[NJFAC] ICE Raids and Crackdowns on Anti-Genocide Speech Are A Threat to All American Workers

How the ICE Raids and Crackdowns on Anti-Genocide Speech Are A Threat to All American Workers

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West, was injured and then arrested while documenting a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Friday. He is now facing a felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer with the the Los Angeles native's detention the latest example of how organized labor is being hit hard from the raids by masked ICE agents.

Not only is the Trump administration not going after the employers of undocumented labor, but it is instead targeting union members who were legally living and working in the US. Team Trump is doing so by cancelling humanitarian parole,  revoking the visas of many graduate student union members, and other ICE actions that target individuals in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color and potentially the wrong outlook on capital-labor relations.

Unions are increasingly sounding the alarm that the ICE agents snatching people off the street is part of the administration's wider crackdown on organized labor.....

Larger Plan at Work 

While militarized ICE agents sweeping into communities across the country might appease some of Trump's MAGA supporters and provide the illusion of doing something about the exploitation of foreign workers, a closer look shows that it is part of a coordinated attack on all of labor.

How so? Let's start with Donald himself and go from there.

Trump's businesses rely on and continue to seek H-2B non-agricultural "guest" workers. A crucial difference between the H-2B and H-2A—covering agricultural workers—and individuals who worked in the US under temporary protected status or humanitarian parole is that the latter two categories didn't have their ability to stay in the country legally tied to their work.

That made them less exploitable. They were free to change jobs and unionize.

Guest workers, on the other hand, are loved by Trump and many employers because they are basically indentured servants. Even the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security "acknowledge that H-2B workers face structural disincentives to reporting or leaving abusive conditions, and often lack power to exercise their rights in the face of exploitative employment situations."....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Baker: Will deficits from Trump’s tax cuts prevent fiscal policy for a recession?

Will the Deficits from Trump's Tax Cuts Leave Us Unprepared to Deal with a Recession? Dean Baker June 9, 2025

The May jobs report indicated that the labor market is still solid, even if there are some concerning signs like the rise in unemployment among Black women and the sharp fall in labor force participation. Whatever problems the Trump administration's policies on tariffs, immigration, and funding science might be causing; to date they do not seem to have pushed us into a recession.

Nonetheless we do need to recognize that we always have a risk of a recession, if not now, then at some point in the future. This fact is worth mentioning because we need to consider this risk in the context of the budget bill passed by the House which the Senate is now considering.

If some version of the House bill passes without major changes, we are looking at annual deficits of close to $2 trillion or nearly 7.0 percent of GDP. If the economy falls into a recession, reduced tax collections and increased payouts for unemployment insurance and other programs will raise the deficit by another 1.5 to 2.0 percentage points of GDP.  This means that we could be staring at annual deficits that are close to 9.0 percent of GDP, or more than $2.5 trillion.

The question to be concerned about is whether in that context Congress would be prepared to pass a stimulus to boost the economy out of recession, knowing that this will raise the deficit even further. Big stimulus packages were crucial for lifting the economy out of recession and getting the unemployment rate down in both 2008-09 and again in 2020-21.

We can hope that a future recession will not be as severe as these last two, but even a more typical recession can still push the unemployment rate above 6.0 percent, putting millions of people out of work. At least as important, when the labor market weakens, workers have less bargaining power. They are less able to quit jobs they don't like or that pay poorly.

Also, the economy can be very slow to rebound from even a mild recession without some additional stimulus. Following the 1990-91 recession we did not get back to the pre-recession level of unemployment until six and a half years. We had the crash of the housing bubble and another recession before getting the unemployment rate back down to levels close to what we saw before the 2001 recession. Automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance are great for helping workers get through the recession and limited the downside, but by themselves they will not get us back to full employment.  

As a result, they are less able to get wage gains that keep pace with inflation. This is especially the case for workers at the middle or bottom of the wage distribution, who are dependent on a tight labor market for the ability to secure real wage gains.

In posing the question about whether Congress would be willing to spend the money needed to boost the economy out of recession in a context where the deficit is already large, I am not asking about what is the right policy. I know what I would recommend, but Congress is not likely to be turning to me for advice on how to deal with the next recession. That is reason for asking now what Congress is likely to do when we get in this situation.

There is also an important point about the country's economic stability that really needs to be asked in the context of this budget bill. Many of us have been dismissive of the risks of large debts and deficits because the United States, as the world's strongest economy, did not have to fear investors fleeing from its debt and the dollar.

There is less basis to be confident about this point in the current political climate. The Trump administration is showing complete contempt for the building blocks of the science and technology that has made us the world's leading economy. The arbitrary cut off of billions of dollars in research funding, and the slashing of future budgets, will drastically slow the pipeline of innovations that have been a major driver of economic growth.

Attacking the university system and the inflow of foreign students will deprive the country of the sort of talented and hardworking individuals who have contributed enormously to making the United States a technological leader. On top of this, we now have an administration that boasts openly about awarding and denying massive government contracts for political purposes rather than merit. 

This way of doing business is a sharp departure from past practices. It makes the United States looks more like a politically unstable developing country rather than the rock solid island of stability it has been for more than a century. In that context, running large deficits is a problem. It can lead to a plunging currency, soaring interest rates, and soaring inflation. We should not have to be facing this situation, but the reality is that we do, and Congress needs to recognize this fact.

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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