Dissent

The once conventional wisdom that immigrants, especially the unauthorized, are unlikely candidates for labor organizing has turned out to be not so much wrong as incomplete. It overlooked several factors that make low-wage immigrants more “organizable” in the workplace than many of their U.S.-born counterparts. First, because new arrivals find jobs through social networks made up of other immigrants from the same place (and often from the same extended family), many workplaces contain within them an unusual potential for solidarity rooted in those very networks—a relatively rare phenomenon among U.S.-born workers. Further contributing to that potential is the shared racialization and stigmatization that many immigrants experience, which often serves as a unifying force. And while organizing is risky, the risks it involves are relatively modest compared, for example, to crossing the border without papers or, for that matter, labor organizing in many of the countries where immigrants grew up.