The Democratic Party’s allies in the AFL-CIO’s unions are pressuring unions and companies to protect illegal-alien migrant employees from deportation, effectively converting the pro-worker unions into wage-cutting front-groups for employers.

The conversion is described by the New York Daily News, which showed how progressive lawyers train local Teamster union leaders to negotiate workplace contracts which minimize employers’ cooperation with immigration enforcement agencies. The article says:

At a Wednesday class, funded by the Consortium for Worker Education, Mike Spinelli of Local 553 listened carefully as trainer Luba Cortés walked everyone through the difference between an administrative warrant and a judicial one. …

Spinelli paid particular attention because many of his members — immigrants who work at a Long Island dairy farm — were profoundly shaken when federal [immigration enforcement] agents raided nearly 100 7-Eleven stores last month in a search for undocumented workers.

“We deliver all the dairy to all the 7-Eleven stores in the city — you can imagine how scared some of these guys are,” he said. “It’s a scary time in general, and we’re hoping this can help the workers feel prepared and help protect them — and also so employers know they don’t have to just roll over.”

Unions once existed to push up workers’ wages by denying employers the ability to hire other people from outside the picket line.

However, since before 2008, unions have been enrolling illegal migrants who illegally crossed the line between the United States and other countries.

Since at least 2013, top union leaders are also working with the Democratic Party preserve the inflow of migrants across the line because migrants are likely to support the party — even though the additional migrants allow employers to pay lower wages to Americans. That changes came when President Barck Obama and his progressive allies pressured AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka to reverse the unions’ traditional hostility to wage-cutting illegal immigration.

The Daily News article showed how progressive lawyers are now trying to insert illegal-friendly, enforcement-hostile clauses in union-employer contracts. The article quotes Richard Blum, a lawyer with the pro-migration Legal Aid Society, describing a negotiating guide supplied by the AFL-CIO:

“Some laws require an employer to do X — and the union can get language in a contract that says they will do X but nothing more,” Blum told The News. “Unions can also bargain for notification when something is happening so they can offer help or possibly intervene, or for a guarantee that if a worker is required to get more paperwork, they be given the maximum time available, and returned with full seniority. Or if they can’t return, they get severance, things like that.”

President Donald Trump reportedly won a respectable share of union votes in the 2016 election partly because he promised to protect Americans from employers who hire cheap-labor migrants after they cross the line. A March 2016 interview by the National Public Radio with Teamsters member Antonio Caracciolo reported:

CARACCIOLO: Well, you know, in the Home Depots in Long Island and New York City, the immigrants hang out there for day labor. And when they – they chased them out of Alabama. They don’t hang out there as much anymore. And know the state of Arizona and Alabama, where they were challenging people for citizenship, the illegal immigrants left the states. The jobs become more available. When there’s less people, there’s other jobs available. The employers who were employing those illegal immigrants, they have to turn to more-skilled workers. As less people are available for the workforce, the individuals who are hiring have to pay more.

The New York Daily News reports that the Teamsters’ membership now includes “airlines [employees], truckers, dairy farmers and more — [and] also has a sizable share of immigrant workers, roughly a third, 40,000.”

Companies want more imported workers because the nation’s formal unemployment rate is low. Without a reserve army of unemployed people, companies are forced to compete for new workers by offering higher wages, bonuses and training opportunities. For example, a new chart shows that annual wage growth (including inflation) rises above 2 percent once the “prime age non-employment rate” drops below 23 percent.

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.