How to Debunk Anti-Immigrant Myths at Work

Anti-immigrant myths flood our airwaves. They dominate news cycles and our online feeds. And now they’re amplified from the highest halls of power.

President Donald Trump has asserted, for example, that millions of immigrants came to the U.S. “from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums,” a claim one expert found “too ridiculous to dignify.”

The lies spread like wildfire. Corrections, if they’re issued at all, fade into the background. Trump’s baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, prompted bomb threats against Springfield schools.

The misinformation is designed to infuriate—and usually to inflate someone’s political fortunes or bank account. Case in point: Influencer Geeth Sooriyapura revealed last year that he had made $300,000 running Facebook pages for UK audiences, many of which center around inflammatory, anti-immigrant posts.

Sooriyapura doesn’t even live in the UK—he lives in Sri Lanka, 5,000 miles from London. He now runs a “teaching academy” showing others how to make money attacking immigrants, often with AI-generated posts and videos.

Assaulted as we are by propaganda priming us to hate, conversations around immigration can often feel loaded—and much more so in the workplace. How can misinformation be challenged in a way that builds solidarity with your co-workers?

GROUND IT IN THE WORKPLACE

People often hold prejudicial views in the abstract that don’t hold up in real life. So it’s useful to ground conversations in the reality of the workplace, said Chris Anders, a steward with Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 666 in Virginia.

Some electricians worry that immigrant members aren’t committed to the union for the long haul. But when his co-workers gripe that “they don’t really care, they ain’t real electricians, they ain’t gonna stick around,” Anders points out that some immigrant workers are participating in a training program his local helps put on for electricians to bolster their technical skills.

“We’re seeing people from my job site who are going after 10, 11 hours of work, then a 30 minutes to an hour commute, and spending another three hours in a class at night,” he said. “People are beat at the end of the day. The thought of another three hours, four hours on top of it all” makes them realize just how seriously some immigrants are taking the job.

As for worries that immigrant workers produce lower-quality work, he says, “I’ve seen a lot of dumbasses. But you’ll see dumbass electricians of every nationality.”

Framing the issue in union language is key. Maybe “one guy is not gonna be sympathetic to the immigrant struggle because he believes American borders need to be protected,” said Francisco “Paco” Arago, a journeyman wireman and member of IBEW Local 11. “But if this guy’s wearing a hard hat like you, you want to speak to the issues that are relevant to them.”

He often brings up the union’s founder, Henry Miller. “His parents were German immigrants, and English was his second language,” Arago said. “He found guys that would speak Polish and Irish and German to folks to get them into the union, because we were hungry and wanted to build a base of power.” For the same reasons, he advocates for making union materials available in several languages today.

“We all put our hand up and swore in front of each other to further the purposes of the IBEW,” he said. “The purpose isn’t just for you to keep your head in the sand and make a paycheck. The purpose is to be defenders of working people in this country, to be a force to be reckoned with against exploitative corporations and shitty politicians that want to trample on the rights of workers.”

The approach even applies to contractors. “If there’s gonna be ICE raids on job sites, we don’t approach the general contractor and appeal to his empathy towards immigrants,” Arago said. “What we say is, ‘Hey, this is a safety issue if we don’t lock down our job sites. Because if you have 10 armed masked guys running on the job site, that guy on the scaffold might fall off because he’s scared.’ We have to speak their language.”

‘WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THAT?’

“I think a lot of us have a knee-jerk reaction when someone says something racist or anti-immigrant, and it’s really common to just be really angry and shut that person down, which is real,” says Kate, a Minneapolis educator who asked that we not use her full name because of the atmosphere of federal repression. “I also think there’s a place for curiosity and asking questions: ‘What makes you think that? Where are you getting that information?’

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“I know it’s hard when we’re deeply, deeply offended by what other people are saying,” she says, “[but] if we want to have a chance of moving people we have to be able to listen, and we need to educate. If people truly understood what was happening and had good information, I don’t think they would support what is happening to our immigrant students and families.”

“The propaganda has been so strong, so successful, that people who are not very removed from immigration are now on the side of, ‘Well, those immigrants are coming, and they’re getting free stuff,’” said Niklas Moran, who works as a stower, storing inventory in an upstate New York Amazon warehouse. When those conversations come up, he asks: “Well, how does that immigrant raise your rent? Who wants you to believe that immigrants are getting free stuff?

“Did your rent really increase because of poor people coming from other countries? They’re able to outbid you on rental property in the Hudson Valley? It’s not happening,” he said.

Some workers may worry that if immigrant workers join the union, there will be less work to go around. “On the other side of the coin, a non-union shop that has all immigrants, they’re getting half of what we’re getting paid,” Arago said. So not only are they exploited, but also “those contractors are able to outbid us on projects, because their labor costs are low.” Bringing all workers up to union standards is the best way to remove the threat of low-wage competition.

There is a time to shut the conversation down, like if someone is being racially disparaging, Anders said, but where possible, he tries to have an open conversation and get to the root of a worker’s concerns. Often it’s not about immigrants, but underlying fears about job security that are better tackled through collective power.

When co-workers talk about how immigrants should come “the right way,” Moran often asks about their family histories. He said people often overestimate the difficulty their family had in coming to the U.S.: “I thought my family immigrated ‘the right way,’” he said, “and then I looked into it and it was like, well, [at that time] it was pretty much impossible to immigrate the wrong way.”

But he finds that people are much more receptive to this sort of conversation if it’s with someone they know and trust: “It takes building a relationship with people.”

LEARN BY DOING

You may be tempted to respond to every piece of misinformation, but what is often more effective is involving people in struggles directly.

Uniting around shared demands and frustrations in the workplace is key. That could mean trying to get your immigrant and non-immigrant co-workers fighting side by side on an issue they agree on—whether that’s raising wages, fixing a safety hazard, or or stopping abusive discipline.

Or it could mean making the case for why your union should join local fights for immigrant defense, or do more to organize immigrant workers. Emphasize how these struggles can help make your union stronger.

Some members may be wary of their union taking up “political issues” like immigration. But many workers have found that fighting for immigrant members and the wider immigrant community has only strengthened the union.

“Anybody who thinks we have to ignore certain issues or avoid certain political conversations in order to grow the base, they don’t understand what it means to grow the base,” Ryan Andrews, an English teacher and member of United Teachers Los Angeles, told Labor Notes last year.

UTLA’s immigrant defense organizing has gotten members across the political spectrum more engaged with the union, he said, because it opened the door for conversations about shared values, whatever their political differences. Last year, students in his district held a walkout over Trump’s immigration policies, and were assaulted by two adult men. The union circulated a petition demanding that the district denounce the attacks, meet with impacted students, and take steps to ensure their safety at future actions. Andrews said that members of varying political beliefs signed the petition—because whatever their politics, they cared deeply about their students.

“We are going to have people that have different political beliefs and views,” Kate said, “but I think if we can come back to our common ground that we all are here because we love and care for our students, and these are the ways that we’re showing up for our students right now… I think the vast majority of people can be moved by that.”