Corporations Exploiting Migrant Labor Left Unscathed by Trump Crackdown
Theatrical arrests and draconian legal measures mask the reality that Trump's immigration policy largely preserves the status quo.
Yesterday, we skipped our scheduled live video podcast. Glenn Greenwald was out and so I guest hosted SYSTEM UPDATE. I used the show to discuss President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office and the continued legislative push to criminalize speech related to Israel. Watch a recording of the show here.
Below is my latest opinion column published in partnership with Unherd.
To the untrained eye, it might appear that the Trump administration has been just as hardline on immigration as it promised it would. It has attempted to deport students over speech and activism related to the war in Gaza, and it has resorted to legally dubious measures in order to send hundreds of Venezuelan and Central American migrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
The crackdown has been accompanied by highly produced advertisements, combative press conferences, and photos of shackled prisoners ushered out of the country onto military jets. Never missing an opportunity to claim victory and provoke its opposition, the White House’s official X account has used cartoon AI images and ASMR-style videos to trumpet its harsh approach.
Naturally, these efforts have prompted fury in the media. Most Americans will now be under the impression that President Trump is delivering on his biggest campaign promise. But the theatrical and draconian legal measures mask the reality that this administration's immigration policy is much more business-as-usual than it would care to admit.
It’s true that the number of attempted crossings of the US-Mexico border have plummeted. But, despite the vast numbers of illegal migrants still in the US, Trump's actual deportation record is below that of last year, when the Biden administration sent back more people on a month-to-month basis. Perhaps most significantly, Trump has so far ignored the biggest magnet for those crossing the border without authorization: the many corporations luring migrants with the promise of employment. There is a discrepancy between the White House’s rhetoric and policy, and it raises profound questions about the administration’s true priorities and whom it ultimately serves.
Consider the likeliest destinations of illegal migrants. Those without documentation tend to make up a significant portion of the workforce in construction, slaughterhouses, restaurants, hotels, janitorial work, and gig delivery services. Yet businesses in these industries have reported few significant raids from US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These pillars of the economy are virtually untouched by the supposed crackdown.
What’s more, despite ample laws that exist to prosecute employers for knowingly employing or recruiting illegal labor, Fortune 500 American executives have faced no scrutiny. You might expect the largest homebuilder in the country, KB Home, to have been bothered by ICE agents since the change in administration. But Robert McGibney, the company’s president, told investors on a recent call that “We’ve seen nothing at all related to immigration.”
Similar quiescence was reported to investors of Taylor Morrison Home, another homebuilder. “We’re happy to report that we haven’t seen anything hit the job site,” said an executive. A counterpart at Tri Pointe Homes reported that the apparent crackdown had resulted in “no impacts at all.”
This is not to suggest impropriety on the part of KB, Taylor Morrison or Tri Pointe. I mean simply to point out that the construction industry, being one of the industries believed to employ illegal migrants, seems to be receiving little scrutiny. There is a considerable distance between the media firestorm and business reality.
And the collective sigh of relief from corporate employers comes as the administration has officially signaled leniency for business interests. Trump has, in fact, offered a generous reprieve to industries involved in employing illegal migrant labor. For all the suggestion of zero-tolerance, Trump has recently mooted the idea of allowing undocumented agricultural workers to leave the country and return as guest workers. “We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people,” the President told reporters last month.
The contradiction at the heart of the administration’s approach reveals a fundamental tension between populist rhetoric and pro-business reality. While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual. This disconnect could ultimately undermine the economic nationalism that propelled the Trump campaign to victory.
What has caused this disconnect? For a clue, we should look to high-dollar donations. The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee Inc, in a filing last week, revealed that its biggest single contributor was Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, a chicken processing company in the United States. The chicken-producing conglomerate gave $5 million to fund the inauguration, far outpacing business donors with much deeper pockets, such as Amazon, Meta, ExxonMobil, and Pfizer.
Pilgrim’s Pride has much to gain from a lax approach. Last year, the company confirmed reports that it used buses to transport Haitian workers to its plant in Russellville, Alabama. It also employs thousands of migrant workers, many of whom are alleged to be without documentation, at its poultry facility in Moorefield, West Virginia.
The activity of Pilgrim’s Pride, then, exemplifies the industrial-scale employment of undocumented workers that has become standard in certain sectors of the American economy. In this, the company is representative of an industry that has done more than any other to ruthlessly exploit migration.
Other firms have been accused of using child labor to work dangerous jobs for low pay. The New York Times, for instance, has identified immigrant children employed in poultry plants from Delaware to Mississippi. This sort of exploitation goes beyond the food industry; the newspaper also reported that 12-year-old migrants were working in the construction sector as roofers.
All of this is at odds with the promises that the Trump campaign made before taking office. Last year, the soon-to-be Vice President, JD Vance, said that migrants’ below-market pay had “undercut the wages of American workers”.
Accepting the nomination, Vance said: “We’re done importing foreign labor – we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won't sell out to multinational corporations.”
Such remarks represented an incursion into the traditional, labor-centric offering of the Democratic Party. It is the kind of argument that is likely to have contributed to GOP success last year. In this way, the Republicans have taken advantage of the slow abandonment by Left-leaning politicians of blue-collar industries. They have adopted trade and immigration-friendly policies that have brought American workers directly into competition with foreigners willing to work for far less. In all, the Democrats have shifted their concern away from physical labor and brick-and-mortar workplaces and toward the professional service sector and the highly-educated knowledge economy. As such, it has left itself vulnerable to such a challenge from the populist Right.
Studies have shown the negative impact of immigration on wages for competing American workers, especially those with lower levels of education. And over the past five years, the US has inadvertently conducted a live experiment on reduced migration and wages. During the early years of Covid, when the border was shut down, migration levels plummeted to record lows. According to new analysis, the corresponding tight labor market produced rapid salary increases among those working at the bottom of the income scale, particularly those in leisure, hospitality, and transportation — the very industries with the highest concentrations of migrant workers.
The rapid “wage inflation” rate angered corporate America and provoked a furious push to import more workers. The major business lobby groups, including the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce, successfully pressured the Biden administration to loosen immigration restrictions and to grant protected status to a variety of immigrant groups so they could take jobs in American factories, restaurants, and meatpacking plants, thus alleviating the pressure to continually raise wages. As migrant workers streamed into the country, wages for blue-collar industries returned to stagnation.
Again, investor calls reveal the interests of corporate America. “Any pro-immigration policies that would be implemented will benefit us [by] increasing the availability of labor throughout the country,” said Andrew Masterman, then a leading landscaping executive, on one such call.
There is no doubt that the Trump administration could level the playing field and hold business groups liable for their role in fueling the migrant crisis. Even now, employers and staffing agencies routinely place advertisements in social media and in Latin American newspapers, beckoning workers across the border for better employment opportunities. There is ripe potential for a crackdown on corporations tapping illicit forms. The legal framework for such enforcement already exists; what appears to be lacking is the political will to implement it systematically.