WASHINGTON—When it comes to immigration and who should be living in the U.S., Donald Trump wants to go back in time, to the year 1924.
That’s when white Anglo-Saxon Protestant nativism kicked in, with a federal law that began on January 1. Its blunt message: “Whites from Northern and Western Europe in; everybody else out.”
President Trump apparently holds to that screed. Under that approach to immigration policy, non-white people—migrant or not, citizen or not—should be thrown out of the country by his ICE agents. And that’s even if they’re refugees seeking and/or granted asylum.
The other Trump addition is that, besides the Northern and Western Europeans, he’s giving priority to Afrikaners—specifically those who are right-wing anti-Black residents of South Africa and supporters of apartheid—for asylum. There’ll be only 7,500 asylum slots worldwide. Trump wants Afrikaners to get them all.
South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rasool, a white person who represents a majority-Black government and electorate, had protested. Rasool said Trump “is mobilizing a supremacism” and “trying to project white victimhood as a dog whistle.” Trump threw Rasool out of the U.S.
By contrast, if one sentence can sum up the present policy of organized labor, even if not all its members agree, it is this: “Immigrants are the backbone of our society. With appropriate safeguards and rules, let them in.”
That includes legitimate refugees fleeing oppression in their homelands, adds Laurie Ball Cooper, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project. IRAP is challenging Trump’s anti-refugee edicts in a federal court case pending in Seattle. Some 120,000 refugees who passed all the U.S. tests for admittance are stranded overseas by Trump’s ban, Ball Cooper said in a phone interview.
“Racism has been a prominent thread throughout U.S. policy and law from the beginning” of its regulation, Ball Cooper added. “That’s where this program truly stood apart from history. It should not be dragged in.”
That history began in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which the then-infant organized labor movement supported. It intensified and continued through the Immigration Quota Act of 1923, which set a worldwide yearly quota of 357,000 migrants to the U.S. That law took effect on Jan. 1, 1924, with strict and small—very small—quotas for anyone not from Northern and Western Europe.
Organized labor, unfortunately, supported that exclusionary policy until 1999, decades after the U.S. loosened its restrictions during the Lyndon Johnson administration and abolished individual country quotas.
Trump and his white nationalists versus the workers and unions of today and their allies symbolize the contrasting visions of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. That includes millions of enslaved Black people, captured by traders in western Africa, then shackled and brought here involuntarily.
The U.S. still is a nation of immigrants. Even the settlers from the Mayflower and in Jamestown, Va., were immigrants—a fact FDR, facing a hostile crowd of Daughters of the American Revolution, all colonial descendants, pointed out. “Fellow immigrants,” he jocularly began, angering them further.
In 2022, the most recent year for complete data, 46.2 million people, 14% of the U.S. population, were foreign-born. And 52% of the 10.47 million migrants that year were from Central and South America and the Caribbean. Another 31% were from Asia and the Pacific.
Most of the 10% from Europe came from the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, in that order. Of that European group, 29% went to New York and California, and another 31% went to Illinois, Florida, and New Jersey combined.
Cook County, Ill., where the Chicago City Council voted to make it a “sanctuary city,” leads all counties in taking European migrants. Los Angeles County is #3, sandwiched by Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, all New York City boroughs. But Los Angeles welcomed 3.29 million of the overall 10.47 million total. The runner-up counties—Miami-Dade, Harris (Houston), Cook (Chicago), and Queens, in that order —received a combined $ 5.2 million.
Trump doesn’t want any of those migrants, unless they’re white or if they’re rich. He ordered his departments of State and Homeland Security to deliver comprehensive plans to throw current migrants in the U.S. out, and to keep everyone else out, too. Meanwhile, he turned ICE agents loose.
“It should come as no surprise [that] the State Department is implementing the priorities of the duly elected president of the United States,” Trump State Department spokesman Thomas Piggott told the New York Times. “This administration unapologetically prioritizes the interests of the American people.”
Not all of them. Not even a majority. The most recent comprehensive survey, by the Pew Research Center in mid-June, showed 60% of a random but scientific sample of respondents oppose Trump’s suspension of asylum applications, while 39% approve. Ball Cooper discussed the asylum issue.
The same margin (59%-39%) held for keeping Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people escaping war and disasters. Keeping TPS recipients in the U.S. is a top cause of the Painters in particular and building trades unions in general.
And by a 54%-45% margin, respondents opposed Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent raids, which were then just beginning in intensity, violence, and viciousness.
However, Trump wants to take the U.S. back to the exclusionary policies of those 41 years, from 1924 to 1965. Nativism and white racism slammed the door on anyone—immigrant, asylum seeker, or refugee—from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Southern and Eastern Europe. A few snuck in illegally.
Then, the sole exception to that exclusion rule, especially during World War II: Temporary farmworkers, exploited “braceros,” from Mexico.
In the intervening years that Trump’s policy mimics, the U.S. barred Nazi-persecuted–and later murdered–Jews, Poles, Russians, and Roma (gypsies). Even Jewish refugees promised asylum from the Nazis were rejected. The infamous denial of the steamship St. Louis in 1939 shows that: It had 900 Jewish refugees from the Nazis, with papers. Just like the 120,000 Ball Cooper discussed.
They could see the lights of Miami and safety, but FDR’s anti-Semitic State Department barred them anyway. The ship sailed to Havana, where the captain had been told the refugees could stay until the U.S. let them in. The U.S. pressured Cuba, and it reversed its decision. The St. Louis sailed back to Europe, and most of its passengers later perished in Hitler’s death camps during World War II.
Until Trump came to power, refugees from nations torn by civil wars, murderous gangs or massive disasters were let into the U.S. Now, they’re not. That combination of Trump policies, producing “whites only” migration, was exposed in recent documents that the New York Times revealed.
Trump suspended refugee admissions in particular on his first day in office, the Times reported. Besides ordering plans for new and much lower migrant quotas, he wants to cap refugee asylum-seekers at 7500 per year, including people fleeing gangs and disasters. The cap now is 125,000.
In concrete terms, Trump’s turned his ICE agents loose in “blue” cities such as D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. He threatens to do so in New Orleans and Portland, Ore.
ICE invades schools, homes, work sites, Home Depot parking lots, courthouses, and even churches, pursuing, beating, tear-gassing, arresting, detaining, and deporting anyone with brown skin, migrant or not, citizen or not. In Chicago’s upscale Logan Square neighborhood, citizen kids as young as five or six years old freak out because ICE could nab their parents, their teachers, and their nannies.
In one particularly upsetting ICE assault, a helicopter landed a horde of agents on the roof of a South Shore apartment building in Chicago in the dead of night. They used tear gas and broke down doors to roust out all the residents, arresting many and injuring some. At least half are U.S. citizens.
And at least 22 people have died in federal custody, while four more undocumented people fleeing ICE have been hit and killed by cars. Another, in rural California, plunged off the roof of a greenhouse and fell to his death. Federal court injunctions have stopped some ICE raids, but the agency’s officers gleefully snub the courts and keep grabbing people.
None of this sits well with organized labor. In 1999, after years of study and lobbying, led by then-Unite HERE President John Wilhelm, the AFL-CIO reversed its historic opposition to immigration.
One reason: Recognition that migrants are not only an increasing share of the U.S. workforce, but are also the heavy majority of exploited and vulnerable workers in the nation. In other words, those who need union protection the most and who might be strongly for it, too.
“We can’t choose who we work with, but we can decide whether we will allow our employers and our society more broadly to divide us from each other and conquer us in the process,” Unite HERE says in its Solidarity with migrants statement posted on its website. It also “organized the Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride in 2003, which honored the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, and called for a bold immigration reform in the face of post-9/11 anti-immigrant bigotry and xenophobia.”
“Past and present, immigrant workers have been at the center of our union’s efforts to end poverty and change lives—from over 100 years ago, when our immigrant founders led the historic Bread and Roses strike, to today, when our immigrant members lead campaigns taking on some of the world’s most powerful billionaires and corporations,” adds Enrique Fernández, the union’s vice president for immigration, diversity and civil rights.
“Unite HERE members hail from nearly 200 countries. Immigrants work hard, pay taxes, own homes, raise U.S. citizen children, and are essential to the cultural and economic prosperity of our communities. They deserve a pathway to citizenship and strengthened labor protections.”
In 2001, the AFL-CIO Executive Council codified its decision of two years earlier by pledging “to increase the vigor and the reach of our participation in community coalition-building on immigrant issues with meetings and forums on the importance of full workplace and civic participation.
“With our partners in the faith-based, civil rights and immigrant advocate communities, we will work to increase public understanding of the contribution of immigrants in these communities and to generate political responsiveness to the needs of immigrants locally and nationally.”
Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), the federation’s constituency group for Spanish-speaking workers, reinforced those points this year, while sounding the alarm about the Trump regime’s repression, exploitation, and deportation of migrants.
“The change in immigration policies and the recent presidential executive orders are hurting the Latino communities around the country, promoting fear and uncertainty, forcing workers into the shadows, and discouraging them from reporting labor abuses,” LCLAA said.
“These policies are not just an attack on immigrants; they are an attack on the dignity, stability, and well-being of entire Latino communities. In this difficult time, it is important to ensure Latino workers and their families have access to reliable information and resources.
“Workers are facing threats of deportation, workplace exploitation, and the loss of essential protections, and without the right information, they are left vulnerable to unjust policies and abuses.” LCLAA pledged “to educate, organize, and equip Latino communities with the tools they need to defend their rights.
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