When the Wall Street Journal editorial board first wrote about the Los Angeles riots, it bemoaned the loss of cheap labor caused by President Donald Trump’s deportations, claiming that “Big Labor” was one of the political forces making increased immigration impossible.

It’s an odd claim to make since it was Big Labor that started the riots to stop Trump from deporting people in the first place.

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Service Employees International Union California President David Huerta was arrested early Friday morning for obstructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from serving a warrant on a clothing wholesaler in the Fashion District suspected of hiring illegal immigrants and falsifying employment papers.

The SEIU then began posting messages on social media platforms such as Bluesky, Instagram, and X, calling on activists to descend on the federal building where Huerta was being held, along with illegal immigrants arrested at other ICE raids throughout the city. That mob, created by the SEIU, first started the rioting in Los Angeles.

The SEIU is not alone. There is no major union in the United States today that supports Trump’s deportation policies. And in 2013, when former President Barack Obama pushed for a massive amnesty for tens of millions of illegal immigrants, an amnesty the Wall Street Journal editorial board fervently supported, every major union wholeheartedly endorsed it.

But it wasn’t always this way. Historically speaking, the Wall Street Journal is correct: For generations, Big Labor was against open borders. While the founder of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, was an immigrant himself (born in London), the AFL was fervently anti-immigrant. It was the major force behind the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred immigration from much of Asia entirely and required immigrants from other countries to pass a literacy test before they were even allowed into the country. 

From the beginning, Big Labor believed, correctly, that mass migration brought in cheap labor that undercut wages and undermined union organizing. At first, President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Immigration Act of 1917, but thanks in large part to pressure from the AFL, Congress overrode Wilson’s veto.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations was always more open to immigration than the AFL, but even after the two merged into the AFL-CIO in 1955, the combined organization still generally opposed immigration policies that brought in new workers, particularly the Bracero Program which at first brought in farm workers from Mexico, but soon spread to other industries such as railroad construction.

The founder of the United Farm Workers union, Cesar Chavez, was also famously against increased immigration, telling one reporter in 1972, “As long as we have a poor country bordering California, it’s going to be very difficult to win strikes.” Chavez’s UFW would routinely call federal immigration officials to tip them off when any illegal immigrant crossed one of their picket lines.

So what happened between 1972 and 2013 that caused Big Labor to flip-flop completely on the immigration issue?

In short, Big Labor got eaten by Big Government.

Private sector union membership peaked in 1954 at around 35%. By 1965, it had fallen to 30% and has steadily declined ever since. Today, just 5.9% of all private sector workers belong to a union. 

But among all workers, 9.9% belong to a union. The percentage of unionized government workers, about 33%, far outpaces the less than 6% of unionized private sector workers. And government unions are relatively new.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, he specifically did not want to give government workers the same collective bargaining privileges that he was creating for private sector workers. 

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt said at the time. “It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”

It was not until 1963 that President John F. Kennedy granted collective bargaining rights to federal workers by executive order, and New York passed the first legislation granting them collective bargaining privileges in 1967. Today, 33 states allow some type of collective bargaining for government workers; the bluest states with the highest taxes (California, Illinois, and New York) have the highest percentage of unionized government employees.

When you are a private sector union member, cheap immigrant labor is a direct threat to your job. If your employer is paying high union wages to its workers, but its competitor is paying immigrants much lower wages, the competitor will have a huge labor cost advantage. Cheap immigrant labor is going to drive your employer out of business. Cheap immigrant labor is going to cost you your job.

The calculus is entirely different if you are a government union member. Governments are a monopoly. They can’t go out of business. More immigrants just mean more government services, which means more jobs and bigger budgets. 

Just look at the LA Unified School District, where the number of students enrolled has dropped by 200,000, from about 640,000 in 2015 to about 410,000 today. With thousands of middle-class families leaving California every year, the number of students would be even lower without immigration. 

But while the number of students has fallen by a third over the last decade, the number of LAUSD employees has increased by almost 20%! The more immigrant children you have in your school system, the more English as a second language teachers you need, the more special education teachers you need, and the more resource teachers you need. Poor immigrant families need lots of government services. And the government employees who provide those services are prime union membership targets.

For decades, private sector workers dominated Big Labor and set its priorities. But starting in the 1960s, as Democrats allowed more and more government workers to unionize, government workers took over Big Labor. In 2010, for the first time ever, government workers outnumbered private sector workers in the labor movement. 

You can see this takeover affect union decision-making in real time. In 2007, the AFL-CIO opposed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act because it argued that the guest worker programs in the bill would undercut American workers’ wages. But just six years later, the AFL-CIO wholeheartedly endorsed and actively pushed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, which had the exact same guest worker programs. 

Big Labor had chosen to embrace open borders and cheap labor with the understanding that those immigrants would need government services, and those government workers could unionize far more easily than private sector workers.

As the share of private sector workers has declined and the share of government workers has grown, there has also been an element of ideological capture. Private sector unions were always just as interested in protecting their employers as they were in protecting their workers. You can’t have workers without an employer. But government unions are only interested in protecting and advancing the interests of the Democratic Party.

This means that where an AFL-CIO dominated by coal miners and manufacturing workers would oppose climate change regulations that shut down coal plants and make energy more expensive, a labor movement dominated by government workers would have no reason to oppose higher energy costs or shutting down entire energy industry sectors.

TRUMP’S DEPORTATION RECORD IS UNDERRATED

And it is not just climate change. Labor leaders these days take positions on issues such as Gaza, transgender ideology, and Black Lives Matter that have no impact on their members’ wages or working conditions. Big Labor has turned into just another arm of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party supports open borders.

If Big Labor wants to regain its relevance in politics and not become just another interest group in the Democratic Party, it will have to wean itself off dependence on government workers and engage the private sector again. It must also abandon the Democratic Party’s position on immigration and reconnect with its nativist roots.