Seventeen migrant workers were taken last month from a home in Lisbon that a Border Patrol agent called “unsafe and degrading.”
You could use the same terms for the policies, official and otherwise, that apply to undocumented workers, who play a critical part in our workforce up until they are arrested and plunged into an opaque justice system that barely recognizes their rights.
Though they are most often victims, they are treated like criminals, while the real bad actors here – the businesses that exploit the workers and the elected officials that let it happen – get off scot-free.
It’s inhumane, and it goes against American values. Yet it continues, largely because a lot of people benefit from it.
The least of those is the workers themselves. Jobs in the United States may offer more opportunity than those in their home countries – Guatemala and Nicaragua, in the case of the workers in Lisbon – but their immigration status makes them vulnerable. Many are paid less than the law allows, and some are trafficked from place to place to fill temporary jobs, but they stay silent for fear of being found out and deported.
Yet even in this precarious spot, undocumented workers have become part of our communities. More than 7 million of the country’s undocumented immigrants work, making up 4.4% of the workforce when they only account for 3.2% of the population, according to a report from the Center for American Progress.
Undocumented immigrants make up around 25% of all farming, fishing and forestry workers. They account for nearly 1 in every 5 landscaping workers, maids, housekeepers and construction laborers. They make up nearly 30% of agricultural workers and painters.
During the pandemic, 5 million undocumented immigrants served as essential workers.
By one estimate, undocumented immigrants pay nearly $80 billion in federal taxes and $41 billion in state and local taxes. They own 1.6 million homes and pay nearly $50 billion in rent each year. They contribute billions of dollars every year to Social Security and Medicare.
Yet it can all go away with one call to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who can take them from their homes, jobs and families in an instant, just as they did with the 17 workers in Lisbon.
Where they go from there is anyone’s guess. In the Lisbon case, federal agencies won’t reveal the names of the workers or where they are being detained, hindering any attempt by the public to check on their well-being or hold authorities accountable.
They also won’t say whether they are investigating the employer. Border Patrol refused to name the business that employed the workers and put them up in crowded, substandard housing, calling them only a “Massachusetts-based company.”
More often than not, that’s how it goes. The workers are punished while employers are allowed to go about their business, waiting for the next group of workers that comes through.
It’s this steady stream of cheap, pliable labor that benefits businesses and makes it harder to reform the system. Why would they want to give undocumented workers legal status when it would mean higher wages and better working conditions for the migrants, and higher costs for them?
It’s for much the same reason that the immigration system remains in shambles, even as both sides of the political spectrum admit it is broken. Elected officials don’t want the cheap labor to disappear either, and they know that without undocumented workers, entire industries would fall apart.
Look no further than agriculture, where the lack of workers has led to huge losses as farmers are forced to leave unpicked crops in the field. Now imagine the same thing happening in health care, food service and construction.
It’s almost as if the system is designed to keep these critical workers in a vulnerable and easily exploited position.
While wholesale reform in Congress seems unlikely, changes can be made on the margins that would make a real difference.
First and foremost, federal authorities should be more transparent about their actions surrounding undocumented workers. Regardless of their status, they have rights, and the public has an interest in knowing how they are being treated.
President Biden should also follow through on his promise to focus less on deporting migrant workers and more on investigating workforce violations by employers.
It’s the exploitation of undocumented workers that is the real crime, not the simple presence of the workers in our communities – and certainly not the important contributions they make to the economy.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
