The US economy depends on immigrant workers. Their job quality matters for everyone.

The future of America’s economic strength depends on immigration. As the US birth rate declines and the median age goes up, fewer US-born workers will enter the labor force. It’s a scenario that, left unaddressed, would spell a shrinking economy and strained public finances. Immigrants lean younger and are more likely to be in their prime working years, helping expand the workforce and ensuring that the economy continues to provide the goods and services we expect. Their tax contributions fill the coffers needed to support an aging population. 

Unfortunately, too many immigrant workers have — like their native-born counterparts — found themselves stuck in low-quality jobs. And too often, immigrants have taken the blame for the declining pay and conditions of those jobs. But an analysis centered on whether immigrants work jobs that others won’t, or whether they undercut wages by working for less, overlooks businesses’ role in determining job quality. 

Employers have long used their leverage in the labor market to drive down wages and labor standards when worker power is weak. The dynamic is especially pronounced in labor-intensive industries, like truck driving, agriculture, and home care. “In many sectors,” observed the labor scholar Ruth Milkman, “immigrants entered low-wage jobs in substantial numbers only after pay and conditions had been degraded to such a degree that US-born workers exited the impacted occupations.” The immigrant workers who fill employers’ self-imposed labor shortages, in turn, become the scapegoats for the latter’s impropriety.

An Economy of Immigrants

Immigration has always been an economic necessity for American capitalism. And the exploitation of immigrant labor has long been economic reality. The turn of the twentieth century saw the US transform from a rural economy into an urban, industrial one built on mass production and powered by millions of immigrant workers and their descendants. The jobs were often brutal and poorly paid. 

In the pre-New Deal years, workers were granted few protections under law. But the prospect of new opportunities, in an era of loosely regulated immigration, drew an influx of newcomers, mostly from poor and distressed regions of Europe. For most native-born white workers, however, there was little appeal in the burgeoning industrial centers. (African Americans similarly migrated from the Jim Crow South, but the inescapable mark of race stood a stubborn barrier in the search for a better life.)

The sociologists Charles Hirschman and Elizabeth Mogford estimated in their study of turn-of-the-century industrial immigration that first-generation immigrants and their children comprised fully 53% of manufacturing workers in 1920. “It would seem that, generally speaking, the foreign born population is engaged in more laborious, disagreeable, and probably, less skilled and less remunerative work than are the native born white,” explained one contemporary observer, quoted by Hischman and Mogford. 

Immigrant workers didn’t accept poor working conditions sitting down. They banded together in early unions and joined in mass organizing efforts, the effects of which would eventually transform vast swaths of manufacturing employment into the engine of postwar, middle-class prosperity.

The Lessons of Packingtown

The story of the meatpacking industry offers a case in point. The abuses of the early-20th stockyards were immortalized in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking masterwork The Jungle. The novel follows the struggles of the fictional Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, who crosses the Atlantic, only to find himself casting about in the chaos of Chicago’s Packingtown, never achieving sure footing. A composite character, Rudkus represented the stories Sinclair heard when undertaking field research for his novel.

 “[O]n Christmas Eve Jurgis worked till nearly one o’clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on the killing bed at seven o’clock,” Sinclair wrote of meatpacking workers’ grind. “For after all the hard work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating; and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the balance of the hour — he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that.” 

But over time, conditions began to change in the meatpacking industry, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and its affiliates. A series of organizing drives, not all successful, brought a degree of solidarity between skilled and unskilled workers from immigrant backgrounds, and between white immigrants and the growing number of African Americans entering the meatpacking workforce. Union contracts eventually covered the majority of meatpacking workers nationwide. With stronger bargaining power, meatpacking workers secured wages that were significantly higher than the manufacturing sector average by the 1960s.

End of an Era

As the country entered the Reagan years, a changing economy and an increasingly anti-union national mood spelled the decline of meatpacking unions. Automation and corporate consolidation increased, industry dispersed to isolated rural locations, and companies increasingly employed hardline union-busting tactics. 

Meatpackers then heavily recruited workers from immigrant communities, including undocumented workers and refugees, who are vulnerable to labor abuses because of their tenuous economic and legal status. By 2024, less than 15% of the nation’s half million meatpacking workers would belong to a union. 

Largely free from accountability to their workers, meatpacking companies have sped up cutting lines, to ever faster and more wearing tempos, while skimping on safety protections. Average wages sit below their 1960s level, after inflation. And amid claims of post-pandemic labor shortages, the industry even pushed states to loosen child labor laws, despite a string of child labor scandals.

What’s Good for Immigrant Workers is Good for All Workers

Today’s immigrant workers need what all workers do: the ability to organize and make their voices and needs heard. That’s difficult for those with uncertain status, like refugees and DACA recipients, people on guestworker visas, and undocumented workers. Providing these workers a path to permanent legal status, a policy favored by most Americans, would better position them to stand up for their rights. It would also limit employers’ ability to create a two-tiered labor market that undermines all workers’ livelihoods. 

Public policy must also recognize the historically high public support for labor unions and make it simpler for workers to organize and hold wayward employers to account. Nearly a century ago, the CIO’s United Packinghouse Workers of America brought together a coalition of meatpacking workers in the fight for decency, demonstrating that worker organizing that includes immigrant workers can transform bad jobs into liveable ones. Indeed, workers in the industry — many from immigrant backgrounds — launched the first meatpacking strike in decades in Colorado last April, securing a wage increase in the process. 

Finally, we have to enforce the labor laws already on the books. The Department of Labor needs adequate resources to do so, yet its funding pales beside that dedicated to immigration enforcement. For every dollar spent on immigration enforcement, little more than a penny is spent on labor law enforcement, according to the AFL-CIO. Reallocating even a fraction of that money to protecting the rights of the nation’s 160 million workers would mark significant progress in the face of decades-long stagnation in DOL capacity.

We know what it takes to make the economy work for all workers. Immigration built the country we know today and is instrumental in shaping our expectations of the American Dream, and Americans continue to view newcomers as a boon to the nation. But if we are to stay true to the nation’s promise, we must ensure that all workers are afforded the same respect and dignity, no matter where they are from.