The ILGWU and immigrant rights
“No other union in America had set up an Immigration Department. From the point of view of the union, immigration was an important ingredient.”
Labor has had a complicated relationship to immigration, including many eras and institutions marked by intense anti-immigrant sentiment. Historically, most unions opposed the organizing and hiring of undocumented workers. The ILGWU, in contrast, was long a “union of immigrants.” It was formed in 1900 on the East Coast, representing primarily newly arrived Jewish and Italian immigrants and grew to become one of the largest labor unions in the United States with a peak membership of 450,000 in 1969. As new waves of immigrants ranging from Latin America to China entered the garment trades, the ILGWU organized garment workers across the United States. As Jay Mazur explains below, most of the members were immigrants, and because of this developing services and organizing geared towards immigrant members’ needs and identities was a key ingredient of the ILGWU’s work. Such services included ESL and citizenship classes, lobby days for different ethnic groups, cultural celebrations, communication with union members in different languages, and immigration services.
In the late 70s, Jay Mazur and other ILGWU leaders and organizers helped form a diverse coalition of organizations whose shared goal was immigration and refugee policy reform, gaining the momentum and influence to become instrumental in advocating for IRCA’s amnesty program. Jay testified before Congress in 1980 in support of a generous amnesty program.
In the early 1980s the ILGWU became the first union to set up a program to provide legal services to its immigrant members and inform them of their rights. Known as the Immigration Project, this program would eventually become national and played a key role in the legislative battle for IRCA. It helped thousands of union members and their families apply for IRCA and become citizens.
In the interview segments below, advocates and ILGWU staff and members describe their experience at the intersection of immigration and labor, and the influential role of the ILGWU in the immigrant rights landscape.
Former ILGWU members and staff reflect on the many ways the ILGWU supported immigrant garment workers. These include Sagrario Mendez, a former garment worker and ILGWU member; May Chen, former Immigration Project staff; Muzaffar Chishti, former director of the Immigration Project; and Nancy Lorence, former ILGWU Local 23-25 Director of Education.
Jay Mazur was the ILGWU President from 1986 to 1995, and the UNITE President from 1995 to 2001. He began working at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1951 after graduating from high school. He spent his entire career working for the union, eventually becoming its president in 1986, the year of IRCA’s passage. Jay credits Kathy Andrade, a seamstress and ILGWU employee, with calling his attention to the plight of undocumented workers in the 1970s.
Anthony Romero is now the Executive Director of the ACLU, but in the mid 1980’s his “first real office job was as an intern at the ILGWU Immigration Project. He had just graduated from college, where his senior thesis focused on the potential impact of IRCA on Latino communities in New York City, and wanted to help eligible immigrants through the complex and time-limited process of qualifying for status through IRCA. He describes how his time with the ILGWU was ”tough but transformative,” reinforcing for him the power of legal advocacy as a tool for social change.
Joanna Chen was a garment worker in New York’s Chinatown, often working several jobs to survive. She describes how she benefited from the ILGWU’s support for its workers, and also her participation in the NYC Chinatown demonstrations of 1982, where the ILGWU organized tens of thousands of workers to force the un-unionized garment shops to the bargaining table and secure safe and fair working conditions for all. After receiving citizenship through IRCA, Joanna became an organizer for the ILGWU.