Our name is United S., and we’re addicted to undocumented labor

Amid all the recent protests, debates and debacles regarding illegal immigration and the second Trump administration‘s heavy-handed response to it, one truth seems to be getting lost: America is reliant on undocumented workers.

In its October 2024 study, “Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy,” the left-leaning American Immigration Council found that undocumented laborers made up 4.6% of the country’s labor force in 2022, exceeding the nation’s roughly 4% unemployment rate.

That same year, households with undocumented workers paid $46.8 billion and $29.3 billion in federal and state taxes, respectively.

The study further noted that “U.S.-born workers could not fill all the jobs of undocumented workers even if they tried to. The country is heavily reliant on an undocumented workforce in industries like construction, agriculture, and hospitality.”

Some 1.5 million U.S. construction workers, or about 13.7%, are undocumented laborers, according to the study. Similarly, nearly 13% of agricultural workers and more than 7% of the nation’s hospitality workers are also undocumented.

Most of us have probably heard accounts of undocumented laborers working in meat plants and fruit orchards, or as construction workers or janitorial staffers, sometimes hired through third-party services.

And that doesn’t even take into account immigrants who have been legally filling workforce gaps through visa programs for migrant farm workers and seasonal nonagricultural workers at places like golf courses, hotels and amusement parks.

But it’s not just the business community that’s got a jones for foreign labor. Go into any suburban neighborhood and you’re likely to find Hispanic people doing landscaping, housecleaning and day labor projects. It’s pretty much a given that no one is inquiring about their immigration status.

And this is hardly a new situation.

Going back to 1993, there have been at least five Cabinet secretary nominees who withdrew their names from consideration after it was revealed they paid undocumented people for domestic work. These range from the “nannygate” scandal that torpedoed two of President Bill Clinton’s attorney general nominees to incidents involving two of President George W. Bush’s nominees for the secretaries of labor and homeland security to President Donald Trump’s first labor secretary nominee in 2017.

My point isn’t to shame anyone who already paid a price for a mistake or to slam hardworking people who likely fled gang violence, political persecution and extreme poverty, risking dangerous border crossings to pursue the dream of a better life.

I’m simply saying there’s a reason this keeps happening.

And now’s the time to say the quiet part out loud: These undocumented immigrants are largely performing hard jobs that American citizens aren’t as interested in doing, and we as Americans don’t want to pay higher prices for those services.

This time around, the second Trump administration has led its messaging around deportations by emphasizing arrests of the worst of the worst — gang members, murderers and human smugglers.

But the fact is, immigration officers have targeted people across the spectrum of the undocumented people in the U.S., a group totaling more than 13.7 million, or about 4% of the nation’s total population. And that’s led to stories of armed and masked ICE agents snatching people off city streets and from courthouses, sparking uproars like the one in a Missouri small town over the April arrest of a popular local waitress and mom of three who came there 20 years ago from Hong Kong and had been living here through temporary status renewals. She was later released.

In mid-June, after Trump called in the Marines to help quell anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and more than 5 million protesters gathered for nationwide “No Kings” protests, federal officials announced ICE would pull back from worksite raids on hotels, restaurants and agricultural operations. That move was apparently sought by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on behalf of farmers and hospitality businesses facing labor shortages.

But following backlash from MAGA purists, and after ordering ICE to step up enforcement in Democratic-run cities like New York and Chicago, Trump swiftly reversed the policy.

That’s his prerogative as chief executive, but we need to acknowledge that the nation’s dependence on undocumented labor isn’t fake news.