Fordham Law Professor Susan Scafidi, founder and director of the Fashion Law Institute, explains to Vogue Business why she believes there is a direct policy conflict between limits on immigration and a desire to increase manufacturing.
There is a direct policy conflict between limits on immigration and a desire to increase manufacturing, says Susan Scafidi, founder and director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School. “It’s something that I’ve been concerned about since the election, and the recent immigration raids in LA are spotlighting the issue in a dramatic fashion.”
Garment factories in the US have been staffed by immigrants for generations, she says: southern and eastern European immigrants in the early twentieth century, Latin American and Asian immigrants in the twenty-first. “Unlike fashion design, garment production jobs are not glamorous positions to which many Americans aspire, but those jobs have long been rungs on the ladder of the American dream,” Scafidi says.
Industry workers are genuinely concerned that, should policy and enactment keep going in this direction, it could very well result in a collapse of the American fashion industry. “Without immigrants, there is a risk that sewing machines will go silent and warehouse doors will remain shut, and the dramatic decline in garment production in the US over the past 50 years will finally reach the point of extinction,” Scafidi says.
Read “Immigration raids in LA strike fear into the fashion industry” in Vogue Business.