British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12466 00:0 xxx 2019 0007–1080 pp. 1–24 Do Immigrants Trust Trade Unions? A Study of 18 European Countries Anastasia Gorodzeisky and Andrew Richards Abstract Migrants form growing proportions of national workforces in advanced capitalist societies. Yet little is known about their attitudes towards the principal agents of worker representation in their host countries, the trade unions, much less via cross-national research. Using European Values Survey data, we redress this imbalance by examining migrants’ levels of trust in unions, compared to native- born. We find higher levels of trust in unions by migrants (compared to native- born) in general and especially by migrants during their first decades after arrival and whose countries of origin are characterized by poor quality institutions. These findings have significant implications for unionization strategies towards migrants, especially given received wisdom portraying migrants as indiferent or distrustful towards unions. 1. Introduction Migrants now form a growing proportion of national workforces of contemporary advanced capitalist societies, yet relatively little is known about their attitudes towards the principal agents of worker representation in their host countries, the trade unions, much less by way of large-scale cross- national comparative research. In fact, the phenomenon of major waves of immigration into Europe and North America and the future fate of trade unionism are strongly intertwined. Union movements have, over the last four decades, lost considerable power. In general, levels of union membership and rates of unionization have declined everywhere (albeit at varying speeds and to diferent degrees) at the same time as migrants form an ever-increasing component of national workforces. As such, migrants represent — at least potentially — a powerful new constituency with which unions might be able to arrest and reverse their own decline. Yet the relationship, historically, between unions and migrant workers has been complicated and difcult — unions have Anastasia Gorodzeisky is at Tel Aviv University. Andrew Richards is at Carlos III University. C  2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.