Well, one doesn't remember WW1 and the immediate post-WW1 years as high points of the American labor movement. In fact, the opposite is the case, and anti-immigrant politics contributed to employer attacks on workers. Mike Davis notes that the years between 1909 and 1913 saw an upsurge of mass strikes: "Beginning with the rebellion of immigrant steel workers in McKees Rock (Pennsylvania) and sweated New York garment workers (the Shirtwaist Strike) in 1909, the supposedly 'unorganizable' immigrant proletariat erupted in militant upheaval" (_Prisoners of the American Dream_, p.45). The war and the political reaction that came with it ended all that. After the war, mass deportation and the Palmer raids attacked workers with their anti-radical, anti-foreign hysteria. It crushed the Industrial Workers of the World. (See William Preston, Jr.'s _Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933_.) Mike Davis writes:
***** As one historian has put it, 1919 was 'the turning point...which didn't turn.'[65] It was the failed test of native labor's ability to unite with the immigrant proletariat. The defeat of the steelworkers' organizing drive marked the end of the remarkable insurgency of Eastern and Southern European workers that had rocked industry since 1909. Faced with a tidal wave of nativist reaction, led by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in midwestern industrial states, the 'new' immigrants retreated into the sanctuaries of ethnic community until the Depression triggered a second, even more militant upsurge. As for the skilled workers, the 1919 defeat opened the way for a broad employers' offensive...and established the open-shop 'American Plan' upon the ruins of the once mighty mineworkers and railway shop unions.
[65] David Brody, _Labor in Crisis -- The Steel Strike of 1919_, Philadelphia and New York, 1965. (p.50) *****
1919 also saw the "Red Summer," a wave of race riots and attacks against blacks, in Omaha, Washington, Knoxville, Chicago, and others. (See Herbert Shapiro, _White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery_.) And there was the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose story was recently featured in the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_: "The race war in Tulsa involved thousands of whites who destroyed most of the 35 square blocks of Greenwood [the black section of Tusla]...in riots that left as many as 300 dead" (Brent Staples, "Unearthing a Riot," _NYT Sunday Magazine_ 19 December 1999).
>The UMWA was probably the most immigrant friendly of all the big American
>unions
>during this time. As you may or may not know the USWA was created by UMWA
>money
>and organization. The UMWA was also the force behind the organization of
>the CIO.
Yes, and the CIO's organizing drive is what I was talking about in an earlier post.
>My Dad and my Grandad could make themselves understood in any number of
>Eastern and
>Southern European dialects and languages. I always got a big kick out of
>this when
>I was a young kid. This I guess you would call a cultural heritage?:o)
In fact, many, many stories like that must exist everywhere, especially in Midwest and on the East Coast. Important historical memories, and we shouldn't lose them. We got to remember them and pass them onto youths.
>We may need to put the brakes on immigration today?
Can't be done, short of WW3 or the end of capitalism.
>Nathan, posted some AFL-CIO boilerplate on H-1B; it's worth taking a look at.
I agree that temporary visas of that kind are no solution, though from migrant workers' point of view, it probably beats not having papers at all. I say unions gotta organize workers as they come, papers or no papers.
Yoshie