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.
Undocumented workers earn even less.
Labor now has joined Congress and industry in the great immigration charade. Congress denies the INS the power to inspect field sites, making it impossible to find illegal farm workers. Further, because Congress has never passed a workers' ID law, without which illegal workers can't be identified, the INS last year abandoned industry work-site inspections. The policy of employers' sanctions has been dropped. Immigration policy today is driven by economics, not by law or social values.