American labor has been no friend to immigrants in recent years, with unions strongly backing the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Law But at their annual convention in Los Angeles this fall, top AFL-CIO officials acknowledged this support was a mistake. The federation seems to have accepted the need for a basic change in immigration policy that some union activists say is "long past time." PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on issues of labor and immigration.

LOS ANGELES -- Los Angeles' huge population of immigrant workers may have a new ally -- the AFL-CIO. For the first time since 1986, when the labor federation supported passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), unions have begun seeing them not as a problem but as a solution.

"For immigrants to build a better future, they need to build unions," says Eliseo Medina, an immigrant from Zacatecas who once worked for the United Farm Workers and is now executive vice-president of the Service Employees union. "But I am also convinced that as the labor movement is the best hope for immigrants, so are immigrants the best hope of the labor movement."

It's not hard to understand why he and others take that view. Unions represent about 14 percent of U.S. workers today, down from 35 percent in the early 1950s. Just to maintain that percentage, unions have to recruit 400,000 workers a year -- a level they topped last year with 475,000 new members. According to AFL-CIO's organizing director, Kirk Adams, unions really need a million workers in the pipeline, "not only to grow but also because of the noise that creates."

But who in the modern American workforce actively wants to join unions on the scale Adams envisions?

Immigrant workers for starters. Miguel Contreras, secretary of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the country's largest labor council, points to the Alameda corridor, where hundreds of non-union small shops employ some 760,000 mostly immigrant workers in what is the largest concentration of manufacturing jobs in the country. "If we're going to organize LA," Contreras says, "we have to organize immigrants."

In the floor debate at this fall's AFL-CIO convention, hotel union president John Wilhelm called Los Angeles "the capital of immigrant workers." The convention itself was held there, in part to highlight the city's upsurge in organizing. But L.A. is hardly an isolated case. The wave of labor activity among immigrant workers has become a national phenomenon.

The federation now confronts the reality, however, that the law it supported in 1986 has made it harder for unions to organize and represent immigrants, not easier. A rising tide of labor opinion says that support was wrong. This summer, beginning in California, labor councils and local unions began passing a resolution calling for the repeal of employer sanctions, that part of the law which makes it illegal for an undocumented worker to hold a job.

While the resolution won support easily in most councils, it was still opposed in some, especially by local officials of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Nonetheless, it spread to Oregon, Washington and New York and by Oct. 12 when it hit the convention floor, national union leaders joined in the call for repeal.

Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers, listed examples in which sanctions were enforced to break union organizing drives, or led to mass firings among already-organized workers. At the Bear Creek Production Company, the world's largest rose grower in California's Central Valley, 15 percent of the firm's 1000 UFW members were fired after the INS came in to review their documents.

"These are not workers who came here yesterday," he recounted to delegates. "These are workers that have been here 15, 20, 25 years, have houses, have families, are in the educational system, have paid taxes, are members of their communities. They asked them to demonstrate their status in this country. And then they were evicted and lost their jobs."

Hotel union president Wilhelm admits that his own union's support for sanctions in 1986 was a big mistake. "Those who came before us, who built this labor movement in the great depression, in strikes in rubber and steel and hotels, they didn't say 'Let me see your papers' to the workers in those industries. They said, 'Which side are you on?' And immigrant workers today have the right to ask us the same question."

Frank Hurt, president of the Bakery, Confectionary and Tobacco Workers, who chaired the committee in 1986 which recommended supporting IRCA, acknowledges that the immigration policies he advocated had not protected workers' rights. "Instead, they arm employers with additional weapons, often wielded with governmental complicity... They pit worker against worker, ally against friend, driving wedges between us when we should stand united."

Along with the mea culpas, the AFL-CIO announced a series of hearings around the country on immigration law which they intend to compile into a White Paper which could well prompt the federation to call for the repeal of employer sanctions. Such a change in direction, according to federation executive vice-president Linda Chavez-Thompson, is "long past time."