Labor and Immigration Policy Theme Analysis

Popular conversations about immigration in the United States tend to be structured around a distinction between “legal” immigrants, who receive official permission to live and work in the U.S., and “illegal” immigrants, who enter the country of their own accord to seek employment, usually by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. While U.S. citizens often assume that the U.S. government wants to limit undocumented immigration because it is detrimental to the national economy, Seth Holmes argues that undocumented immigrants actually play an essential role in the U.S. economy, by design. Namely, industries like agriculture rely heavily on undocumented immigrants’ low-paid labor, which provides the U.S. with all the benefits and none of the costs of legal immigration. Even though U.S. anti-immigration policies are framed as a way to reduce undocumented immigration, Holmes argues that they really make migrants more vulnerable and desperate, so that they are more willing to accept low wages and exploitation. In other words, by denying migrants the benefits of legal recognition, residency, or citizenship, U.S. immigration policies ensure that U.S. companies can draw cheap labor from a constant supply of poor, vulnerable migrants.

Undocumented migrant farmworkers play an essential part in the U.S. economy, which depends on paying them low wages while denying them basic rights and protections. Ninety-five percent of U.S. farmworkers are poor Mexican migrants, and most of them are also undocumented. This situation has emerged because, while American consumers want fresh, locally grown fruit, most U.S. citizens are unwilling to do dangerous farm work for the meager wages that competitive farms can afford to pay. As a result, undocumented migrants make an important and distinctive contribution to the U.S. economy. This situation is neither new nor unique: Mexican migrants have long made up the majority of U.S. farmworkers, as they’re more economically and socially vulnerable, so willing to accept the lowest wages and worst working conditions. Similarly, other vulnerable groups—like Indigenous Canadians and Cambodian refugees—have worked on the Tanaka Brothers Farm in the past. The U.S. agriculture industry’s pattern of hiring people from disenfranchised groups shows that it largely depends on exploiting people’s desperation and vulnerability. Notably, farm managers explicitly recognize that their business model—and American agriculture as a whole—depends on migrants’ cheap, efficient labor. For instance, a manager at the Tanaka Brothers Farm, where most workers are undocumented, tells Holmes that he sometimes struggles to find enough workers to hire every season, even though he knows that berry picking is arduous, dangerous, and undesirable work. He wishes that the U.S. government made it easier for workers to cross the border, but he also knows that undocumented people would not tolerate the poor working conditions if they had legal protections. Accordingly, he knows that his farm—and the whole U.S. agriculture industry—depends on a labor situation that is technically illegal on both ends: farms are allowed to illegally abuse their workers only because those workers are in the country illegally.

Holmes shows how U.S. immigration policy shapes immigrants into the type of workers that the agriculture industry needs: it ensures that they remain highly vulnerable and willing to accept extremely low wages and few legal rights. Holmes points out that undocumented workers would not be nearly as profitable for the U.S. if laborers had access to social services. Most spend their prime years working in the U.S. but use social services back home in Mexico, like education in their youth and healthcare in old age. As a result, the Mexican public sector bears all the cost of supporting them, whereas the U.S. gains most of the economic advantages of their labor. Migrants could access most U.S. public services if they had an accessible pathway to residency or citizenship, and Holmes argues that this is precisely why the immigration system denies them such a pathway.

U.S. immigration policy also intentionally makes crossing the U.S.-Mexico border incredibly dangerous, which leads only the most vulnerable migrants to do so. For instance, by ramping up Border Patrol enforcement in more populous areas of the border, the U.S. government draws migrants to less populated and far more dangerous sections of desert, where hundreds of migrants die every year. But Holmes knows that this doesn’t prevent migrants from going to the U.S.—it just makes their lives worse and further dissuades them from interacting with the government (and risking deportation) once they’re already in the U.S. Similarly, as crossing the border gets more difficult and expensive, many migrants no longer return to Mexico to visit their families every year. Accordingly, even though harsh immigration enforcement might seem to be working against the economy’s need for vulnerable laborers, it actually feeds it.

Finally, government and public attitudes toward undocumented immigrants serve a similar repressive role, denying their humanity in order to exploit their labor. For example, Holmes argues that the term “illegal aliens” portrays undocumented migrants as a separate category of human beings who lack basic human rights, including the right to dignified labor conditions. When such people are viewed as “illegal aliens” rather than undocumented migrant workers fleeing poverty, they can do far less to protest or improve their exploitative working conditions. Of course, the more exploitative these conditions, the more the U.S. agriculture industry profits. Therefore, Holmes shows that U.S. immigration policy is not only intended to manage the inflow of immigrants: it’s also designed to

While sympathetic readers are likely to see a contradiction between U.S. industry’s thirst for migrant labor and U.S. immigration policy’s violence toward migrants, by breaking down how that contradiction shapes these migrants into the kind of workers that industry needs, Holmes shows that this combination of policies is actually brutally rational and effective. He also notes that conditions continue to worsen for migrant labors: notably, the border has become increasingly militarized and dangerous since 2000. In the absence of a marked legal effort to grant them official protections, it’s unlikely that this trend will improve in the future.