The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the “nativist lobby’s independent think tank which has never found any aspect of immigration it likes,” has come out with a new report claiming that immigration raids “boost” union organizing. The author, Jerry Kammer, comes to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) won its 15-year-long unionizing battle at Smithfield Food’s largest hog processing plant in Tar Heel, NC thanks to ramped-up enforcement measures and immigration raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2007.

Kammer’s glaring lack of labor history knowledge coupled with the anti-immigrant mission of his employer can serve as the only possible explanations for his gross misrepresentation of what happened at Smithfield between 1994 and 2009. The UFCW’s organizing win was not the result of immigration raids, but rather a bitter labor struggle that unified the workforce and culminated in a game-changing legal dispute:

1994 & 1997: The UFCW loses its first two elections amidst allegations of widespread coercion, intimidation, and targeted layoffs.

2000: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issues a decision finding massive violations of labor laws on behalf of Smithfield.

2004: The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirms the 2000 decision, finding that Smithfield had engaged in “intense and widespread” coercion in both elections. Smithfield agrees to hold a third union election, but the UFCW argues that the company should recognize card-check organizing instead.

2007: Smithfield files a federal lawsuit against the UFCW, accusing the union of libel and slander.

2008: When the suit is settled, both parties agree to another closely supervised election which the UFCW wins 2,041 to 1,879.

2009: Nearly 7 months after the union win, Tar Heel workers ratify their first union contract.

Kammer is also apparently ignorant to the well-known fact that immigration raids have more often been the bane of a union organizer’s existence. Following the Smithfield immigration raids, union officials claimed that Smithfield had collaborated with ICE authorities to discourage its workers from organizing. Smithfield’s immigrant intimidation tactics were also extensively documented in a Human Rights Watch report as having been used to crush union organizing efforts. Union organizer Eduardo Peña compared the Smithfield immigration raids to a “nuclear bomb.” Ultimately, the immigration measures backfired on Smithfield. In 2006, over 300 workers walked out in protest of the company’s immigration tactics. The success of the workplace action impressed African American workers and fueled increased unity between them and Latino workers.

It’s true that immigrant workers — both documented and undocumented — are difficult to organize. However, it’s a problem that could be solved more cheaply and more effectively with mechanisms like the ones provided in the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which make it harder for employers to intimidate workers that are trying to organize.

The UFCW couldn’t comment on Kammer’s report due to the Smithfield lawsuit settlement which prevents them from discussing the terms of the organizing process. However, they weren’t too fond of Kammer’s last report which also advocated for increased immigration raids and enforcement-only solutions from a deceptively pro-labor perspective.

The news that the vote to remove funding for more F-22s from the defense authorization has been delayed until tomorrow morning offers a good opportunity to restate what’s at issue here. On the one hand, you have a pretty strong (though not complete) consensus in the U.S. military and the Obama administration that more F-22′s — which were originally conceived and designed to counter the Soviet threat — are unsuitable for America’s current national security challenges. In addition to being hugely expensive, the fighters have proven to be a nightmare to maintain.

On the other hand you have some Congresspersons who are afraid of losing defense jobs in their districts, and who greatly appreciate the huge checks that they receive from defense contractors.

So just to be clear, this argument over the F-22, at least as it’s occurring in Congress, not really a debate over defending the country — it’s a test of whether the requirements of electoral politics can outweigh the requirements of American national security as defined by the Department of Defense. This isn’t to suggest that Congress has no role in determining American defense requirements — of course it does, but let’s not pretend that seven extra planes is the difference between air dominance and ceding the skies.

Meanwhile, Mike Goldfarb observes that “one thing that’s been consistent throughout this process has been quiet support for F-22, in contrast to the vocal opposition from Obama, Gates, and McCain. Most people thought that F-22 was DOA as soon as Gates released the administration’s defense budget. But it turns out that support for the program in Congress is pretty broad.”

I don’t know if I’d call Lockheed and Boeing spending $6.5 million and $2.4 million, respectively, on lobbying in the first three months of 2009 “quiet support.” But yes, it is rather impressive what kind of support can be gotten for an item that the military doesn’t want by spreading its production out into 48 different states, donating vast sums of money to various political action committees, and sending armies of lobbyists onto the Hill. It’s almost as if politicians were interested in getting re-elected or something.

No one on either side of the issue was under any illusion that ending the F-22 was going to go down easy. As I noted at the time, Secretary Gates’ announcement of his 2010 defense budget recommendations anticipated the effort to reinstate politically valuable but militarily superfluous boondoggles like the F-22, saying that he knew that “Some will say I am too focused on the wars we are in and not enough on future threats”:

The allocation of dollars in this budget definitely belies that claim. But, it is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk -– or, in effect, to “run up the score” in a capability where the United States is already dominant -– is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable. That is a risk I will not take.

Of course, if you’re of the opinion that the defense budget should be a magical place where considerations of costs and benefits need not apply, then this doesn’t mean much. In the reality-based community, however, we understand that calculating and making these sorts of trade-offs is an element of a strong and responsible national defense.

Last night on Fox News, former Bush policy czar Karl Rove argued that the administration is justified in withholding information from Congress. “It is so dangerous to give Congress information” because they leak it, Rove argued.

ThinkProgress interviewed Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) earlier today, and asked him to respond to that accusation by Rove:

First of all, leaks come far, far, far more often from the administration than they do from Congress. So if the issue is we can’t tell anyone because they might leak it, well then you better not do it at all, because you’re going to have to tell somebody and somebody’s going to leak it. Vastly more amounts of secret programs have come out of the administration than they have come out of Congress.

Smith added that the importance of informing Congress is because of the need for checks and balances. “We have oversight responsibility for the intelligence community,” he explained. Smith said that if the intelligence community pursues wrong or illegal activities, Congress is held responsible for it. “If we’re not briefed fully and in a timely manner,” he said, referencing the recent example of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “then we’re being held responsible for things we didn’t know about.” Watch it:

Smith is of course correct that the Executive Branch leaks a great deal. After all, while working in the White House, Karl Rove himself leaked classified national security information, helping to damage the career of a covert CIA agent. Moreover, the secret program that has been reported in the press in recent days (purportedly a targeted assassination program) was leaked to the Wall Street Journal by “two former intelligence officials familiar with the matter” in its report — not Congress.