On January 23 in Minneapolis, more than seven hundred businesses closed their doors, and thousands of workers joined Minnesotans of every variety to demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leave the state. Nearly a century after the city erupted in a general strike, Minneapolis has again become a center of resistance — this time against federal immigration forces who have now killed two people and have turned the city into what many residents describe as a war zone.
Unions endorsed the January 23 action in a way we rarely see in the United States, where labor leaders often stay tightly within the bounds of “bread-and-butter” issues. The Minnesota AFL-CIO, backing the strike, warned that ICE’s operations were leaving people afraid to do the most basic things: going to work, shopping for groceries, sending their kids to school. That fear, its president Bernie Burnham said, was already harming working people across the state.
National labor leaders echoed the point. After the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse and member of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler called for ICE to leave Minnesota “before anyone else is hurt or killed,” explicitly linking immigration enforcement to danger for workers.
It’s about time organized labor took a clear stand against ICE. Rather than being adjacent to work, immigration enforcement is one of the key ways work is governed, and not in a way that benefits working-class people, US-born or otherwise. ICE is not simply a border agency that occasionally intrudes into the economy. It is a labor-market institution: an apparatus that disciplines workers, structures whole industries, and makes organizing riskier.
Rather than being adjacent to work, immigration enforcement is one of the key ways work is governed, and not in a way that benefits working-class people.
Economists have measured what happens when immigration enforcement expands. It reduces…
Auteur: Alex N. Press
