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 anti-immigrant politics in the US has developed. Workers’ most immediate interest is in a protected labor market, and because the tendency of organized labor in the US has been to pursue rather narrow economic strategies, the historic orientation of major labor organizations like the AFL-CIO towards immigration has been one of restriction. Labor’s pursuit of this agenda, often with racialized rhetoric, makes it difficult to disentangle workers’ material concerns from racial animus. There is, however, a difference between acknowledging that racial formation and racist discourses mediate the translation of class interests into policy, and arguing that racial animus was the ultimate motivation for these policy positions. In labor historiography, workers’ anti-immigrant positions always suggest a tangled, confused relationship between race and the material interests of workers — even the most blatantly racist programs of organized labor, such as the California trade unions’ campaign to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act and the AFL’s defense of that Act for sixty years, were also crucially motivated by economic anxieties about immigrant competition.