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Comment by OGEnthusiast | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see the tacit endorsement of these ICE raids by a local union leader:

> Christi Hulme, president of the Savannah Regional Central Labor Council, said unions that are part of her council believe Korean workers have been pouring cement, erecting steel, performing carpentry and fitting pipes. “Basically our labor was being given to illegal immigrants,” Hulme said.

So far in the US, most labor unions have generally been fairly left-wing, including being pro-immigration. Wonder how long that will last.

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Labor unions have never been especially pro-immigration as a group -- it's highly dependent on their membership and whether it is growing or shrinking and how and why it is growing or shrinking.

If you're a union that is largely concerned with preserving jobs and privileges in a shrinking industry, then there is a pretty good chance that you are going to be quite opposed to non-union immigrants coming in and "taking your jobs."

If you're a farm-worker union with a growing membership of immigrants, more concerned about adding new members and organizing than with preserving previous wins, you may be quite in favor of more immigration.

That makes a lot of sense actually. Unions prefer union workers. Many of the unions are major pushers of higher minimum wage laws because it makes it more feasible to pay a little more for a union worker, than a non-union worker.

This is the kind of thing unions are for.

> So far in the US, most labor unions have generally been fairly left-wing, including being pro-immigration.

The line up against which leftist ideology fails to cohere with capitalism. Labor unions are a leftist concept but their goal is to uphold worker's rights against Capital (corporations or whoever can swing money around, like lobbyists), a pretty stark Marxist concept. However another thing Marx pointed out is that capitalism is virulent - it will industrialize a country, lift out the working class to middle class and create petit bourgeois, and then move elsewhere to seek new forms of cheap labor. What does your local union do when that happens?

I suppose this is why it was always "Workers of the World" not "Workers of Local 816," but so far as I can tell there's not much organization across international worker's groups outside of explicitly communist groups that are basically clubs, not actual unions with any power.

Defending the quality of ones labour market against social dumping is pretty left-wing. Internationalism is not a prerequisite for the left, especially with trades unions that won out against industrial unionism and the internationalist idea of One Big Union a hundred years ago. Being pro-immigration is a liberal stance.

Bro, labor unions were the first to push the laws that limited citizenship for Asians. They are always anti-immigrant when they have any power.

It’s worthwhile for any foreigner to look around and see if they want software unions because without a doubt you will be outnumbered by domestic workers who will immediately turn on you the moment they don’t need you.

And here are some Asians, in detention because of a labor union. As anyone could have predicted.

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