Union leadership also sees illegal aliens as potential dues-paying members.
The SEIU has been very successful in organizing illegals in the hotel industry, for example. And illegals make good union members because they're uneducated and pliable -- they will do what they're told and accept the leadership's abuse.
Government employee union members now far outnumber those union members in the private sector.
That gives the SEIU too much credit. They have retained control of the big full-service hotels in cities where hotels have been unionized for decades, even as the workforce turned over from black and white to mostly Hispanic. They haven’t converted any non-union cities, nor have they won victories in limited service properties, even in union cities, that I know of.
The SEIU’s most touted campaign — unionizing outsourced janitors — has really been a holding action, as the buildings being cleaned usually had unionized cleaning staff before the work was outsourced.