Are labor unions still relevant? That seems to be the prevalent question on the minds of both workers and employers these days, especially when it comes to the pitched battle over education reform and the dismal outlooks for blue collar and low wage workers.

But the New York Times is reporting on labor’s new strategy to tap into a long overlooked sector of the country’s workers. And where’s it happening? At the car wash:

As organized labor’s ranks continue to decline, unions are looking increasingly to low-wage service workers as a source of growth, convinced that these workers — car washers, janitors, nursing home aides, security guards and pharmacy clerks — will be eager to join. In some ways, union leaders say, this campaign parallels previous ones in which unions organized thousands of immigrant janitors in Houston and Los Angeles and substantially lifted their wages.

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The leaders of the unionization drive acknowledge that success will be difficult. “These immigrant workers are being beaten down by the system,” said Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers. “They deserve a chance of having a voice at work, and we are good at helping people do that.”

The news comes just as the Los Angeles Times is reporting that California’s losing its union jobs faster than any other state. Of course, the unions’ success will hinge in large part on their ability to reconcile the longstanding racial tensions between labor and immigration. The US labor movement has had a long, fraught history of overlooking struggles faced by workers of color, and the anti-immigrant fervor that’s sweeping the moment could force them to make a very declarative stance.

A border activist charged with littering for leaving jugs of water in the Arizona desert for migrants was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday.

Dan Millis, a volunteer with the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths, was convicted in a federal court of littering when he and three other volunteers left water for border crossers in 2008 along a section of the Arizona desert that was a designated wildlife refuge. He faced a $5,000 fine and six months in jail for refusing to pay the $125 ticket.

On Thursday the Ninth Circuit overturned his conviction and ruled 2-1 that the statute was vague enough such that water did not constitute garbage. The dissenting opinion was written by Judge Jay Bybee, a former Bush administration assistant attorney general who co-wrote that administration’s torture memos. Bybee wrote: “Leaving plastic bottles in a wildlife refuge is littering under any ordinary, common meaning of the word.”

“It’s a win,” Millis said. “We’re happy with the outcome but we’re not happy with the situation that continues to exist. I’m thinking about how this can hopefully turn into better border policy.”

Not if the federal government can help it. Millis said that his defense, led by Arizona attorney Bill Walker, was forbidden to mention in court why he was out there in the first place, and why No More Deaths does its work. Millis was forced to argue his case without what he called a necessity defense.

“We are out there because of a flawed, inhumane border policy,” Millis said. “There are human lives at stake.”

Since 2001, No More Deaths has provided water and operated medical stations for border crossers in the Southern Arizona deserts. It’s organizational policy to return to the locations of their water drops to pick up emptied jugs, and pick up any trash they find when they’re out and about. Millis said they recycle, too.

On February 22, 2008 he was stopped by two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officers who cited Millis for “dumping of waste” along oft-traveled trails. Millis said that while they confiscated the 22 gallons of water he planned to leave for migrants that day, they did not take away the trash Millis had also collected. Just two days prior to his run-in, Millis had also discovered the body of a 14-year-old Salvadoran girl named Josseline Jamileth Hernandez Quinteros. Hernandez was traveling with her younger brother. The two were traveling to the U.S. to be reunited with their family in Arizona. But he arrived alone.

The verdict comes on the heels of reports of a year of unprecedented deaths along the border. Millis said that in the six months between when the Ninth Circuit first heard his case and yesterday, when they issued their verdict, 126 migrants had perished in Arizona. Most die from dehydration and heat-related illnesses in the region where daytime temperatures soar into the triple digits.

“That’s 126 too many,” he said. “It’s inexcusable.”

In recent years, multiple border activists have been cited for littering by the Fish and Wildlife officers. In June 2009, a federal jury convicted another activist on a similar littering charge. No More Deaths activist Walt Staton was sentenced to 300 hours of community service and a year of probation.

On Thursday the Ninth Circuit reminded Millis that their verdict would likely not protect humanitarian aid groups from future prosecution. Still, it’s some vindication for a group that has no plans to stop helping people who make the treacherous journey through the country’s dangerous borders. “It’s a moral admission by the U.S. government,” Millis said. “It’s a little bit of their conscience peeping out, that maybe this is not the best use of our taxpayer money.”

“We should probably start looking at the root causes, and changing our border policies, demilitarize our border and reform our trade policies. That’s what it means to me anyway.”

Does everyone feel safe yet? It’s September 1, the day that unmanned surveillance drones arrive to patrol the entire southwest U.S.-Mexico border.

Reuters reports that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has sent Predator B drones into the air from Corpus Christi, Texas, today to begin surveillance of the United States’ 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

Napoiltano told reporters: “With the deployment of the Predator in Texas, we will now be able to cover the southwest border from the El Centro sector in California all the way to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, providing critical aerial surveillance assistance to personnel on the ground. This is yet another critical step we have taken in ensuring the safety of the border and is an important tool in our security toolbox.”

By 2011, there will be a total of seven unmanned aircrafts hovering in the air, most over land, and at least one patrolling the coast. These aircrafts, which are identical to military toys used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, rely on radar technology to detect human movement and are specially designed for long, high-altitude flights. According to McAllen, Texas’ The Monitor, they’ve identified some 4,000 people crossing through the desert and 15,000 pounds of marijuana.

And more aircrafts are on their way, too. When Congress passed an extra $600 million for border security earlier this summer, the bill included $32 million for two more aerial drones, which are scheduled to arrive in 2012.

New York’s State Education Department issued a memo to its schools last week reminding them that they should not be forcing families to produce proof of their immigration status for their child’s enrollment in school.

Kirk Semple reports for the New York Times that the state distributed the memo after the New York Civil Liberties Union reported that at least 20 percent of the New York school districts were demanding children’s immigration papers before they could get into school. According to the NYCLU, they couldn’t find evidence that kids had been turned away if they were unable to produce paperwork–though even asking families for proof of their immigration status can often be threat enough that families may keep their kids out of school. The memo was sent out after months of pressure from the civil rights group.

New York’s Education Department takes the time to remind their educators about students’ basic civil rights, with a little history lesson:

Undocumented children, like U.S. citizen children, have the right to attend school full
time as long as they meet the age and residency requirements established by state law. In a 1982 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that children who are undocumented immigrants cannot be denied a free public education if they are, as a factual matter, district residents

It then reminds administrators that schools would do well to focus on educating their students rather than asking unnecessary, invasive questions. Well, actually the memo says: “[S]chools should avoid asking questions related to immigration status or that may reveal a child’s immigration status, such as asking for a Social Security number.”

The NYCLU says the written memo will only be useful if its backed up by enforcement, which the group promises it will monitor. Check out the memo here.

New research released this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco finds no evidence that new immigrants push U.S.-born workers out of the labor market. To the contrary, the study shows that immigration actually helps grow the economy and pushes wages up for all workers. It’s the latest in a growing body of economic research showing that immigration offers a net gain.

The report’s author writes:

[T]otal immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker. That equals an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker in constant 2005 dollars. Such a gain equals 20% to 25% of the total real increase in average yearly income per worker registered in the United States between 1990 and 2007.

The main reason that immigrants don’t have a negative effect on the employment of U.S.-born workers is that the two “tend to take different occupations,” the report explains.  Immigrants work in specific, segregated industries, and when immigrants and U.S.-born workers are employed in the same industries they tend to work in different kinds of jobs.

Significantly, language is one of the reasons that job divide emerges. The report’s author explains:

Because those [workers] born in the United States have relatively better English language skills, they tend to specialize in communication tasks. Immigrants tend to specialize in other tasks, such as manual labor. Just as in the standard concept of comparative advantage, this results in specialization and improved production efficiency.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones observes the irony:

The very mechanism that provides the productivity boost — the fact that immigrants don’t speak English well and therefore push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs — is precisely the thing that most provokes the immigrant skeptics. They all want immigrants to assimilate faster and speak English better, but if they did then they’d just start competing for the higher paying jobs that natives now monopolize.

Certainly, the new study is not all there is to say about the matter. As Elise Foley at the Washington Independent notes:

Economists say some workers, particularly in low-skilled jobs, could see lower wages due to an influx of immigrants. Some argue the exploitation of undocumented workers drives down wages for everyone in certain sectors — which they say is why comprehensive immigration reform is vital.

The notion that immigrants threaten the economic well-being of US-born workers is a well worn refrain in the immigration restrictionist lexicon. For the moment it appears to have taken second fiddle to a set of attacks having to do mainly with immigrant criminality. But the jobs argument is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Whatever impact immigration has on the labor market–and the evidence is strong that it is a net positive–we’re likely going to keep hearing the same arguments cast and recast. That’s because the movement against immigration isn’t really about the jobs or about national security or about drugs or crime. It’s really about fear; about the mounting anxiety that shifting racial demographics will unsettle relationships of real or perceived power and privilege that are marked by race. And new numbers aren’t going to unsettle these anxieties.