidarity
San Francisco’s many progressive city officials have created policies, built municipal institutions, and allocated funding that made it possible for unions to build solidarity with immigrant communities. Among elected city officials are several individuals who came up in the labor and immigrant rights movements (e.g. former Supervisors Eric Mar and John Avalos, Supervisor Hillary Ronen, and former Mayor Ed Lee). They regularly engage with labor and immigrant rights leaders in crafting policies and initiatives that benefit the city’s diverse immigrant communities. City officials have also developed municipal institutions that benefit vulnerable immigrants in San Francisco—notably the Immigrant Rights Commission (from 1997), the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (from 2000), and the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA, from 2008). This has positioned the city as a prominent actor and convener in the immigrant and labor advocacy space. The city has also contracted with unions and immigrant organizations to provide municipal services to immigrants, at times providing opportunities for them to do so as a coalition. One key example has been the city-funded Rapid Response Network, created in 2007 to respond to the growing number of federal immigration raids targeting San Francisco businesses. 1
In July 2015, Mayor Ed Lee provided support to SFLC and SEIU Local 87 (the Janitors Union) to open the We Rise Center. With funding from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, the Center provides critical legal and social services to union members and their families as they navigate DACA and other aspects of the increasingly fractured US immigration system. SFLC and SEIU also received a DreamSF Fellow through the OCEIA-directed leadership development program that offers immigrant youth—including undocumented youth—hands-on experience in direct services, advocacy, and immigration law careers. This fellow conducted multilingual outreach around DACA and citizenship issues, work she continued as a full-time Center employee after her fellowship ended. This city support has helped facilitate the participation of SFLC and SEIU in monthly OCEIA meetings with other community organizations where DreamSF Fellows are placed, which has helped unions build solidarity with immigrants. In all, with the creation of the We Rise Center, San Francisco labor unions have doubled down on their commitment to build solidarity with immigrants. The calculus is clear, as a Center employee explained, because “as a movement, we are paralyzed if we can’t unlock both the activism and the potential leadership of this huge sector of our [immigrant] members.” 2
San Francisco’s political progressivism provides labor unions valuable opportunities to strengthen and deepen their solidarity with immigrant communities, though the relationship between unions and various government officials and municipal institutions can be contentious. Unions often advocate for more than city officials are prepared to legislate or fund. This forces them to use their political and electoral heft at strategic moments, such as when they pushed for city funding for the We Rise Center after President Obama announced the DAPA program. This close relationship with city government also arguably makes it challenging to maintain the social movement unionism that San Francisco unions are famous for and that scholars argue is critical to revitalize the labor movement (e.g. Clawson, 2003; Fantasia and Voss, 2004). However, unions in San Francisco have the staying power—with robust workforce representation and notable political clout—that allows them to diversify their work. This includes developing and investing in a new center that focuses on providing legal services to undocumented and other immigrants.
Dense and Mature Infrastructure of Immigrant Organizations Compels Unions to Step Up
San Francisco’s civic context has similarly enabled unions to advance transversal solidarity with immigrant communities, especially in recent years when community organizations have had to challenge a barrage of federal anti-immigrant policies. As an established gateway city that has long been a hotbed for social movements, San Francisco today has a dense and well-developed infrastructure of over 215 immigrant organizations (de Graauw, 2016). These organizations have long provided essential services to immigrants and advocated on immigrants’ behalf in local politics and beyond, well before unions took up the immigrant cause. This has created a very crowded and at times competitive immigrant advocacy space where unions must vie to carve out unique advocacy and service niches.
San Francisco unions have worked with immigrant organizations in successive campaigns since the late 1990s to advocate for local policies that support immigrants and other low-wage workers (de Graauw, 2016). In these various campaigns, unions and immigrant organizations have had both the opportunities to lead and motivations to work together to influence local policy. Unions can draw on stable financial resources, large cadres of members who can be mobilized in the political process, and clout with city officials. Immigrant organizations, on the other hand, have deeper connections to immigrant communities that help unions build trust with and organize alongside immigrant workers. This is especially important to reach undocumented and limited English proficient workers (Fine, 2006; Jayaraman and Ness, 2005). Over time, San Francisco’s rich infrastructure of immigrant organizations has provided unions with a variety of opportunities to join advocacy causes that enable them to build solidarity with immigrants and the organizations serving them.
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, unions started to reach out to immigrants by “giving out food,” according to an SFLC employee. 3 “More and more immigrants were coming for assistance” following the announcement of President Obama’s DACA and DAPA programs, he added, “and we figured we need to do something on a larger scale to be part of the movement.” 4 This demand for increased immigration legal services incentivized SFLC and SEIU to set up the We Rise Center. The Center’s creation built on unions’ previous outreach around DACA and naturalization assistance, which included referrals to other community organizations that, according to the same SFLC employee, were largely not reaching union members. 5 “We wanted to put something together with brick and mortar,” another SFLC employee commented, “so that people know that the labor movement is also going to start taking immigration on as one of the big issues that we have.” 6 The Center, in other words, has provided unions the opportunity to grow and, in turn, immigrants the opportunity to gain information both about their legal case and the labor movement. These efforts have also signaled to the larger immigrant rights movement that organized labor in San Francisco is a committed partner, as well as to city officials that unions are relevant actors in reaching immigrant constituents.
In this dense hub of immigrant advocacy and support, San Francisco unions have been careful not to duplicate other efforts nor to create the impression that they are competing with immigrant organizations for city funding. “Our goal was to add to the pie, not to take it away,” an SFLC employee assured. 7 Unions walked this fine line through working in coalition with immigrant organizations to identify their value-added approach to providing legal services. “We didn’t want to be just a well-intentioned notario [often an unscrupulous legal service provider],” the same SFLC employee said, nor did they think it was effective to “organize big workshops where everyone only gets 15 minutes [with a lawyer].” 8 Instead, the We Rise Center has provided a case management approach in an environment where “at least 75% of union members have some complicated [immigration] case” that requires far more resources than straightforward DACA and naturalization applications. 9 In the end, the Center’s legal service model has focused on contracting with several experienced law firms to provide union members and their families initial screenings and the option to pursue further legal representation at a reduced, Center-negotiated rate. In the first six months of operation, the We Rise Center had helped about 150 immigrants obtain such comprehensive consultations. 10
Houston Unions: Limited Solidarity with Undocumented Immigrants
Compared to San Francisco unions, on the whole, Houston labor unions were able to build only limited solidarity with undocumented immigrants in the wake of DACA and DAPA. Houston unions lack the staff, resources, and political clout to create independent support systems for immigrants. They also operate in a more tepid political climate for immigrant rights, and they have access to far fewer established immigrant organizations as possible collaborators and solidarity allies. This is not to say that Houston unions have stood on the sidelines in the wake of DACA and DAPA. Indeed, they have strategically leveraged relationships with allies in local government and the business community in advocating for inclusive immigration reform. Also, the Harris County AFL-CIO has helped to incubate local worker centers and support their work, such as in their historic policy campaign to end employer wage theft in 2013 (de Graauw and Gleeson, 2017). In other words, Houston’s political and civic context has meant that labor unions have had to adopt a different brand of transversal solidarity than their San Francisco counterparts.
Moderate City Government Complicates Transversal Solidarity
Unlike in progressive San Francisco, immigration has long been and continues to be a divisive issue in Houston’s mixed political climate. Over the years, there have been several notable immigrant rights supporters on city council (e.g. former Council Members Mike Laster and Ed Gonzalez), but the countervailing pressures of the region’s pro-business and small government ethos and a vocal contingent of anti-immigrant forces (including former Council Members Orlando Sanchez and Helena Brown) have stopped the Houston government from embracing the city’s undocumented immigrants more fully. Labor and immigrant organizations have wielded limited power in this space. One labor organizer with a broad-based community organization working with Houston’s diverse immigrant communities characterized power in Houston as being “wielded by a combination of multi-national corporations, largely oil and gas, finance, engineering, construction,” with unions merely occupying the “third or fourth tier” of local power far behind these corporate giants. 11
Despite this pro-business culture and hesitant position toward immigrant rights, Houston politicians have not entirely ignored the needs of its large foreign-born and undocumented population. Support from several immigrant-friendly Democratic mayors and allied council members made possible the 2001 creation of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (MOIRA), later renamed the Office of New Americans and Immigrant Communities. This office provided funding for the creation of a day labor center in immigrant-dense southwest Houston, though this initiative was short lived because of controversy over the use of public funding to help undocumented workers. It also participated in the Justice and Equality in the Workplace Project, an immigrant worker rights initiative catalyzed by the local office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Mexican Consulate. The Harris County AFL-CIO played a central role in each of these initiatives as it sought openings for advocating on behalf of the region’s immigrant workforce.
While San Francisco unions’ direct involvement in immigrant service provision helped garner funding from and increased legitimacy with local government, the stakes and resources were very different in Houston. When President Obama created DACA in 2012 and DAPA in 2014, Houston Mayors Annise Parker and Sylvester Turner publicly supported both programs and spoke out against both Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s attacks on these initiatives (Singer, 2015) and President Trump’s repeated attacks on cities that support their undocumented residents (Shilcutt, 2017). This mayoral support for DACA and DAPA notwithstanding, the city made no funding available for their implementation, and there have been no tangible opportunities for unions to work directly with local government on DACA and DAPA issues. This essentially explains why unions instead have directed their immigrant solidarity efforts toward local immigrant organizations, albeit largely in a peripheral way.
Unions Struggle to Collaborate Long Term with Immigrant Organizations
Unions’ relatively passive response to DACA and DAPA can also be explained by the fact that Houston is “a huge city, and we only have a very small number of organizations,” as described by the leader of a local worker center. 12 This has made sustained coalitional work around immigration issues difficult in Houston. To be sure, there have been a handful of immigrant rights coalitions over time, including the Catholic-led Hispanic Council of Organizations that supported amnesty for undocumented immigrants during the 1980s, 13 a local chapter of the state-wide Texas Immigrant Rights Coalition, 14 the direct-action oriented Houston United, 15 and the business-driven Americans for Immigration Reform convened by the local chamber of commerce and several high-profile immigration lawyers. 16 However, none of these coalitions operated for very long, and labor unions have not typically been prominently involved in them. 17 This has made it challenging for unions to build solidarity with undocumented immigrants in collaboration with other nongovernmental organizations pre-DACA.
Immigrant rights coalitions in Houston today often operate statewide, wearing multiple advocacy hats and motivated by the necessity to work in coalition and across partisan lines. Seeing a need for expanded immigration legal services and better service coordination among local providers, two local foundations—the Houston Endowment and the Simmons Foundation—seeded the creation of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative (HILSC) in 2013, after DACA was announced. The result today is an ethnically diverse set of about a dozen funded service providers, many also working with Houston’s large population of resettled refugees. Conspicuously missing from this collaborative are Houston labor unions, which have no track record of sustained direct service provision. Unions have instead relied largely on referrals to HILSC service providers to connect immigrant union members to needed legal services.
These challenges notwithstanding, Houston unions have curated a particular approach to building solidarity with undocumented immigrants by working with local immigrant organizations in selected advocacy campaigns. For example, the Harris County AFL-CIO has collaborated with the local chapter of United We Dream (UWD)—the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country—in advocating against Texas’ 2017 anti-immigrant “show me your papers” legislation and in pressuring the Harris County Sheriff’s Office to end their 287(g) program in 2017 (Flynn, 2017). This alliance between the AFL-CIO and UWD represents unions’ effort to remain relevant to a younger workforce (Tapia and Turner, 2018), but also UWD’s need to diversify its alliances in this city with a notably large and diverse immigrant population. “There is never going to be one organization that’s going to service all of Houston,” one UWD organizer explained, “you just can’t do it; no amount of money would ensure that.” 18 So, while the Harris County AFL-CIO did not hire their own lawyers or host their own DACA and DAPA workshops as unions in San Francisco have done, they have provided referrals to HILSC and advocated alongside undocumented immigrant-led organizations like UWD. 19
Indeed, the statewide Texas AFL-CIO president sees Houston and the larger Texas Gulf Coast it is part of as a driver for “working very consciously with immigrant organizations.” 20 Even after the Harris County AFL-CIO reorganized into the regional Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation in 2015, its leadership viewed remaining connected to immigrant resources as key to remaining relevant to union members. “We can play that very important role [for immigration assistance] for some of our members and for the community as a whole,” this leader explained, “and we want to figure out ways in which we can do that.” 21 The Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation has done so largely through resource referrals, an approach that is unsurprising given the lack of local government funding for immigrant services and foundations’ general aversion to funding unions (Dean, 2017).
To do more is tough for Houston-area unions, given persistent staffing and resource challenges. One organizer, for example, explained how few UNITE-HERE organizers there are in a state as large as Texas. “For these four cities [Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio], I think we have seven staff people right now.” 22 Also, while the national AFL-CIO had funded training for organizers to help boost naturalization and voter turnout among immigrant members, this funding was not concentrated in Texas. “We don’t actually have many resources at our local [and] we don’t actually help with the actual [DACA and DAPA application] process,” one SEIU Texas organizer explained, “but we can direct people to places that do.” Additionally, her union regularly fields requests from local press such as the Houston Chronicle and ethnic media outlets like Univision and Telemundo. “The Spanish media definitely sees SEIU Texas as an immigrant rights organization, actually sometimes even more than a labor organization,” she noted, adding that “they always know that we’re reliable.” 23 This public storytelling in a place that can be very hostile to undocumented immigrants is another way in which Houston unions have managed to build their own brand of solidarity with undocumented immigrants.
Conclusion
The US labor movement has played an important role in shaping inclusive federal immigration policies in recent years, but the extent to which unions have subsequently helped immigrants to access key immigration benefits varies from place to place. In this article, we examined how US labor unions have engaged with immigration policy implementation in efforts to build solidarity with immigrant communities. Specifically, we examined how unions in San Francisco and Houston—two immigrant-dense cities with notably different political and civic contexts—have engaged with the Obama administration’s DACA and DAPA programs. We show that besides unions’ history of political and economic power in a particular place, a city’s political and civic context also determines how and how deeply unions are able to build transversal solidarity.
In San Francisco, long-standing political progressivism has enabled historically powerful unions to build deep solidarity with immigrant advocates and to eventually create the city-funded We Rise SF Labor Center for Immigrant Justice. San Francisco’s rich infrastructure of immigrant organizations means that powerful unions face a very crowded and sometimes competitive arena that they must carefully navigate to determine their advocacy and service niches. Conversely, Houston’s political context is far more ambivalent toward worker and immigrant rights and has granted unions fewer opportunities to build transversal solidarity. While the city has remained largely hands-off with regard to DACA and DAPA, private philanthropy has played a major role in funding and coordinating legal service providers in Houston. This has relegated Houston’s historically weak unions to the backseat, where they focus largely on public education, service referrals, and strategic media coverage.
These findings suggest that we need to look beyond the national immigration policies that diverse coalitions of immigrant advocates strive to enact, to consider also the local strategies that emerge to implement them. The organizations that advocate to create policies such as DACA and DAPA are not always the same ones that are active in their implementation (de Graauw, 2016). In progressive jurisdictions like San Francisco, local governments played an important role in funding immigrant services and convening pro-immigrant organizations, which has in turn further facilitated union solidarity with immigrant communities. In more moderate cities like Houston, where local politicians are more ambivalent about immigrant rights, private funders wield relatively more influence, making it more challenging for unions to act in solidarity with immigrant communities. In such divergent contexts, advocates confront different (dis-)incentives for investing in immigration initiatives like DACA and DAPA. As social movement scholars track the evolution of immigration advocacy, we must therefore take care to distinguish the locally determined dynamics of federal policy implementation.
A lot has been written about the US labor movement’s often complicated role in pushing for federal immigration reform, but our research argues that the national story does not necessarily determine the longer-term on-the-ground reality. Federated organizations like the AFL-CIO have set certain national priorities, but local central labor councils operate with notable autonomy, shaped importantly by the local context in which they operate. Local chapters of unions such as SEIU and UNITE-HERE also differ substantially based on their local industries and membership characteristics, as well as on where their national organizations invest staff and financial resources. Therefore, while the national labor movement has repeatedly declared solidarity with immigrants, the realization of these commitments depend on local unions’ ability to engage in a range of advocacy and service activities as well as their ability to leverage the immigrant rights investments of different governmental actors and nongovernmental organizations.
Our research has shown that solidarity strategies are certainly not entirely supply-side driven. Understanding the motivations and goals that organizations have to build solidarity with immigrants is important. For unions, this includes a need to develop legitimacy with immigrant workers who are, or could one day be, union members. It also reflects unions’ desire to remain relevant in progressive movements, especially as their membership wanes and organizing new members becomes increasingly more difficult. Unions’ desire and ability to do more than negotiate collective bargaining agreements, however, depend on the availability of new resources and willing partners. In the case of DACA and DAPA, the federal government was completely absent, and only some local governments took up the charge to help immigrants take advantage of these programs. Private philanthropy has a long record of providing such implementation support, though rarely do they extend that to unions, and they certainly did not in Houston. As a result, while unions across the country may have similar desires to build solidarity with immigrant communities, the ways in which they can do so are far from uniform.
Our research offers insights into unions’ solidarity strategies at a particular moment in time, when DACA and the promise of DAPA mobilized unions to deepen their solidarity with immigrant communities. Now that US immigration policy nearly exclusively focuses on surveillance, detention, and deportation, immigrant allies are increasingly stretched thin, exactly at a time when it is ever more important for them to act collectively in defense of immigrant communities. What does union solidarity look like now that immigrant communities writ large are under attack and COVID-19-induced austerity measures threaten government and philanthropic funding to support immigrants? In moving forward and extending this research into the current period, it is important also to take seriously local realities for understanding patterns of transversal solidarity more broadly and to consider local contextual determinants of union solidarity efforts with immigrants more specifically.
Finally, the United States offers a unique context for understanding how labor unions build solidarity with immigrants and the organizations that advocate on their behalf. Unlike in Europe and beyond, where unions have sectoral bargaining (Fine and Tichenor, 2012b), US unions must build power worksite by worksite. Unions operating in any one of the 27 states with “right-to-work” laws are even more constrained due to their inability to collect dues uniformly. Therefore, labor scholarship outside the United States can help shed light on how other national and local conditions shape union solidarity strategies. Important insights could be gleaned, for example, from union solidarity strategies in Canada, where the federal government invests notably in immigrant integration (Bloemraad, 2006) and provinces also have a hand in developing both labor and immigration policies (Gabriel and Macdonald, 2011). In extending this research to other country contexts, scholars should remember that the extent and depth of unions’ transversal solidarity are bound to differ also according to local context.
