In my recent op-ed, “The Immigration Reform We Need: Holding ‘Sanctuary Industries’ Accountable,” I argued that while right-wing narratives vilify sanctuary cities as lawless havens for undocumented immigrants—eliciting the MAGA refrain, “What Part of Illegal Don’t You Understand?!—these same narratives conveniently ignore the outlaw industries that depend on their illegal, (therefore) cheap, and (therefore) exploited labor.
These "sanctuary industries,” their owners, and their employers operate with near impunity, exploiting undocumented workers while evading accountability, and while their exploited labor is targeted at work and, before that, while they attempt a dangerous border crossing in order to get that work. This manufactured shadow economy has labeled what used to be called “migrant workers” as “illegals” now for decades—all while providing legal sanctuary to outlaw industries that flout the law to protect what they see as their God-given right as Americans to exploit labor, legal or otherwise, begging that we ask Trump and his MAGA cult in return, “What Part of Illegal Don’t You Understand?!”
My earlier post was more a reaction to how so-called “immigration reform” played out in the election and how Trump’s Project 2025 has always been a scam, just like most of his immigration threats/promises/theories have been all along. Here, I examine more how this systemic exploitation has been deliberately constructed, its profound societal impacts, and, again, what real reform might look like.
The Deliberate Construction of "Illegality"
In her book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Aviva Chomsky examines how U.S. immigration policies were manufactured to criminalize undocumented immigrants, thus creating a labor system that exploits their status as “illegals” for economic gain. She argues that the concept of "illegality" was constructed to exclude and exploit racial minorities while benefiting outlaw industries reliant on vulnerable labor—the vulnerabilty of this labor has always been proportionate to their ever increasing illegality.
Chomsky argues that the concept of illegality as we know it today really only dates back to the 1960s. She explains that before this period, there were no numerical limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, and people could move relatively freely across borders. However, as the U.S. began to impose restrictions, particularly targeting Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, it created a new class of "illegal" people. This shift served the economic interests of the owners of explotation reliant industries by providing a vulnerable labor force that could be easily exploited without accountability for owners, employers, or management.
Chomsky also notes that by maintaining a workforce that lacks legal protections, industries can suppress wages and working conditions, maximizing profits. This dynamic places the burden of illegality on workers, who face constant threats of detention and deportation, while employers often evade accountability within a bubble of de facto immunity.
Chomsky's insights reveal that the exploitation of undocumented workers is not an accidental byproduct of flawed policies but a deliberate strategy to serve corporate interests.
Tanya Golash-Boza’s Legality and Exploitation: Immigration Enforcement and the U.S. Migrant Labor System adds crucial context to this discussion, tracing the historical shifts in U.S. immigration policy that have institutionalized exploitation. During World War II, amid severe labor shortages caused by the deployment of U.S. workers to the frontlines and to the war effort in general, programs like the Bracero Program were established to recruit migrant labor under strict conditions, to meet the urgent demands of U.S. industries at the time. When these programs ended, the demand for cheap labor did not disappear—instead, it was met by undocumented workers who had become “illegals” and were therefore more easily exploitable because of their precarious legal status.
Golash-Boza’s analysis highlights how immigration enforcement has shifted from regulating labor flows to criminalizing workers. This transition has only deepened the vulnerability of undocumented immigrants, making them indispensable yet disposable in the eyes of employers and policymakers alike.
The Informal Economy: Hidden in Plain Sight
Duane E. Campbell’s Harder Times: Undocumented Workers and the U.S. Informal Economy shines a light on how undocumented labor operates within these shadow economies I call “sanctuary industries,” particularly in urban areas like Los Angeles. Factories, restaurants, and warehouses depend on undocumented workers while keeping them out of public view, evading labor protections and enforcement. These industries thrive on secrecy, relying on the fear of deportation to suppress worker complaints about wage theft, unsafe conditions, and other abuses.
Matt Nguyen-Ngo’s work on undocumented Asian Americans in industries like nail salons and restaurants underscores the pervasiveness of this exploitation. He calls for policy solutions that not only protect undocumented workers but also address the systemic inequities that allow these practices to flourish.
The COVID-19 pandemic starkly revealed the hypocrisy of how undocumented workers are treated. As the Harvard Political Review notes in Undocumented Workers: The Essential, Exposed, and Expendable, these workers were deemed "essential" during the pandemic, ensuring the survival of the “shadow” part of industries like agriculture and food service. Yet these supposedly “essential” workers were denied the essential benefits and protections afforded to others—from healthcare to unemployment assistance—and they remained at constant risk of deportation. This contradiction of relying on undocumented workers while denying them basic rights is a cornerstone of the sanctuary industries’ model.
Dismantling Exploitation Industries: A Framework for Enforcement
To dismantle exploitation industries and address their systemic abuses, immigration reform must halt punitive measures aimed at undocumented workers and redirect enforcement toward owners, employers, and industries that perpetuate this exploitation. This requires bold and uncompromising reforms.
Expand Labor Protections with Significant Consequences for Violations
If we want labor laws to work for legal workers, they must apply to all workers, regardless of immigration status, with strict enforcement to ensure compliance. This includes:
Mandatory Audits: Frequent, unannounced labor audits are required for industries known to exploit undocumented labor, such as agriculture, construction, and hospitality.
Significant Fines and Asset Seizures: Impose fines large enough to matter to businesses that repeatedly violate labor laws and seize assets from serial offenders to fund worker restitution programs.
Criminal Charges for Owners, Executives, and Managers: When found complicit in illegal hiring practices or labor violations, business owners, CEOs, and managers—especially HR managers—should be charged with criminal negligence or conspiracy, and sentences should be significant enough to constitute a deterrent from breaking the law.
For instance, large corporations could face penalties similar to those under anti-racketeering laws, such as the RICO Act, to dismantle exploitative labor networks operating across state lines. These types of reforms would ensure that accountability extends to the owners and the top levels of management, not just subcontractors or mid-level supervisors.
Legalize Pathways for Migrant Labor
A more just immigration system requires modernizing labor programs to meet industry needs while protecting workers. Policies should include:
Guest Worker Visa Reform: Replace current guest worker programs with legal pathways offering fair wages, long-term visas, labor protections, healthcare, and clear routes to permanent residency.
Streamlined Applications: Simplify the processes for migrant workers to apply for legal work status, ensuring they are not tied to exploitative employers to maintain their visas.
Worker Oversight Committees: Establish independent committees composed of labor advocates, government representatives, and immigrant worker groups to oversee industries relying heavily on migrant labor.
By ensuring workers have legal protections and mobility within industries, we can reduce their dependence on specific employers, thereby limiting the potential for exploitation.
Impact on American Workers and the Economy in General
These reforms would help all American workers. By removing the competitive advantage of cheap, illegal labor, employers will be incentivized to offer fair wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions to attract legal workers. Additionally, a level playing field will ensure that American workers are no longer undercut by exploitative practices that devalue labor across the board. Immigration reform and labor enforcement will elevate standards for all workers, ensuring greater dignity and equity in the workplace.
Quantifying the exact percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) attributable to industries that heavily rely on undocumented labor is challenging due to the clandestine nature of undocumented employment and the lack of precise data. However, existing research provides insights into the significant economic contributions of undocumented immigrants:
Overall Economic Contribution: A 2016 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that undocumented immigrants contribute approximately 3% of private-sector GDP.
Potential Economic Loss from Deportation: The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that deporting between 1.3 and 8.3 million undocumented immigrants could reduce U.S. real GDP by up to 7% by 2028, highlighting the substantial economic role these workers play.
While it's difficult to assign a precise GDP percentage to "sanctuary industries," these figures illustrate that undocumented workers are vital to the U.S. economy, particularly in sectors that depend on their labor.
7% of the U.S. GDP (estimated at $26.85 trillion in 2023) amounts to approximately $1.88 trillion. This illustrates the significant economic impact that undocumented labor contributes to key sectors of the U.S. economy. Trump doesn’t mention that Project 2025’s fantasy of deporting all of the undocumented workers in the U.S. would cost the nation at least $2 trillion when the cost of the implementation is factored in. This is beyond inflationary, and it is probably even beyond recessionary.
In Count on Trump’s plans bringing back inflation surge: Deportations will create job losses we can’t fill, causing food and housing prices to again soar, Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman suggests that mass deportation policies, like those outlined in Project 2025, could lead to severe labor shortages, price hikes, and significant economic disruptions. While not explicitly calling it "recessionary," the scale of economic contraction implies that a recession would be a likely outcome of mass deportation.
The Moral and Economic Imperative
Addressing sanctuary industries is not just a matter of policy—it’s a moral imperative. The current system thrives on the vulnerability of undocumented workers, enriching industries at the expense of human dignity, economic fairness, and continuing America’s historically abysmal record on human rights.
As Chomsky, Golash-Boza, Campbell, and others have shown, the exploitation of undocumented labor is not a peripheral issue; it is a central feature of how these major U.S. industries operate. Reforming this system will require not only political will but also a fundamental reevaluation of how we value labor and justice in this country.
The term "sanctuary cities" has long been a rhetorical weapon used by critics to frame liberal urban areas as lawless zones protecting “illegal aliens”: “What part of illegal don’t you understand?”
Yet, the real sanctuaries in America’s immigration system aren’t for the workers themselves but for the industries, owners, employers, and managers who flout the law and exploit these vulnerable workers. The scam immigration policies of every U.S. administration since the sixties provide legal and economic “sanctuary” to these outlaw industries—what might better be called "exploitation industries"—by establishing and maintaining a shadow outlaw economy of worker exploitation.
The undocumented workers that sustain this outlaw economy are vulnerable economic refugees just trying to survive. While these industries thrive, these economic refugees receive a form of economic "sanctuary" that comes at the cost of low wages, hazardous border crossings, unsafe working conditions, no healthcare, and constant vulnerability.
Like Trump and right-wing governments all over the U.S., liberal governments—at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels—are also complicit in maintaining and sustaining these outlaw economies by allowing, even encouraging, these exploitation industries. Whereas Trump will promote racist mythologies and inhumane tactics—family separation, “bad hombres,” “rapists”—the liberals quietly perpetuate the scam and exploitation to avoid increasing inflation or to avoid appearing “anti-immigrant.”
Sonia Nazario, in her New York Times op-ed “What Part of Illegal Don’t You Understand?”, highlights the systemic hypocrisy at the heart of America’s immigration policies that shut down the border to refugees of all kinds. She critiques how the Trump administration criminalized refugees while violating their right to seek asylum. Nazario closes her op-ed with a stinging critique of Trump’s actions:
“In the end, it is Trump who has broken the law—not the refugees who arrive at our border seeking safety.”
Trump is, in fact, the bad hombre and rapist.
Of course, Nazario’s insight also applies to these economic refugees who have no choice but to sustain the exploitation industries I have called (somewhat problematically) “sanctuary industries.” Lawbreaking owners and employers profit from the vulnerability of economic refugees, and the workers themselves are the only ones who have to fear the enforcement of the law. I have used this problematic name for these exploitative industries because I want to draw attention to the fact that the lawbreakers that really matter are the owners and employers hiding out in their outlaw industries, receiving protection from the enforcement of the law, receiving sanctuary from a racist, inhumane, and corporatist system that relies on obvious exploitation.
What is also obvious is that most of the American electorate is oblivious to the exploitation these industries rely on for their profits. Americans cared most about “immigration” (keeping brown non-Americans out) and “inflation” in this last election, and they seemed to be clueless how the two are deeply connected to the systemic exploitation of undocumented workers in sanctuary industries.
Again, “What part of illegal don’t you understand?”
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