Whether Walmart uses contractors to clean its stores or large office building owners do the same, the result is the same: the owners win, and Americans who can do the jobs lose because they don’t get the pay or conditions often offered. Make no mistake: America invites people to come here, even if it is illegal, because it provides them with jobs. The following are just a few of the companies that have enticed workers to come here; sometimes they even send people to bring them here. People like Cristóbal Gómez often helped, convincing Mexican-Americans to go to Hawaii to work.
The settlement was $175,000, and Cristóbal Gómez’s role was much worse than simply recruiting the workers. According to the passage, the South Texas workers were locked inside a razor-wire-surrounded compound every night at 11 p.m. When they complained, Gómez threatened that they could be thrown out of the dormitory with no way home because he was holding their return airline tickets.
After more than a month, the workers simply stopped working, contacted Texas Rural Legal Aid, and the strike attracted Hawaiian press attention. Only then did Wailuku Agribusiness and Gómez return the tickets. Back in Texas, the workers sued under the Agricultural Workers Protection Act, Fair Labor Standards Act and Title VII, along with claims for breach of contract, fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Then comes the wonderful ending: days before the McAllen jury trial, Wailuku and Gómez agreed to pay $175,000 after the federal judge warned them that a South Texas jury probably would not look kindly on an agribusiness company that had abused and lied to local farmworkers.
A hundred years ago, large American agricultural interests wanted Mexican workers. They did not suddenly discover a humanitarian concern for poor people south of the border. They needed labor, and Mexican workers offered something extremely valuable to an employer: a large workforce willing—or compelled by poverty and circumstance—to work for wages and under conditions that many American workers would not accept.
The pattern did not begin with undocumented immigration as we understand it today. It began with a basic business calculation. If an employer can obtain enough workers at a lower cost, wages do not have to rise to attract somebody else. If the workforce is migratory, poor, racially marginalized, unfamiliar with American law, or vulnerable to deportation, its bargaining power becomes weaker still.
The Library of Congress notes that agriculture and mining began attracting Mexican workers to the Southwest in large numbers around the turn of the twentieth century. When Congress imposed the restrictive immigration quotas of 1924, Mexico was exempted in part because Southwestern agricultural interests argued that they needed Mexican workers to plant and harvest their crops.
A later congressional history put the economics more plainly. By 1929, the Southwest produced about 40 percent of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, and growers relied heavily on inexpensive Mexican labor to sustain that production. The same source notes that small farmers complained that they were forced to compete against larger farms employing cheaper Mexican workers, while organized labor feared that the labor supply would depress wages.
This was not a secret. Americans argued about it openly in Congress.
In 1928, during debate over Mexican immigration, a Texas correspondent was quoted in the Congressional Record complaining that large landlords preferred Mexican tenants because they could be “driven almost like slaves” and would live in barns, sheds and tents. The letter was ugly and filled with the racial prejudice of its time, but buried within that prejudice was an accusation about the economics: landlords preferred a workforce they could control more cheaply.
Texas growers became so protective of their Mexican labor supply that the state enacted laws during the 1920s aimed at making it expensive for recruiters from other states to take Mexican workers away. Sugar-beet companies from Michigan and Ohio were recruiting about 10,000 Mexican workers a year from Texas, and Texas farmers feared losing them.
The argument that Mexicans were simply coming north and taking American jobs turns this history upside down. American employers were recruiting them.
From Mexican Labor to Braceros
World War II formalized what American agriculture had already been doing. With American workers moving into wartime industry and military service, growers again demanded Mexican labor. In 1942, the United States and Mexico created the Bracero Program.
The Library of Congress describes braceros as generally receiving very low wages and often working under conditions Americans were unwilling to accept. Conditions in Texas became so notorious that for a period the Mexican government refused to send braceros into the state. Yet the program proved enormously popular with American growers and continued long after World War II, finally ending in 1964.
Then came one of the great contradictions in American immigration history. During the 1950s, the federal government was simultaneously importing Mexican workers legally through the Bracero Program and deporting Mexican workers who lacked the government’s authorization. The notorious 1954 deportation campaign known as Operation Wetback did not eliminate American agriculture’s demand for Mexican labor. It increasingly moved that labor into a government-approved system.
The distinction mattered enormously to the worker, but much less to the grower who still needed someone in the field.
And it leads to a distinction worth remembering today:
The undocumented worker may be easier to deport. The guest worker may be easier to control.
An undocumented worker can disappear and find another employer. A temporary foreign worker whose lawful presence depends upon an employment arrangement may have much more to lose by walking away, complaining, or attempting to organize.
What Happened When the Braceros Were Taken Away?
There is an argument frequently made about the end of the Bracero Program that at first appears to undermine this story.
Economists Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis, and Hannah Postel examined what happened after the government ended the program in 1964. They found surprisingly little increase in either the wages or employment of domestic farmworkers in the states that had relied most heavily upon braceros.
But look at what the growers did instead.
They mechanized.
The researchers found accelerated mechanization in tomatoes, sugar beets and cotton. Where machinery could replace labor, growers invested in it. Where crops could not readily be mechanized, production tended to decline. In other words, growers did not respond primarily by bidding wages upward until enough American workers appeared. They changed the production process or reduced production.
That does not prove that American workers would have performed every agricultural job at some particular wage. It proves something more fundamental about business behavior: the employer has alternatives.
A machine can be expensive and still be cheaper than paying the wage necessary to attract and retain human labor. A farmer can grow a different crop. Production can move. A field can even be harvested less completely if recovering the last portion of the crop costs more than it is worth.
Anyone who has driven past a modern cotton field after the machines have finished has seen that calculation lying on the ground and hanging from the plants. The goal of the business is not to pick every piece of cotton. The goal is to maximize the return after the cost of picking it.
Then Agriculture’s Labor Model Moved Into the Factory
By the late twentieth century, the same economic forces were plainly visible in meat and poultry processing.
Tyson Foods provides perhaps the clearest explanation because a Tyson manager actually described the economics under oath.
In 2001, after a 2½-year undercover INS investigation, the Justice Department charged Tyson Foods and several managers in a 36-count indictment. Prosecutors alleged that managers arranged for undocumented workers to be transported from the Southwest border into jobs at Tyson facilities and that the alleged operation touched 15 plants in nine states. The indictment accused Tyson of tolerating unauthorized hiring to meet production goals and reduce costs.
Tyson denied that this was corporate policy. In 2003, a federal jury acquitted the corporation and three managers, accepting the defense argument that managers who broke immigration laws were acting outside company policy. Two former managers who had reached plea agreements with prosecutors testified against the company. That acquittal matters, and any honest account of the case has to say so.
But something remarkable survived the criminal case: the testimony explaining why this workforce was attractive.
A manager described the advantages of temporary and undocumented workers at a Tyson plant. Temporary workers supplied through an outside agency did not create the same workers’ compensation exposure for Tyson and could not use the plant’s union grievance procedure. Increasing their numbers, he testified, meant “we can weaken union participation.”
He testified that undocumented workers did not file unemployment claims. Their attendance made it possible to reduce overstaffing. And when asked about productivity, he explained that the workers had a stronger work ethic than the people Tyson could obtain “at the wages that we were offering.”
Read that last phrase again.
The problem was not that Americans were biologically or culturally incapable of doing poultry work. The company was having difficulty obtaining the workforce it wanted at the wages it was offering.
Instead of letting the labor shortage force the wage upward, another labor supply was available.
Undercover recordings presented at the Tyson trial were even more revealing. One manager discussed replacing 300 or 400 workers, possibly 500. In another recorded conversation, an undercover federal agent explained that workers would come from Mexico, cross the river, and obtain identification documents. The manager responded: “Excellent. That’s what we’re needing.”
Again, Tyson itself was acquitted. But the conversations and testimony expose the economics behind the demand.
Immigration Status Could Become a Management Tool
At Nebraska Beef in Omaha, workers told Human Rights Watch that immigration status became intertwined with attempts to organize a union.
One worker said the plant manager knew which employees were undocumented and called them into his office individually before a 2001 union election. According to the worker, undocumented employees were told they could be deported if they voted for the union. Human Rights Watch separately documented that the National Labor Relations Board found Nebraska Beef management had committed multiple labor-law violations during the organizing campaign, although the alleged deportation statement itself came from worker testimony rather than an NLRB finding.
Then came an immigration raid.
More than 200 workers disappeared from the workforce. According to employees interviewed by Human Rights Watch, management restarted production with approximately the same line speed despite having more than 200 fewer people. Workers demanded either a slower line or more money. They received fifty cents more an hour, and a worker told Human Rights Watch that the five employees who had spoken for the group were subsequently fired.
Federal prosecutors accused Nebraska Beef managers of participating in a scheme to recruit workers from Texas and Mexico and provide false documents. But that prosecution never produced convictions. U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf dismissed important charges after concluding that the government had acted in bad faith by deporting hundreds of potential witnesses before their testimony could be preserved.
Once again, the workers were easy to remove. Proving what management had done was considerably harder after the witnesses were gone.
Sometimes Management Admitted It
Agriprocessors, the enormous kosher meatpacking operation in Postville, Iowa, removes some of the ambiguity.
Former poultry manager Hosam Amara pleaded guilty to conspiracy to harbor undocumented workers for profit. He admitted that he and other managers knowingly harbored undocumented workers and that the purpose was commercial advantage.
His plea agreement showed how valuable the labor supply had become. When immigration officials warned the company’s human-resources department to stop accepting certain expired residency cards, Agriprocessors suddenly had a labor shortage. According to the Justice Department, Amara complained to the CEO, and undocumented workers were then placed on another company’s payroll so they would not appear to be Agriprocessors employees. Existing workers were encouraged to bring family members to work at the plant.
Another Agriprocessors operations manager, Brent Beebe, pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain false documents for workers. He admitted obtaining $4,500 from a company vice president to help approximately 19 production employees acquire new fraudulent identification shortly before the 2008 immigration raid.
Those were not accusations left unresolved by a jury. They were guilty pleas.
“Maximized Productivity and Profit”
Asplundh Tree Expert Co. makes the economic connection even more explicit.
In 2017, Asplundh itself pleaded guilty to unlawfully employing unauthorized workers. The Justice Department said the company’s decentralized hiring system allowed upper management to remain willfully blind while lower-level managers hired and rehired workers they knew were ineligible to work legally. The company was ordered to pay an $80 million criminal forfeiture and another $15 million in a civil settlement.
Why maintain such a system?
The Justice Department said it created a workforce that was readily available, easily relocated around the country, and available to respond quickly to storms and other emergencies. The hiring system, prosecutors said, “maximized productivity and profit.”
That sentence could have been written a hundred years earlier about agricultural labor.
And It Happened in Houston
Waste Management provides an example close to home.
In 2018, Waste Management of Texas entered a federal non-prosecution agreement involving its Afton Road operation in Houston and forfeited more than $5.5 million that the government calculated as proceeds associated with the illegal employment practices. Three managers were convicted and received prison sentences ranging from 27 to 94 months.
The Justice Department said managers repeatedly hired or rehired unauthorized workers and that the workforce enabled the operation to maintain its preferred helpers and “maximize profits and productivity.”
Managers went even further. After some employees were fired because they lacked proper documentation, managers supplied some with the identities of real citizens or lawful residents so they could return to the payroll. Waste Management’s own internal investigation concluded that managers had intentionally circumvented the company’s immigration-compliance system.
Again, ask the most important question.
Why go to all that trouble?
Because the workers had economic value.
The Worker Was Never the Real Winner
For a century, Americans have periodically been told that Mexican workers or immigrants are taking something from American workers.
That description conveniently leaves the employer out of the story.
Mexican workers did not exempt Mexico from the immigration quotas of the 1920s. Agricultural interests lobbied for access to their labor. Mexican workers did not create the Bracero Program. Governments created it because growers demanded workers. Undocumented workers did not order themselves transported to Tyson plants, devise payroll arrangements at Agriprocessors, decentralize hiring at Asplundh, or provide false identities to employees at Waste Management.
Employers made those decisions because there was money in them.
The immigrant worker and the American worker therefore should not automatically be viewed as enemies. Both can lose when an employer has access to a workforce with less bargaining power. If one group of workers can be paid less, threatened more easily, discouraged from filing claims, prevented from grieving working conditions, frightened away from organizing, or replaced when it protests, the bargaining position of everybody performing that work can suffer.
That is why the testimony from the Tyson trial is so revealing. The manager did not say Americans could not perform the work. He said Tyson had difficulty obtaining the workers it wanted at the wages it was offering.
When one supply of inexpensive labor disappeared, American business repeatedly found another solution. It recruited another workforce. It used government guest-worker programs. It mechanized. It changed crops. It reduced production. It outsourced. It found temporary agencies.
What it frequently resisted doing was allowing a shortage of labor to do what shortages are supposed to do in a market economy: raise the price.
The names have changed. The legal categories have changed. The machines have changed. The industries have changed.
The business calculation has survived remarkably well.
