It's a good thing the AFL-CIO wasn't meeting in California. The AFL-CIO would have us reward the people who have slipped by the INS and the Border Patrol. We would have 4 million to 5 million undocumented workers with union cards but no green cards. This is a radical turnabout for labor, which, unlike Congress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has long and consistently opposed illegal immigration. For labor, undocumented workers have taken jobs from legal workers, depressed wages, weakened the union movement and created a black market work force.
Labor is right about that.
In California, undocumented farm workers have badly weakened the United Farm Workers, for example, which three decades ago had 80,000 members under contracts. The AFL-CIO turnaround is easily explained. With millions of undocumented workers present and showing no signs of going home, let's organize them, says the union. The potential for organizing undocumented immigrants, bringing their wages and benefits up to AFL-CIO standards, is considerable. In a recent study for RAND, immigration analysts Georges Vernez and Kevin McCarthy reported that earnings for legal immigrants were 50 percent less than for U.S.-born workers, with the difference widening.