Panelists Say Immigration and Labor Policy Always Connected

The intersections of labor and immigration policy were the subject of a panel discussion hosted in January by Yale Law School’s Liman Center and the Center on Dispute Resolution, Quinnipiac University School of Law. Panelists explored how legal gaps and enforcement challenges — just as changes in the federal government were starting — affected immigrant and non-immigrant workers across a range of industries.

One of the commentators was Michael K.T. Tan ’08, a 2008 Liman Fellow, who came back to Yale Law School to direct the Movement Project, an initiative on labor, climate, and migration at Yale Law School. Tan also co-taught the Worker and Immigration Rights Advocacy Clinic. He explained that in many ways, the Trump administration has tried to make its immigration policy into a labor policy and frame immigrants as threats to citizen-workers.” This effort aimed to propel a myth that immigrants are taking American jobs, homes, and money, many have noted. Observers have long said that concerns have popular resonance at a time when people are concerned about the affordability of food, housing, health care, education, and more. Moreover, economic insecurity, coupled with divisive political rhetoric, has exacerbated tensions among different groups of workers. 

Mary Yanik ’14, a 2015 Liman Fellow and Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane Law School, emphasized that demonization of immigration has occurred before.

“The history of immigration is a history of racial exclusion and of using immigration enforcement as a blunt tool of labor regulation,” she said.
Yanik explained that workers worried about their immigration status may be afraid to report violations of labor law or to cooperate in employment and labor standards investigations. Without reporting, poor working conditions will go unchallenged and unabated, and individuals may lose wages, be unsafe, and be reluctant to organize, which in turn makes collective bargaining to improve such conditions difficult. 

“When workers cannot speak out, everyone is at risk,” Yanik said. 

 “When workers cannot speak out, everyone is at risk.”

— Mary Yanik ’14

Ibrahim Diallo, the 2024 Curtis-Liman Fellow and a former staff attorney at the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, spoke about the need for intersectional organizing around issues that impact workers. Labor organizations need “to look broadly at what is affecting their families and communities,” Diallo explained. 

For workers like taxi and rideshare drivers who are not covered by traditional labor law protections, including the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, organizers have been focused on state and local laws that can provide protections. Diallo explained that in New York City, organizers pushed for — and secured — an enforceable taxi drivers’ bill of rights and minimum wage law for rideshare drivers, and more initiatives were ongoing.  

Juan Fernando Luna León ’23, a 2024 Liman Fellow at UNITE HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles, discussed how unions have integrated immigration safeguards into collective bargaining agreements. 

“We were able to win important protections in our contracts, ensuring that employers require judicial warrants before cooperating with federal immigration authorities,” he said. 

Luna León noted that such measures primarily benefit unionized workers and that others were at risk.  

Panelists stressed the role that legal professionals can play in helping people navigate both labor and immigration law. For example, the Biden Administration’s Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement (DALE) authorized the Department of Homeland Security to grant temporary immigration protections to non-citizen workers who are victims of or witnesses to unlawful labor practices. Deferred action was designed to shield non-citizen workers from threats of immigration-related retaliation by employers. Panelists explained that people seeking deferred action benefited from legal guidance on the process, as well as from help gathering and preparing necessary documents. Yet few lawyers were well-versed in both the immigration and labor issues involved. 

The discussion also focused on tensions among labor groups. Tan emphasized the importance of building long-term alliances.

“How can we understand immigrant and native-born workers to be in common cause with each other?” Tan asked. “How can we work together to ensure that all of us can prosper?” 

Yanik provided one answer: most people can relate to being exploited at work, the unfairness of being unable to do anything about it, and how that exploitation and felt helplessness make working conditions worse for all. In that commonality lies the opportunity to build coalitions, Yanik said. Given that worker rights and immigration justice are intertwined, organizing, advocacy, and legal intervention makes change possible, she said.

While increasingly restrictive immigration policies loom, panelists remained hopeful about the resilience of labor and immigration movements and the potential for legal advocacy to drive systemic change. Tan, who is departing from Yale Law School and rejoining the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project as its deputy director, pointed to one bright spot.

“Despite everything seeming pretty terrible right now, there are ways in which our movements are more equipped to answer this call than before,” Tan said.