Entry and Equality? Union Strength and Immigration Policy in OECD Countries, 1980-2010

An emerging literature looks at how trade unions approach immigration. A main finding in this literature is that unions have ambivalent positions. Importantly, however, this ambivalence is thought to be higher in regard to immigrant entry than immigrant rights (i.e. rights that are granted to those that have already entered). Traditionally, unions have been depicted as preferring low rates of immigration in order to avoid labor market competition for their members, yet there is also evidence that they have realized that restrictive entry policies are counterproductive since they cause precarious irregular immigration (Watts 2002). In regard to rights, the positions of unions should be less ambiguous. Indeed, it is in the interest of unions to promote immigrants’ rights so as to lower the migrant workers’ “competitive advantage” vis-à-vis local workers. In this paper, we use data on immigration policy for 18 OECD countries for the years 1980-2010. Using various different policy indices, these data allow us to differentiate between a number of dimensions of immigration policy, notably the area of immigrant entry and the area of immigrant rights. We can thus explicitly test whether strong unions affect entry policies differently than rights policies. We find that indeed, union strength is associated with more restrictive entry policies for labor migrants, but that on the other hand, strong unions are associated with more rights for these migrants, although this is not robust to different model specifications. Our findings thus lend further support to the hypothesis that unions have nuanced positions towards immigration, but also suggest that they affect policy making relating to entry more than policy making relating to rights.