Question

Labor Unions typically favor tough restrictions on immigration, while employers tend to favor more liberal rules. Why? Explain your answer in details.

Answer 1

To answer answer this question and as well understand the explanation we must first need to understand what are the different interests of employers and labor unions.

Let's start with labor unions, the primary motive of the labor unions is to protect the rights of labors. By protecting the rights labors I mean bargaining for a minimum wage that every labor must get irrespective of the kind of work. So the interest of labor unions is to make sure labors gets some minimum wage.

Let's now come to employers, the primary motive of every employer is to make profit. And how do they make profit? The employers make profit by lowering their cost of production, for lowering their cost production they try to offer a wage as low as possible. If it weren't for the labor unions we would not have any minimum wage that we have now.

Now after understanding the interest of labor unions and the employers let's come to question now. Why labor unions typically favour strict restrictions on immigration and while employers favor more liberal rules.

The process when someone comes from his own country to another country to settle permanently is called immigration. As you can notice already immigration allows the country's employers to employ workers from a poor countries coming to that country to live and work. This allows employers to employ labors at a very low wage rate. That's is the reason why employers favours more liberal immigration rules.

On the other hand, when workers from a poor country comes to relatively rich country to work the bargaining power of labor unions gets weak. Since the poor labors are willing to work at a relatively lower wage rate than the native labors. This is against the interests of the labor union. That's is the reason why labor unions favour tough restrictions on immigration.

We can see this in the light of current situation in United States. The trump administration is very strict on immigration rules and stopped issuing H1B visas to immigrants and claims that companies should hire local Americans more. And while the company owners are against this strict law on immigration since they are now forced to hire local Americans instead of Asian workers which would be willing to work at lower wage.