The Other “Right to Work”: Unauthorized Workers and the Labor Vision of Sanctuary Cities

David Helps, University of Southern California

In the United States, the passage of the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) made it a criminal offense for unauthorized immigrants to work and for employers to hire them. Historians and social scientists have analyzed how the criminalization of work and IRCA’s “employer sanctions” impacted the enforcement of labor and immigration law, trends in wages and working conditions, civil rights in the workplace, and unionization efforts in industries heavily populated by immigrants. Yet considerably less is known about the relationship between the criminalization of unauthorized workers and the simultaneous Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s. This paper takes up the question through a case study of the Los Angeles metropolitan region—the country’s so-called “illegal alien capital,” its fastest-growing labor market, and a tribune of sanctuary activism. It follows union organizers, Catholic clergy, and workers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico who asserted a “human right to work” that deviated from the mainstream Sanctuary Movement by refusing the moral and legal distinction between Central American refugees fleeing U.S.-backed dictatorships and job-seeking migrants displaced by economic conditions in Mexico. This network of activists and migrants, I argue, instead combined the mainstream movement’s claim that refugees had a “right to remain” with more far-reaching rights claims based on a transnational concept of citizenship bestowed by membership in the working class. By the end of the 1980s, this alternative vision became overshadowed by the now familiar definition of sanctuary as the practice of limited cooperation between local police and federal immigration enforcement. Yet I suggest that the labor vision of sanctuary cities continued in the 1990s and after as an influence on the city’s labor movement as it transformed Los Angeles from the U.S. capital of the “open shop” to a national model of successful immigrant worker organizing.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 160. Past as Prologue: Migrant Labor, Migrant Rights, and “Multiculturalism” in Late Twentieth-Century Los Angeles