[...] whatever native workers may fear about the intensified competition from new entrants to the labor market, with regard to the rights of the immigrants who enter the US, all workers benefit when those new workers are protected from employer despotism. Defending the rights of labor depends on labor’s organized power, and that power is hard to sustain if employers can hold large sections of the working class hostage to worries about their legal status. Focusing on rights also avoids the thornier problem of flow, where there has been a long and unsettled debate about where workers’ interests lie. In any capitalist labor market, a liberal immigration regime seems threatening to workers, because any increase in the supply of immigrant labor puts native workers at risk in the short term — by heightening job insecurity or downward pressure on wages. Even if the labor economics research shows that this impact is minimal, for unorganized workers who have few other strategies for protecting their economic interests, immigration can loom as a pressing concern. For these reasons, the tendency of organized labor in the US has been to support some sort of restriction with regard to immigration flow, even in the present day, when on rights-related questions, like detention or amnesty for undocumented workers, unions have been quite aggressive in supporting immigrants.

But this is a self-defeating strategy. The basic fact is that you can’t fight to protect immigrant rights while also unleashing a legal regime against immigrant flows. In other words, it is hard to fence off policies directed at one horn of the dilemma from affecting the other one. Fighting to defend one’s labor or political rights becomes more challenging — if not impossible — if you lack the basic right to be in the place where you live and work. When the flow of migration itself is minimal that conflict between the right to enter and other rights may not be so conspicuous. However, when the migration flow is significant, and efforts to restrict entry intensify, the legal apparatus that is deployed will always place immigrant workers in a highly vulnerable position in the labor market. Because their right to remain in a country is insecure, these workers are more vulnerable to exploitation and less likely to make claims on whatever rights to labor or political participation they formally possess.