Michael Felsen and M. Patricia Smith
March 5, 2019
As President Trump scrambles to convince us that not having a wall is suddenly a “national emergency,” progressive lawmakers and advocates have pointed out that the most dire emergencies facing the U.S. are the imaginary and real crises manufactured by Trump himself.
One case in point is wage theft, or more specifically, the endemic cheating of workers in low-wage industries out of their pay. This ubiquitous, under-the-radar problem has only gotten worse in response to the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies and talking points crafted in response to problems that do not exist.
It’s no secret that traditionally low-wage industries in the United States-including agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service industries-have long relied heavily on immigrants, many of whom lack immigration status or work authorization. In November 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that in 2016, there were 10.7 million undocumented workers in the U.S., of whom 7.8 million (or 4.8 percent of the labor force) were working or looking for work. And the vast majority (two-thirds) of undocumented adults had lived in the U.S. for more than a decade.
Meanwhile, immigrant workers pay billions of dollars in taxes. California State Controller Betty Yee estimates that immigrants without work authorization contributed more than $180 billion to that state’s economy in 2017 alone. Federal and state laws that are designed to provide workers with basic protections-like the right to a minimum wage, overtime pay, and a safe and healthy workplace-apply to all workers in the United States, regardless of immigration status, and they have a right to complain to the government when their employer is violating those laws. Employers are also prohibited from threatening, intimidating, or in any other way retaliating against any worker because they’ve asserted their rights under the law.
These laws are intended to protect all workers from exploitation, and to eliminate employer incentives to hire-and underpay-workers who lack status over those who have it. Notwithstanding these legal protections, violations are rampant. According to a May 2017 report from the Economic Policy Institute, 2.4 million workers in the ten largest states lose $8 billion annually to minimum wage violations alone. Extrapolating nationwide, this suggests that workers are losing more than $15 billion per year, without even including overtime violations.
Other studies clearly show that workers who lack immigration status are disproportionately affected. For example, the landmark 2009 study “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers” found that 37 percent of undocumented immigrant workers surveyed were victims of minimum wage violations in the prior week, compared with 24 percent for immigrants with work authorization and 16 percent for U.S.-born workers.