United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain is shrugging off concerns over mass immigration, particularly a flood of illegal aliens at the southern border, and its historically crushing impact on labor unions.
In an interview with Axios, Fain downplayed the fact that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have overseen more than 10 million migrant encounters at the nation’s borders since early 2021.
“They’re not invading our nation,” Fain said of illegal aliens. “They’re human beings.”
Fain’s remark underscores the gigantic shift on immigration policy among labor unions in the United States that started in the mid-1990s.
Whereas union leaders like the AFL-CIO’s Samuel Gompers and William Lucy of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists once lobbied against unchecked immigration to the United States, arguing it cuts wages, cripples the bargaining power of union workers, and diminishes living standards, Fain and union leaders today gloss over any impact mass immigration has on the jobs and wages of their members.
Research, for decades, has proven otherwise.
The late Vernon Briggs Jr., a labor economist at Cornell University, spent much of his career documenting how low levels of immigration historically boosted union membership in the U.S. labor market while high levels of immigration crushed union membership.
“By 2006, the foreign-born population has swollen to 12.1 percent of the population and almost 15 percent of the labor force. Union membership in 2006 had continued the decline … falling to only 12 percent of the employed nonagricultural labor force,” Briggs told the House subcommittee on immigration in 2007:
The revival of the phenomenon of mass immigration is, of course, not the only explanation for the decline in union membership. There are multiple factors — all of which are beyond the scope of this testimony. But mass immigration is one of the key factors especially because of [sic] the large component of the total flow are illegal immigrants (estimated in 2006 to number close to 12 million persons, of whom an estimated 7.4 million are illegal immigrant workers). [Emphasis added]
In 2001, Briggs published a report showing how the lower the foreign-born population in the U.S., the higher union membership is in the workforce:
Chart via Center for Immigration Studies
Briggs noted:
Since 1965, when policymakers inadvertently renewed mass immigration, the foreign-born population of the United States has increased by 231 percent (from 8.5 million immigrants to 28.4 million immigrants), and the civilian labor force has risen by 86 percent (from 74.4 million workers, to 139 million workers), but union membership has fallen by 10 percent (from 18.2 million members, to 16.3 million members) over this interval.
…
The decline in union membership and the impact of mass immigration both have been identified by the Council of Economic Advisers as contributing explanations for the worsening income inequality in the nation.
Economic libertarians have made clear that their support for unchecked immigration is heavily influenced by research showing that high levels of immigrants entering the U.S. workforce squashes the bargaining power of labor unions.
“We found that immigration reduced union density by 5.7 percentage points between 1980 and 2020, which accounted for 29.7 percent of the overall decline in union density during that period,” Cato Institute researchers admit:
This effect was concentrated in the private sector and for male workers with a smaller effect for female workers and no effect on public sector unionization. We found this happens because immigrants have a lower preference for unionization and because immigrants increase diversity in the workforce that, in turn, decreases solidarity among workers and raises the transaction costs of forming unions. [Emphasis added]
German economists have found a similar trend, writing in their findings from a 2022 report, “An immigrant has an almost 11 percentage point lower probability of being a union member than a native.”
Such trends have continued on Biden and Harris’s watch. Despite claiming to be the most pro-union administration in American history, union membership dropped to just 10 percent in 2023 — a record low following a record low of 10.1 percent in 2022.
This record low in union membership coincides with a record number of immigrants now living in the United States. By March of this year, the foreign-born population stands at 51.6 million. Put another way, about 3 in 19 people living in the U.S. were born in a foreign country.
At this rate, the foreign-born population may hit more than 82 million by 2040.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
