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While many U.S. and Canadian unions historically marginalized immigrant workers, by the early 1990s, key unions achieved success organizing immigrant workers and adopted more progressive immigration policies. North America's major labor federations also made significant changes. The Canadian Labour Congress created a National Anti-Racism Task Force in 1994 to address, among other issues, the links between racism and Canadian immigration policies. In 2000, the AFL-CIO reversed its previous support for legislation that contributed to the discrimination and intimidation of immigrants. Then in 2003, a coalition of major U.S. unions, NGOs and community organizations organized the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to call attention to the rights of immigrants. This paper argues that shifts in union immigration policies emerge not only out of demographic changes that generate the need to organize immigrant workers, but also reflect larger changes wrought by processes of economic integration. It also suggests that unions' adoption of less draconian immigration policies provide new political arenas for transnational labor collaboration. A 1997 campaign conducted by the Teamsters, UFW, and Mexican labor activists to defend the rights of migrant farmworkers who had left their community in Mexico to work in the Washington apple industry provides one example. Another example is advocacy in favor of labor rights for undocumented workers by the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions in court cases. We believe these and other examples will show that transnational links and amicus advocacy led official federation policy on immigration reform. These examples show how social change occurs in large, diffuse organizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tracks the development of refugee policy in Canada, Australia and the United States over the past twenty years. Historically, nations made strategic choices about how many refugees to accept from which regions. Increasingly however, asylum seekers arrive at borders without U.N. refugee status, and require processing by national level immigration officials to determine their eligibility for protection. I discuss how national governments in the United States, Canada and Australia have attempted to stem the flow of asylum seekers who seek protection by limiting access to their refugee status determination systems. Examples of these attempts include Safe Third Country treaties, interdiction at sea, visa checks at foreign airports, mandatory detention, excision of territory and expedited removal. I argue that in all three countries, refugee policy has undergone a transformation as a public policy area, and has begun to merge conceptually and practically with domestic immigration policy. As asylum seekers come to be viewed as illegal immigrants, often referred to in the media as security threats or "queue jumpers," refugee policy is losing its separate identity, and thus its insulation from the politics of illegal immigration control. The data are drawn from interviews with key refugee policy makers and advocates in each of the three nations, as well as content analysis of the policy frames used in legislative hearings and newspaper coverage. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]