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[...] In the past thirty years, mass migration to the US reached levels unseen for a century, and those thirty years have not been a period of prosperity and wage growth for the working class, but the opposite. For those American workers who have experienced declining wages, long periods of unemplo…

Will a call for open borders inevitably alienate native workers?

The answer to that question will differ depending on what we think ultimately drives the nativist reaction among the working class — racial animus or material anxiety. To be sure, both factors are necessary to understanding how ant…

[...] Formally speaking, all immigrant workers, legally authorized or otherwise, have most of the same labor protections and rights to participate in workplace organizing as native workers. Substantively, the right to be present in a country is a precondition for securing all other rights. Even if …

Under the current system, then, even employers in sectors that rely on immigrant labor have little to lose from immigration restriction policies. We have built fences and walls, militarized the border, and imprisoned immigrants, without significantly impacting the availability of immigrant workers …

[...] American capital’s dependence on immigrant labor in the nineteenth century is unique among industrializing countries, in that the process of colonization and settlement had resulted in patterns of yeoman farming, rather than feudal agriculture, and thus lacked the reserves of surplus agricult…