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by Apocryphon 2086 days ago
It's rather parochial and essentialist to imagine that American labor unions are inherently anti-immigration. This country was founded by immigrants after all, and certainly more recent immigrants can bring in new innovations that can improve our current flawed institutions. Perhaps the next generation of labor unions can do better. To imagine that there is a "context of America" that is fixed and unchanging is to both deny the many cultural contributions that immigrants have brought to this country, and to deny that this country's context is perpetually changing.
1 comments

True, it is a bit unfair to be prejudiced that way. But you know the famous saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me". I haven't forgotten how Avalon and Peru and Excelsior came to be. And when I tried, it was brought home to me again why I shouldn't.
There is a rich irony in your evocation. As a former resident of that neighborhood, and as someone from that continent once denied, I can see that times can change. Perhaps this country has. And even labor unions, too.
I'm eager to believe you're right. Which of your favourite unions has an immutable tenet to be pro-immigration?
Even a cursory glance at contemporary tech movements show that they are largely culturally progressive in nature. Anything from the TWC reveals that they fit in with the general leftist Bay Area political milieu:

https://techworkerscoalition.org

https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/f...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/13/14264804/palantir-immigra...

If you think any of these groups are going to produce something that can be turned into a nativist movement, then you don't seem to have a clear idea about the state of modern politics.

Well, I think you'll find from my previous arguments that immutability of the tenet is crucial. If it is an essential part of the belief system, only good can come from stating it to be so.

The hesitance indicates to me a desire to tack into shifting winds: useful, perhaps, to you who only has goals accidentally coincident to mine, but deleterious to me. But that's overly judgmental, perhaps you simply haven't had the time.

The schism is fixable. I will wait, acting only to preserve the trenches as they are. But until then it remains a schism.

Perhaps they did not need to state that tenet because it is obviously self-evident.