Immigrant labor in the U.S.

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Garment Bosses’ Slave Shop Revealed; Workers Still Face Deportation Threat
By Barry Fatland, The Militant, 4 September 1995. The exposure of slave-like conditions at a garment sweatshop in El Monte, where 72 Thai workers had been in bondage for years, has sparked widespread public outrage.
Mexican slave ring began in Chicago
By Michael Gillis and Brenda Warner Rotzoll, [29 July 1997]. The ring that allegedly forced deaf, undocumented immigrants from Mexico to work as peddlers originated in Chicago nearly a decade ago and later expanded to New York. The deaf Mexicans had been deceived by an offer to be taken to a paradise.
Sweatshop Workers Get $2 Million Settlement
By Michael Miller, Reuters, 23 October 1997. A group of Thai and Latino immigrant workers whose virtual slavery in barricaded sweatshops shocked America and rocked the garment industry, won a settlement of more than $2 million. The workers had been forced to work for up to 20 hours a day for less than $1 an hour and had not been allowed to leave their compounds, which were surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire.
Unions and the upsurge of immigrant workers
By David Bacon, 5 December 1997. The labor of undocumented workers pumps tens of billions of dollars into California’s economy, but workers themselves receive only a small percentage of it. High rate of exploitation is a source of extra profit for industries dependent on undocumented labor. The history of the union struggles of immigrant workers in Los Angeles and Southern California is by-and-large a history of success.
Immigration law—bringing back sweatshop conditions
By David Bacon, 11 October 1998. The enforcement of U.S. immigration law has become a key weapon in the proliferation of the return to exploitative sweatshop conditions in the workplace reminescent of a century ago. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made employer sanctions part of federal law.
The law that keeps workers chained
By David Bacon, 5 October 1999. Immigration law is a tool of the employers; they’re able to use immigration law as a weapon to keep workers unorganized, and the INS has helped them use it.
Immigrant workers win union
By Gloria La Riva, Workers World,, 15 October 1998. Immigrant workers at California Waste Solutions Co. in west Oakland won union recognition and a contract after a five-week wildcat strike. The word has spread among mostly immigrant workers in factories along the East Bay corridor that Local 6 is winning contract after contract and union protections.
The AFL-CIO reverses course on immigration
By David Bacon, 17 October 1999. Unions across the country are trying to decide whether undocumented immigrants are a threat or are potential union members. The AFL-CIO, instead of seeing immigrants as a problem, its unions have begun seeing them as the solution.
Toward Transnational Unionism?
By Paul Johnston, extract from Citizens of the Future: The Emergence of Transnational Citizenship among Mexican Immigrants in California (a work in progress), 20 March 1999. The stage is set for the imposition of a new labor regime which more effectively and selectively excludes undocumented immigrants, while also selectively inserting an expanded guest worker workforce into the lowest rung of the labor market. By politicizing and regulating secondary labor markets and by creating explicit institutional bridges between related public institutions in the U.S. and Mexico, this agenda may well create the context for a viable transnational unionism.
Access Denied
By Amitava Kumar, [16 August 1999]. The plight of the Indian H-1B workers in the United States. The fantasy of the new wired order, where fluid and mobile contracting will deliver goods, services and even government, to a well-connected world. The difficult questions about the consequences of this change, particularly for the weak and the most vulnerable parties in this process, do not feature very large in this plot.
INS insiders profit on immigrant dreams
By Walter F. Roche Jr. and Gary Cohn, The Baltimore Sun, 20 February 2000. Former immigration officials siphon millions from a program to entice foreign investors with the promise of green cards.
Immigrant Workers Must Be Free To Make a Living
By David Bacon, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 March 2000. A new world reality. The UN estimates that over 80 million people live outside their countries of origin. Growing economic inequality on a global scale, between rich and poor countries, causes this migration.