Woke Companies Prefer Illegal Alien Labor to American Workers

Mass deportations won't hurt the economy. They'll boost it.

Illegal aliens are necessary for our economy, screeches the Left— no Americans will take the jobs that they do! This is a total lie, and I'll prove it. But it's a lie that's extremely lucrative for big businesses and politicians alike.

The argument is that no Americans, especially young Americans, would accept manual labor jobs in construction, hospitality, food service, and other industries. I know quite a few workers who undermine that claim, but anecdotes are not sufficient evidence. The data from the last two decades makes it clear that many companies and conglomerates aren’t hiring illegal aliens because Americans don’t want the jobs—they prefer hiring illegals to hiring Americans because it is cheaper. Meanwhile, countless Americans, especially American men, find themselves unable to get hired by the companies greedily scouting for foreign workers. This is why companies and farms are panicking at Trump’s immigration raids – not because there won’t be workers, but because American workers expect fairer wages than illegal aliens accept.

Don’t just take my word for it. In 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies demonstrated both that plenty of Americans are willing to take construction jobs, and that illegal aliens appear to be taking those jobs from Americans: 

“In 2021, immigrants (legal and illegal) were 29 percent of all construction workers, but only 17 percent of the total labor force.

With more than seven out of 10 construction workers being U.S.-born, any assertion that people born in this country are uninterested in such jobs is wrong.”

One example of how eager Americans are for the blue collar jobs for which illegal aliens are hired happened in June. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a Nebraska meat-packing plant, Glenn Valley Foods, arresting dozens of illegal aliens in what became the biggest worksite immigration raid in state history: 

The waiting room was jam-packed with American citizens lined up, applications in hand, eager to work. The very jobs we’re told no Americans want suddenly became hot commodities the moment the illegals were shown the door.

This Nebraska raid comes on the heels of a brutal reality check: back in 2024, a jobs report showed a staggering drop of 1.3 million jobs for native-born workers, almost perfectly offset by a gain of 1.2 million jobs for foreign-born workers.

All the “job gains” Biden bragged about went to illegal aliens, not to Americans. This is not by accident—it's by design.

In 2016, the Texas Tribune reported that Target and H-E-B grocery stores were among those that benefitted from hiring stockers, baggers, and custodial staff who were illegal aliens because they would take lower wages than Americans. In 2017, New York Injury Attorneys Blog looked at some reasons that farming and restaurant conglomerates were aiming to hire illegal aliens at low wages and in bad working conditions. While the blog was mostly interested in complaining about the treatment of illegal aliens, it did provide an interesting window into why many American companies are reluctant to hire Americans, preferring workers with low expectations and a fear of reporting abuse to law enforcement.

“Case Farms is a prime example of this issue. The company … supplies chicken to Boar’s Head, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, and Popeye’s, as well as to the federal government for school-lunch programs,” the site explained. Originally Case Farms’ Ohio plant employed primarily Amish, then other Americans from the Rust Belt area. Finally, the plant grew so big that the company began sending recruiters down to Texas border towns to hire illegal aliens. While some of the migrants quickly left upon discovering lousy living conditions (no heat in winter, lack of running water, etc.), thousands of Guatemalan “refugees” were not so picky. Instead of improving conditions, Case Farms just waited for the illegals with the lowest expectations.

Nor are they alone in that method of “solving” workplace or profit issues. “Hiring undocumented workers keeps costs down. In the restaurant industry, where low profit margins and high employee turnover present constant challenges, hiring undocumented workers is often a default solution,” NY Injury Attorneys Blog stated. “Even though it is illegal to hire undocumented immigrants, guilty employers are frequently not held accountable. Employers also often misclassify undocumented workers as independent contractors or subcontract to other businesses that do the actual hiring in order to skirt culpability.” 

In fact, under Biden, federal immigration authorities were ordered to cease workplace raids. The government and Big Biz were in it together to provide cheap labor at the American worker’s expense. Democrat politicians gained illicit votes and changed the demographics of red states, while the plutocrats increased their profits at workers’ expense. Incidentally, in 2010, a briefing report for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that black Americans were particularly affected by the penchant of American companies to hire illegals for minimum wage jobs. So much for Democrats defending blacks.

Most recently and noted above, Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camarota testified to Congress in 2023 about the issue of illegal aliens taking minimum wage jobs from Americans. While acknowledging the serious problem that lower skilled U.S. men’s workforce participation since 1960 has declined in correlation with the increase in illegal immigration, he also noted statistics to debunk the myth that no American wants such jobs. “Due to their education levels, [migrants] are heavily concentrated in lower-wage, less-skilled jobs such as construction labor, building cleaning and maintenance, food service and preparation, groundskeeping, retail sales, and food processing. However, the vast majority of workers in these jobs are still U.S.-born or legal immigrants,” he said.

“The notion that illegal immigrants only do jobs American[s] don’t want is false. Even in the two dozen occupations where illegal immigrants are 15 percent or more of all the workers, 5.7 million U.S.-born Americans are employed,” he added. He undermined also the assertion that America’s economy will collapse if illegal alien workers are deported:

“Though often the focus of illegal immigration debate, farmworkers comprise less than 1
 percent of the entire U.S. labor force; and less than 5 percent of all illegal immigrants[’]
 work is in that relatively small sector.

There is clear evidence that immigration reduces the wages and employment of some
 U.S.-born workers, though distinguishing the impact of illegal immigration in particular
 is difficult. However, it should be pointed out that lower wages can also result in higher
 profits for employers or lower prices for consumers.”

Camarota did, however, state that non-college educated U.S. men’s workforce participation dropped 14 points between 1960 and 2023—meaning that while illegal alien workers make up a relatively small percentage of the workforce on which our economy depends, they still take jobs from hundreds of thousands of American workers.

Donald Trump was right—illegal immigration hurts American workers. There are many Americans who cannot find employment not because the jobs don’t exist, but because companies are prioritizing cheap foreign labor. It’s the same principle that made huge companies move manufacturing out of America to Communist/third world countries like China and India with abusive labor practices. Mass deportations of illegal alien workers won’t destroy our economy, but they will open up hundreds of thousands of jobs which American workers will be happy to take.

(READ MORE: Make Food Great Again by Making Farmers Hire American Again)

Catherine Salgado is a contributor for PJ Media. She also writes for Media Research Center, the Prickly Pear, and her Substack Pro Deo et Libertate on a variety of political, historical, and cultural topics. She received the Andrew Breitbart MVP award for August 2021 from the Rogue Review for her journalism.

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