Trump's Immigration Plans Meet a Powerful Adversary: Unions - WSJ
LOS ANGELES—Unions, which have felt conflicted lately over how to deal with Trump, found an issue this past weekend over which to confront him: immigration. It came after the head of the state’s biggest union was arrested here for allegedly obstructing federal agents from conducting an immigration raid. The union says he was “peacefully observing.” David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union California, appeared in court Monday afternoon. He was released on $50,000 bail.
Just a half mile away, his union, which represents a swath of working-class California, including nurses, janitors and security guards, organized a sprawling protest in downtown’s Grand Park. Other unions declared solidarity with the SEIU and with immigrants caught up in federal raids.
The clash may become a watershed in how organized labor deals with Trump. In recent years many rank-and-file union members warmed to Trump’s outreach to working-class voters. Union leaders, who traditionally back Democrats, have wavered over how stringently to oppose him, if at all. Their decision to fight him in this instance in no small part reflects the growing presence of immigrants in union ranks.
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One reason the ICE raids have drawn such protests is that Los Angeles is home to precisely the sort of undocumented immigrants that Americans, according to polls, don’t think should be targeted: long-established residents who pay taxes and have never committed a crime. Most of California’s unauthorized immigrants arrived during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, when Mexico’s economy was in crisis and bloody civil wars gripped parts of Central America.
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During much of the 20th century, union leaders saw immigrants as a threat to their members’ livelihoods. But as declining manufacturing thinned their traditional base, union organizers looked to other sectors for new members. Los Angeles was one of the first places where the shift took hold, starting with an SEIU campaign to organize janitorial workers in the 1980s. This fight comes at a delicate moment for the relationship between unions and Trump, who has helped remake Republicans’ image as the party of the working class.
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