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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PIMS - Polity Immigration and Society series
- Sprache: Englisch
Immigration has been a contentious issue for decades, but in the twenty-first century it has moved to center stage, propelled by an immigrant threat narrative that blames foreign-born workers, and especially the undocumented, for the collapsing living standards of American workers. According to that narrative, if immigration were summarily curtailed, border security established, and ""illegal aliens"" removed, the American Dream would be restored.
In this book, Ruth Milkman demonstrates that immigration is not the cause of economic precarity and growing inequality, as Trump and other promoters of the immigrant threat narrative claim. Rather, the influx of low-wage immigrants since the 1970s was a consequence of concerted employer efforts to weaken labor unions, along with neoliberal policies fostering outsourcing, deregulation, and skyrocketing inequality.
These dynamics have remained largely invisible to the public. The justifiable anger of US-born workers whose jobs have been eliminated or degraded has been tragically misdirected, with even some liberal voices recently advocating immigration restriction. This provocative book argues that progressives should instead challenge right-wing populism, redirecting workers' anger toward employers and political elites, demanding upgraded jobs for foreign-born and US-born workers alike, along with public policies to reduce inequality.
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Seitenzahl: 344
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
Praise
Series title
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Immigrant Threat Narrative and the Politics of Resentment
Political Polarization and the Populist Upsurge
Immigration, Inequality, and Labor Degradation
Overview of the Book
Notes
1 Brown-Collar Jobs: Low-Wage Immigrant Workers in the Twenty-First Century
Immigration and Occupational Segregation
“Jobs Americans Don’t Want”
The Impact of Immigration on U.S.-Born Workers
Notes
2 Immigration and Labor in Historical Perspective
Immigrants in the U.S. Labor Market before 1920
Immigrant Labor and the Rise of Agricultural Capitalism
Immigrant Workers and the Labor Movement
Note
3 The Eclipse of the New Deal: Labor Degradation, Union Decline, and Immigrant Workers
Capital Mobility and Deindustrialization
Management’s Anti-Union Offensive
Residential construction
Building services
Meatpacking
Deregulation and Subcontracting
Conclusion
Notes
4 Growing Inequality and Immigrant Employment in Paid Domestic Labor and Service Industry Jobs
The Impact of Rising Inequality on Domestic and Personal Service Work
Widening Inequality among Women
Paid Domestic Labor in Historical Perspective
Pay and Conditions in Domestic Work
Inequality and Growth in Low-Wage Restaurant Jobs
Immigrants in the Nail Salon Industry
Conclusion
Notes
5 Immigrant Labor Organizing and Advocacy in the Neoliberal Era
The Myth of Immigrant “Unorganizability”
Networks
Immigrant worldviews
Stigmatization
Immigrants and Union Organizing
Worker Centers
The Immigrant Rights Movement
Conclusion
The Politics of Immigration in the Age of Populism
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Brown-Collar Jobs: Low-Wage Immigrant Workers in the Twenty-First Century
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Praise
“This new book is a vital corrective to the conservative claim that immigrants ‘take jobs’ from American workers. Milkman’s careful historical research shows that de-unionization and job degradation on the one hand and rising inequality on the other are the key drivers of rising low-wage immigration over the past half-century – not vice versa. Understanding that employers and political elites – not immigrants – are to blame for the plight of U.S.-born workers can help to build bridges across racial and ethnic lines to mount a unified challenge to the toxic politics of right-wing populism.”
Pramila Jayapal, member of the U.S. House of Representatives and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus
“Ruth Milkman addresses the central claim of contemporary nativism, that immigrants ‘take’ the jobs of ‘Americans.’ She persuasively shows that immigrant labor is not the cause of wage degradation but its consequence. An important and timely book.”
Mae Ngai, Columbia University
“This carefully documented and forcefully argued book shows that low-wage immigration is rooted in deteriorating wages and working conditions. A convincing counter to conventional immigration narratives.”
Michael J. Piore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Series title
Immigration & Society series
Carl L. Bankston III,
Immigrant Networks and Social Capital
Stephanie A. Bohon & Meghan Conley,
Immigration and Population
Caroline B. Brettell,
Gender and Migration
Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, & Eveline Reisenauer,
Transnational Migration
Eric Fong & Brent Berry,
Immigration and the City
Roberto G. Gonzales, Nando Sigona, Martha C. Franco, & Anna Papoutsi,
Undocumented Migration
Christian Joppke,
Citizenship and Immigration
Grace Kao, Elizabeth Vaquera, & Kimberly Goyette,
Education and Immigration
Nazli Kibria, Cara Bowman, & Megan O’Leary,
Race and Immigration
Peter Kivisto,
Religion and Immigration
Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego, & Leah C. Schmalzbauer,
Immigrant Families
Ruth Milkman,
Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat
Ronald L. Mize & Grace Peña Delgado,
Latino Immigrants in the United States
Philip Q. Yang,
Asian Immigration to the United States
Min Zhou & Carl L. Bankston III,
The Rise of the New Second Generation
Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat
Ruth Milkman
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Ruth Milkman 2020
The right of Ruth Milkman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9201-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9202-9 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Milkman, Ruth, 1954- author.
Title: Immigrant labor and the new precariat / Ruth Milkman.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press 2020. | Series: Immigration & society | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: «Why immigrants aren›t to blame for the erosion of the US labor market»-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019052457 (print) | LCCN 2019052458 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745692012 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745692029 (paperback) | ISBN 9780745692050 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Foreign workers--United States. | Precarious employment--United States. | Unemployment--United States. | Labor market--United States. | United States--Emigration and immigration--Economic aspects.
Classification: LCC HD8081.A5 M545 2020 (print) | LCC HD8081.A5 (ebook) | DDC 331.6/20973--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052457
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052458
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Acknowledgments
Jonathan Skerrett kindly solicited this book from me on behalf of Polity several years ago, and he has been extraordinarily patient in awaiting its completion. I am deeply indebted to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University, where I was privileged to have a nine-month residential fellowship in 2018–19. Freed from all my other duties, I was able to concentrate during that period on writing this book. The ideas in it have been germinating for some time. They were influenced by comments and criticisms from colleagues who attended my presentations of the work in progress at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center; the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland; the University of California, Davis; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the University of Kansas; the University of Massachusetts, Boston; the University of Hong Kong; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and CASBS itself. I am also grateful for the helpful suggestions of three anonymous reviewers who read an earlier draft of the manuscript at the publisher’s request, and to Deepak Bhargava, who provided invaluable comments at the eleventh hour as I completed the final revisions. Many thanks to all.
RM
New York City, October 2019
Permissions Acknowledgments
For epigraph to Introduction:
From Greig de Peuter, “Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization edited by M. Cote, J. F. Day, and G. de Peuter. © University of Toronto Press. Reproduced with permission.
For epigraph to chapter 1:
From Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies by Michael J. Piore. © Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.
For epigraph to chapter 3:
From What do Unions Do? by Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff, copyright © 1984. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
For epigraph to chapter 5:
Used with the permission of The American Prospect, “Immigrants and Unions Make America Great,” by Hector Figueroa and Cristina Jimenez Moreta. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2018. All rights reserved.
Introduction
These people are doing the shit work of global capital: they are servicing it, feeding it, washing its windows late at night, cleaning its offices, and looking after the children of the global entrepreneurs. … Du Bois once said, ‘The color line will be the central problem of the twentieth century.’ I think migration will be the central issue of the twenty-first century.
Stuart Hall (de Peuter 2007: 128)
The United States is home to more immigrants than any other country in the world. Its 44.4 million foreign-born inhabitants made up 14 percent of the nation’s population in 2017, a higher proportion than at any time since 1910 (Radford 2019; Tavernise 2018; Carter 2006). The foreign-born component of the U.S. labor force was even larger: 17 percent in 2017, more than triple the level in 1980 (Zong et al. 2019). A large and growing share of the nation’s foreign-born workforce is made up of college-educated professionals and white-collar workers, disproportionately of Asian origin. Yet public debate (and this book) focuses primarily on the less-educated immigrants concentrated at the bottom of the labor market, most of whom are Latinx.1 Although they are widely believed to be doing “jobs Americans don’t want,” low-wage immigrant workers, disproportionately from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, have become the third rail of American politics in recent years. The “illegal aliens” among them are especially controversial, notwithstanding the fact that less than 5 percent of the nation’s workforce was undocumented in 2017 (Passel and Cohn 2019).
Immigration has been a contentious issue for decades, but in the twenty-first century it moved to center stage, helping to catapult Donald Trump into the U.S. presidency and upending traditional political alignments around the world. Although nativism has been resurgent in many other contexts as well, the “native” population of the United States is distinctly different from that of most other wealthy nations in that until the late twentieth century it consisted almost entirely of descendants of European immigrants, on the one hand, and African slaves, on the other. But Americans have notoriously poor historical memories, and recent immigration debates have unfolded not in relation to the legacy of settler colonialism and slavery but, rather, against the backdrop of the exceptional period of low immigration that began after World War I. Two shifts in U.S. immigration law demarcate that era: the establishment in 1924 of nationality-based quotas designed to sharply restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe; and the lifting of those quotas in 1965, which spurred a massive new immigrant influx from the global South (Ngai 2004).
Because the overwhelming majority of post-1965 immigrants are people of color, their incorporation into American society has been mediated by pre-existing racial hierarchies; yet the growing immigrant presence itself has also gradually reconfigured the U.S. racial order. The Latinx (“Hispanic” in official statistics) population exemplifies this dialectic. In 2017, 44 percent of the nation’s total immigrant population was Latinx; among the undocumented the share was much higher, estimated at 75 percent. Although nearly twice as many Latinxs are U.S.-born as foreign-born (Zong et al. 2019), in practice few Americans differentiate between those whose families have resided in the United States for generations and those who arrived recently. Latinxs can be of any race, and they span the class spectrum, but those differences too are increasingly blurred. Similarly, variations in Latinx citizenship status and national origin have become less salient over time, as a single “panethnic” category has taken shape (Mora 2014).
By the twenty-first century, indeed, most Americans considered “Latinos” to be a racial rather than an ethnic group. And that group, however understood, is at the center of the increasingly heated debates over immigration – debates that fuse racial, cultural, and economic concerns. In recent decades conservative advocates of immigration restriction have elaborated a powerful “immigrant threat narrative,” according to which the Latinx influx, and especially its undocumented component, not only has hurt American workers economically but also has contributed to the nation’s cultural decline. More specifically, in this view, the U.S.-born have suffered as a result of “immigrants’ use of welfare, health and educational services, their propensity to turn to crime, and their tendency to displace native citizens from jobs” (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015: 5). The origins of this narrative can be traced back several decades, to the mid-1970s (Minian 2018: ch. 2). Over the years since, it has been amplified by media outlets such as Fox News and conservative talk radio and by right-wing websites and organizations such as the Tea Party.2 More recently Donald Trump has become the most prominent proponent of the immigrant threat narrative. If immigration were summarily curtailed, border security established, and the estimated 10.5 million “illegal aliens” residing in the country as of 2017 (Passel and Cohn 2019) removed, his rhetoric suggests, the American Dream and the living standards it once delivered to working people would be restored – helping to “Make America Great Again.”
The Immigrant Threat Narrative and the Politics of Resentment
Nearly all experts on the subject agree that the economic benefits of immigration for the United States outweigh its costs. Immigration contributes positively to overall economic growth and to technological innovation. It reduces the costs of many goods and services, benefiting consumers; it also increases demand in key sectors such as housing, stimulating the real-estate industry and other economic activities tied to it. The fiscal impact of immigration is typically negative at the local and state levels, mainly because the cost of providing education to new arrivals and their children is not fully recovered in state and local taxes paid by immigrants. But this is offset by a positive fiscal impact at the federal level, not only because immigrants are disqualified from many government benefits but also because they are disproportionately prime-age workers, contributing more to Social Security and Medicare than they receive (Blau and Mackie 2017).
However, the expert consensus regarding the economic benefits of immigration is not shared by the larger public (Schuck 2007). On the contrary, as a large body of data demonstrates, Americans are deeply divided on this question (Gallup 2018a, 2018b). For example, as figure 1 shows, 45 percent of respondents to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-2016, when the attacks of then candidate Trump on Mexican immigrants were riveting public attention, agreed that “the growing number of immigrants working in this country hurts American workers.” Almost as many respondents to this survey (42 percent) endorsed the opposite view, namely that growing immigration helps American workers. (The remaining 13 percent said that there was not much effect, didn’t know, or refused to respond.)
Figure 1 Percentage of respondents saying that the growing number of immigrants working in the U.S. hurts American workers, by race, education, household income, and political identification, 2006 and 20163
Source: Pew Research Center (2016).
Anti-immigrant sentiments have become increasingly visible thanks to Trump’s presidential campaign and the policies his administration has promulgated since he took office, but the issue long pre-dates his entry onto the political stage. Nativism has been a feature of American politics from the earliest period, and at many points in the recent past negative attitudes toward the foreign-born were more prevalent than they were in 2016. Ten years earlier, for example, a wave of May Day protest marches by immigrants and their supporters sparked an intense backlash among the U.S.-born (Wong 2017). As figure 1 shows, in a mid-2006 Pew survey that included the same question asked ten years later, a higher share of respondents than in 2016 – 55 percent – agreed that immigrants hurt American workers. (In 2006, 28 percent of respondents said that immigration helped U.S. workers, while 17 percent said it did not have much effect, didn’t know, or refused to answer.)
As these data suggest, attitudes about immigration are extremely volatile. They fluctuate not only over time (see Gallup 2018a) but also across space, with hostility generally more pronounced in new immigrant destinations than in areas with a long-established foreign-born population (Enos 2017). Attitudes also are affected by the way in which the immigration issue is framed (Bloemraad et al. 2016). Amid all these variations, however, one consistent pattern in recent years is that non-college-educated workers are especially receptive to the immigrant threat narrative. The data shown in figure 1 illustrate this: in both 2006 and 2016, non-college-educated respondents, as well as those with lower household incomes, disproportionately endorsed the view that immigrant employment hurts American workers.
Some commentators explain this in terms of economic self-interest, arguing that less-educated, lower-income workers are those most likely to feel threatened by labor market competition from immigrants. Indeed, the economic dividends from immigration are unequally distributed, with less privileged U.S.-born workers benefiting far less than their more affluent counterparts. Some studies find that high-school dropouts, especially African-American and Latinx males, experience wage declines as a result of immigration, although these effects are very small – less than 2 percent for each 1 percent increase in the labor supply as a result of immigration (Blau and Mackie 2017: 241–3). Other analysts point to heightened economic anxieties among the non-college-educated, especially in the wake of the Great Recession.
However, most recent scholarship suggests that ethnic and racial resentments far outweigh economic concerns in shaping working-class anti-immigrant attitudes (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014). As one analysis of survey data on attitudes toward immigration over the period from 1992 to 2016 concluded, “an ounce of racial resentment is worth a pound of economic anxiety” (Miller 2018: 23; see also Zolberg 2006: 386–7). Moreover, as political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck have shown, racial anxiety is itself a critical driver of economic anxiety. Their analysis of the 2016 presidential election highlights Trump’s success in activating non-college-educated “whites’ own group identity” and harnessing it to economic concerns. “The important economic sentiment underlying Trump’s support,” they argue, “was not ‘I might lose my job’ but, in essence ‘People in my group are losing jobs to that other group’” (Sides et al. 2018: 7–8; see also Gimpel and Edwards 1999; Haney López 2019: 58).
Justin Gest’s fieldwork in the U.S. Rustbelt led him to a similar view. “Working-class people [are] consumed by their loss of social and political status in social hierarchies, particularly in relation to immigrant and minority reference groups,” he concludes. “Their politics are motivated and pervaded by a nostalgia that reveres, and seeks to reinstate, a bygone era” (Gest 2016: 16). Gest’s research focused on what he calls “post-traumatic cities” in deindustrialized Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Other scholars have documented a parallel “politics of resentment” (Cramer 2016) among non-college-educated whites in small towns and rural areas. Frustrated by rising taxes and convinced that their communities have been abandoned by government, they are deeply anti-statist, mistrustful of urban elites, and hostile to racial and ethnic minorities. Workers in rural areas who (not without reason) fear the extinction of their traditional way of life see immigrants as an especially salient threat (Wuthnow 2018: 144–6). Arlie Hochschild’s ethnography of rural Louisiana vividly captures this mentality:
Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you! You’re following the rules. They aren’t. As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? Who are they? Some are black. Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare programs, and free lunches …
And now Filipinos, Mexicans, Arabs, Indians and Chinese on special visas or green cards are ahead of you in line. Or maybe they snuck in … You see the Mexicans work hard – and you admire that, but they work for less, and lower American pay … Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans [a formerly endangered species] – all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great … You’ve suffered a good deal yourself, but you aren’t complaining. (Hochschild 2016: 137–9)
In recent years, U.S.-born Latinxs and African Americans have been less receptive to the immigrant threat narrative than their white working-class counterparts, but that was not always the case. Negative views of immigrants have declined sharply among African Americans, perhaps reflecting the open racial hostility directed at them by the same conservative groups who regularly attack immigrants. As figure 1 shows, in 2006 a slightly higher proportion of black (64 percent) than white respondents (61 percent) said that immigrant employment hurts U.S. workers, but ten years later their positions were reversed, with 44 percent of blacks and 54 percent of whites endorsing that view.
Meanwhile, the growing prevalence of mixed-status Latinx households that include both U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants, along with the unifying effects of Latinx panethnicity, has eroded hostility to the undocumented among U.S.-born Latinxs. This is one reason why Latinx voters increasingly have exited the Republican Party, joining their African-American counterparts who did so decades ago. Thus Latinx Democrats outnumbered Latinx Republicans by 36 points in 2016, up from 23 points in 2002. College-educated whites also shifted toward the Democratic Party in this period, while less-educated whites moved in the opposite direction. This “diploma divide” among whites was strongly tied to attitudes about race and immigration (Sides et al. 2018: 25–9).
Political Polarization and the Populist Upsurge
The nation’s growing political polarization is inextricably intertwined with attitudes toward immigration as well. As recently as 2006, 61 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats endorsed the view that immigration is harmful to American workers; as figure 1 shows, ten years later the gap had widened dramatically, with 66 percent of Republicans but only 30 percent of Democrats doing so. Another 2016 survey found that 70 percent of white Trump voters wanted immigration reduced, compared to only 20 percent of whites voting for Clinton (Kaufmann 2019: 122). “No other factor appeared as distinctively powerful in 2016,” Sides, Tesler and Vavreck (2018: 156) conclude, “as attitudes about racial issues and immigration.”
Only a few decades ago, moderate Republicans in the business wing of their party actively opposed restrictive immigration policies, as did market fundamentalists who opposed economic regulation more generally. Indeed, with the support of these elements within his party, Ronald Reagan presided over the last major immigration reform, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which famously granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented persons. Two decades later George W. Bush tried to build consensus in support of a follow-up immigration reform measure; the failure of that effort both reflected and reinforced the declining influence of moderates in the Republican Party. That decline gained momentum during the Obama presidency and was further consolidated after Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory.
As the influence of the far right has grown, and as political moderates have been marginalized, Republican rhetoric has become increasingly xenophobic. Although the hardening of their anti-immigrant stance is a relatively recent development, Republican efforts to woo white working-class voters began over half a century ago, when Democratic support for the civil rights movement led Southern whites to exit that party en masse. That was the first crack in the legendary New Deal Democratic coalition anchored by unionized blue-collar workers, white Southerners, and African Americans. That coalition was subsequently eroded further by deindustrialization and the accompanying crippling of private-sector labor unions, which led many white workers in the North and Midwest to defect, most notably the “Reagan Democrats” who surfaced in the 1980 presidential campaign. Unable or unwilling to effectively address the growing economic distress in the nation’s former industrial heartland, Democrats embraced the “identity politics” of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and, most recently, immigrant rights. That shift further alienated many white non-college-educated workers who had once been stalwart Democrats, deepening their resentment not only of urban cosmopolitan elites but also of racial minorities and immigrants. Over time, more and more working-class whites either stopped voting entirely or moved into the Republican column.
Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign shrewdly capitalized on these developments. His strident criticism of the offshoring of jobs and of “free trade” marked a radical break with mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike and resonated deeply among blue-collar workers whose communities had been ripped apart by plant closures – including many union members and even some union officials. Trump famously embraced the “poorly educated,” and his campaign speeches regularly celebrated manual labor in factories and on construction sites while heaping scorn on college-educated workers laboring at desks or in cubicles (Berezin 2017). The “diploma divide,” indeed, provided Trump with a crucial source of support (Sides et al. 2018: 156).
Insofar as he championed the “forgotten man” and criticized the “rigged” political system and the powerful elites who run it, Trump shared common ground with left-wing presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who also won extensive support from white workers in 2016. From opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, both populist candidates criticized the rich and vowed to help “the people.” The crucial difference was that Trump’s idea of “the people” was strictly confined to U.S.-born whites, excluding – indeed vilifying – Muslims, African Americans, and especially Latinx immigrants. “Leftwing populism is dyadic,” John B. Judis points out. “Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group” (Judis 2016: 15; see also Mouffe 2018). In the case of the United States, demonizing immigrants became a hallmark of the Trump brand.
In 2014, the conservative journal National Review published an essay by Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, who would later become Trump’s first attorney general. The essay articulated the political reasoning behind the anti-immigrant populism that became Trump’s signature campaign issue two years later. Pointing out that both business elites and the Democrats favored more open immigration policies, Sessions wrote, “Republicans can either join the Democrats as the second political party in Washington advocating uncontrolled immigration, or they can offer a principled alternative and represent the American workers Democrats have jettisoned.” He added, “The last 40 years have been a period of uninterrupted large-scale immigration into the U.S., coinciding with increased joblessness, falling wages, failing schools, and a growing welfare state. Would not the sensible, conservative thing to do be to slow down for a bit, allow wages to rise and assimilation to occur, and help the millions struggling here today?” (Sessions 2014: 20–1).
Sessions, with help from his youthful communications director Stephen Miller, had been promoting these views relentlessly throughout the Obama years. In 2013, Sessions and Miller met with Steve Bannon, then head of Breitbart News and a leader of the alt-right, who urged Sessions to run for president and to promote his immigration platform. Sessions demurred, but soon afterward all three men emerged as early supporters of Trump’s presidential candidacy, at a time when it was widely considered a fringe phenomenon. All three would become part of Trump’s inner circle, playing key roles in his campaign and then in his administration. In January 2016, Bannon persuaded Miller to leave Sessions’s staff and become Trump’s main speechwriter; a month later Sessions formally endorsed Trump’s candidacy; and in August 2016 Bannon left his position at Breitbart to head up Trump’s campaign. After the election Bannon was appointed as the president’s “chief strategist,” Sessions became his attorney general, and Miller took a position in the White House as a senior policy advisor and rapidly took on the role of chief architect of immigration policy. Bannon departed in August 2017, and Sessions was forced to resign in late 2018; at the time of writing Miller remains in the White House (Davis and Shear 2019).
With their help, as New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have documented in rich detail, “Trump’s assault on immigration became the beating heart of his administration” (Davis and Shear 2019: 10). The immigrant threat narrative was now no longer a mere narrative but instead was systematically weaponized into official policy. This involved ramping up deportations, banning nationals from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States, sharply limiting refugee admissions, and notoriously separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border. The Obama administration also had conducted large-scale deportations, but those primarily targeted immigrants with criminal records and those who had just crossed the U.S.–Mexico border without authorization. Under Trump, the focus shifted to “internal removals,” which led to the deportation of thousands of law-abiding immigrants who had lived in the United States for long periods of time. The administration has also taken steps to restrict legal immigration, a move with no precedent in the post-1965 period, but one that Sessions had long advocated (Davis and Shear 2019: 164).
Immigration, Inequality, and Labor Degradation
Is immigration really a key driver of the reversal of fortune experienced by U.S.-born workers since the 1970s, as Trump and other promoters of the immigrant threat narrative claim? The timing seems to suggest as much. Soon after the passage of the 1965 law that ended four decades of highly restricted immigration, the economic status of non-college-educated workers, most of whom had prospered during the post-World War II years, began to spiral downward. In 2018 the real (i.e. controlling for inflation) median hourly wage of male wage and salary workers aged eighteen to sixty-four was lower than it had been in 1973 (Economic Policy Institute 2019). In the same period, moreover, inequality in income and wealth grew dramatically.
Correlation is not causation, but there is extensive evidence that the deteriorating situation of the U.S. working class and the growth of low-wage immigration after 1965 are tightly interconnected. However, the line of causality runs in the opposite direction from that implied by the immigrant threat narrative. The central thesis of this book is that immigration was not the cause either of the massive economic restructuring that began in the 1970s or of the accompanying growth of economic inequality and labor degradation; rather, the influx of low-wage immigrants was a consequence of those developments. As American employers sought to externalize market risk through various forms of subcontracting and took steps to undermine organized labor, their demand for low-wage labor exploded. That, in turn, led millions of immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, to enter the bottom tier of the U.S. labor market. As chapter 3 documents, immigrants entered low-wage jobs in substantial numbers largely after pay and conditions had been degraded to such a degree that U.S.-born workers exited the impacted occupations en masse.
A key premise underlying this argument is that the primary driver of labor migration, past and present, is economic demand. (Refugees fleeing war, violence, ethnic cleansing, political persecution, climate change, or natural disasters are another matter.) Certainly “push” factors within sending countries can help to spur emigration, and in some contexts those have become more significant in recent years. But, as Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand and Nolan J. Malone put it in their influential study of Mexican immigration to the United States, “If there were no demand for their services, immigrants, particularly those without documents, would not come, since they would have no means of supporting themselves” (Massey et al. 2002: 145).
To be sure, political forces and state policy in receiving countries can and often do limit the volume of immigration. But, in the case of the United States from the 1940s up until the start of the Trump administration, immigration policy largely catered to the needs of employers, which meant that, as Michael Piore argued long ago, “The strategic factor in initiating the migration and controlling its evolution appears to be the search of American employers for new sources of labor.” Moreover, Piore added, “the migrants appear to be coming to take a distinct set of jobs, jobs that the native labor force refused to accept” (Piore 1979: 3). The 2008 financial crisis was a revealing illustration of the demand-driven character of labor migration in this era. As employment in sectors such as construction and manufacturing collapsed, unauthorized migrants abruptly stopped crossing the border. Other forms of (legally authorized) migration, such as for purposes of family reunification, continued in this period, however (Blau and Mackie 2017: 78).
Before the Great Recession, from the neoliberal turn of the early 1970s onward, migration to the United States, including unauthorized migration, grew in direct response to rising employer demand for low-wage labor. In this period of intensified international competition, new business strategies emerged to drive down labor costs through outsourcing, deregulation, and concerted efforts to weaken or eliminate labor unions. Whenever and wherever they could, U.S.-born workers voted with their feet to reject the newly degraded jobs, and many employers responded by hiring immigrants to replace them. In industries where migrants did not enter the country on their own in sufficient numbers to meet the demand for low-wage labor, recruiters were routinely dispatched to Mexico and other parts of the global South to find them, typically with blatant disregard for immigration laws and regulations (which until very recently were notoriously poorly enforced).
The construction industry illustrates this dynamic. In the 1980s, after a concerted employer assault on trade unions depressed pay, benefits, and working conditions in residential construction, many U.S.-born workers abandoned it for the commercial construction sector, which was still unionized and was booming at the time. Employers then recruited immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere to fill the vacancies in the residential sector. Similarly, in industries such as truck driving, where deregulation led to union decline and wage degradation, as well as in many de-unionized manufacturing and service industries (for example, meatpacking and building services), employers increasingly turned to immigrants from across the global South to fill the jobs abandoned by U.S.-born workers in the late twentieth century.
This process can be understood in terms of a shift in “job queues” that rank jobs by their relative attractiveness to workers. As Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos note, “Any change that reduces an occupation’s financial rewards, mobility opportunities, or job security can depreciate its ranking in a job queue” (Reskin and Roos 1990: 29, 44; see also Lieberson 1980). Job queues are especially likely to shift when labor markets are subjected to economic shocks like the rapid deregulation and de-unionization of the 1970s and 1980s. When this occurs, the most privileged workers (men, whites, or in this case the U.S.-born) reject jobs whose rankings in the queue have declined.
Crucially, employers’ preferences can also change, transforming not only job queues but also labor queues – which “order groups of workers in terms of their attractiveness to employers” (Reskin and Roos 1990: 29). Indeed, once they grew accustomed to hiring immigrant workers, initially in a search for cheap labor (to fill the vacancies created by the shift in the job queue), many employers came to prefer them to the U.S.-born (Waldinger and Lichter 2003). This was reinforced by immigrant self-selection: the low-wage immigrants who came to work in the United States from Mexico and elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s were, relative to non-migrants with similar levels of education, disproportionately young, healthy, skilled, and eager for economic advancement (Chiquiar and Hanson 2005). Once employers’ preferences shifted decisively, a new equilibrium was established in the labor queue, and the boundaries defining “brown-collar” jobs performed by immigrants were naturalized, taken for granted by workers and employers alike.
Demand for immigrant labor expanded not only in male-dominated industries degraded by the neoliberal restructuring that began in the 1970s but also in the predominantly female domestic and personal services sector. Here the key driver was not employment restructuring and job degradation but instead a mix of demographic pressures and rising income inequality. The increasingly prosperous professional and managerial classes began to devote a significant part of their disposable income to purchasing services from housecleaners, nannies, home-care and eldercare providers, as well as gardeners, manicurists, and other service workers. In this period, such affluent households often included two adults with long working hours, thanks to the feminist movement’s success in opening the doors of the professions and the corporate suite to upper-middle-class women in the 1970s – even as changing expectations of parenting and the aging of the population stimulated growing demand for paid carework inside the home. Yet, in the same period, the traditional labor supply for domestic work was evaporating, as the civil rights movement opened up lower-level clerical and service jobs and other options to African-American and Mexican-American women. In another case of a shifting job queue, these U.S.-born women of color began to shun paid domestic work just as demand for it began to soar, leading households to hire immigrants instead. Soon these jobs too became “brown collar.”
These dynamics have remained largely invisible to the public, as the immigrant threat narrative has effectively distracted attention from the actual causes of declining working-class living standards and from the forces driving migration itself. Non-college-educated American workers have every reason to be enraged and alienated by rising inequality and the degradation of employment, but their anger has been profoundly misdirected. It was not the influx of immigrants that generated these changes but, rather, employers’ deliberate efforts to degrade formerly well-paid blue-collar jobs and to promote public policies that widened inequality.
Overview of the Book
The following chapters elaborate this counterargument to the immigrant threat narrative in more detail and present supporting evidence. Chapter 1 provides a brief profile of the twenty-first-century U.S. immigrant workforce, both authorized and unauthorized, emphasizing the concentration of low-wage immigrants in a limited number of occupations and industries and critically interrogating the popular claim that they are taking “jobs Americans don’t want.” The key point here is that direct competition between low-wage immigrants and U.S.-born workers is rare, as the latter reject most “brown-collar jobs” as unacceptable.
Chapter 2 sets the twenty-first-century immigration debate in historical perspective, arguing that, in the past as in the present, labor migration into the United States was spurred primarily by employer demand. As the rise of capitalism transformed the nation in the nineteenth century, foreign-born workers were actively recruited for low-skill, poorly paid jobs that most U.S.-born workers shunned. That process took place not only in industries such as manufacturing or construction but also in capitalist agriculture, which recruited immigrant workers from countries across the globe. Indeed, the labor contractor-based system that growers used to recruit Mexican farm workers in California and the Southwest starting in the late nineteenth century would set the template for low-wage immigrant employment in many urban industries later on. Similarly, the farm worker union drives that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in many respects prefigured the low-wage immigrant labor organizing that blossomed in the late twentieth century.
