Labor opposition targeted employer-controlled immigration, not immigrants themselves

Evidence

Although a good deal of unqualified anti-foreign sentiment was circulating among American workingmen by this time, the campaign against contract labor rested on a sharp distinction between voluntary immigration and that induced or controlled by capitalists. With remarkable unanimity, union leaders clung to this distinction through the late eighties and into the beginning of the next decade. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences social identity theory: unions preserved working-class solidarity by externalizing blame to capitalists, keeping fellow workers as in-group. — connects to: Even labor unions conceded a racial framing of immigration restriction by 1924. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1933