$1-a-Day Jobs and the Logic of the New Immigrant Crackdown
Immigration raids and detention aren’t just political theater — they supply corporations with cheap, captive labor and help roll back protections for all workers. Behind the language of border security lies coerced labor that echoes the convict lease era.
In Florida, lawmakers recently rolled back labor protections to allow children as young as fourteen to work overnight on school nights. (Joe Raedle /Getty Images)
The well-worn claim that immigrants “take American jobs” helped sweep the current administration into office last November. First deployed by the “Know Nothing Party” of the mid-nineteenth-century, this old chestnut has long been a staple of anti-immigrant politics. While studies show immigration strengthens the US economy overall, the broader gains are little comfort to low-wage workers who feel only precarity and downward pressure on wages. Donald Trump capitalized on these anxieties, as nativist politicians have long done, channeling them into resentment of immigrants rather than the bosses and policies driving exploitation.
On Inauguration Day 2025, the new administration wasted no time in declaring war on an imagined “invasion,” dispatching Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to conduct raids in communities around the country. By late July, arrests of immigrants had increased by 200–400 percent. The rhetoric of invasion has served to brand many immigrants as criminals for committing the act, still only a federal misdemeanor, of crossing without papers. Further, the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill this summer allots $165 billion to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over the next decade, funding a dramatic expansion of ICE into what amounts to a domestic army.
The question is whether these massive public expenditures on the war against immigrants help the economy. In short: no, they do not.
Agricultural industries, long reliant on immigrant labor, are facing the worst labor shortages in over a decade. The food service industry — with its low wages, lack of benefits, and poor job security — has struggled with hiring since the COVID-19 pandemic, and conditions have not improved in the last eight months.
Sending Kids to Work in the Sunshine State
In August, tariff wars resulted in the lowest employment levels in the manufacturing sector in half a decade. Manufacturing, food service, and other industries report strain caused by the departure of valued workers who have lost their ability to work legally because of the cancellation of programs like humanitarian parole and temporary protected status.
The war against immigrants has not improved the US economy. What it has done is open the door to labor practices long deemed unconstitutional and illegal, like child labor and forced labor. In Florida, for example, lawmakers recently rolled back labor protections to allow children as young as fourteen to work overnight on school nights. While child labor is not uncommon, particularly in the agricultural sector populated almost entirely by immigrant workers, laws like Florida’s generalize this exploitative practice to all workers. Florida’s agriculture sector, already strained by immigration crackdowns, stands to benefit from the new law, which expands the pool of workers who can legally be put to work in the fields.
Meanwhile, the expansion of immigration detention has become a boon for private prison corporations like the GEO Group, Palantir, and CoreCivic, which profit from rising incarceration. These corporations have quietly settled lawsuits over coerced labor in detention centers — cases courts have found violate the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Forced labor is repugnant, yet it is being normalized through detention practices that compel immigrants to work under threat of punishment.
Detention, Coercion, Corporate Profit
In late June, 2025, ICE reported a record number of people in detention: 60,000, most with no criminal record at all. Ironically, even as DHS secretary Kristi Noem denounces human trafficking as a problem perpetrated by immigrants and declares that “forced labor is repulsive” with respect to China, she is working to expand DHS’s “voluntary work plan.” In practice, the program forces immigrants in detention to work, sometimes with no pay at all, and oftentimes under threat of solitary confinement if they don’t comply.
As Grace Hussain explains it, “The private businesses that overwhelmingly run the [detention] centers are choosing to take advantage of their captive populations in order to avoid paying higher wages to citizens.” The model is not unique to the United States. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele’s flagship prison, the “Terrorism Confinement Center” (CECOT), enforces a “Zero Idleness Program” that compels inmates to perform agricultural and factory work as well as maintain the prison itself. The US has deported immigrants guilty of no crimes except being in the country without papers to this prison.
The legal basis for coerced prison labor lies in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This exception created a loophole, exploited initially in the former Confederacy to fill the labor vacuum left by emancipation. Under the convict lease system, incarcerated people, predominantly but not entirely African American, were rented out to employers, generating revenue for the state and local governments that oversaw the prisons. “Criminal hunters” often pursued minor crimes such as unpaid tickets to supply this labor. The system endured through World War II, helping to build municipal infrastructure and private fortunes throughout the South.
The Thirteenth Amendment has since been used to justify prison labor more broadly, a practice that continues today. More than four thousand US companies currently rely on prison labor in their supply chains.
Forgetting the Past, Exploiting the Present
Ironically, while the Trump administration expands coerced labor, it is fueling efforts to reshape how the history of such labor is remembered. Trump has complained that institutions like the Smithsonian dwell too much on negative features of American history, including slavery and racial violence.
At the same time, conservative education projects such as PragerU and Prager UKids produce content criticized for downplaying the brutality of slavery — including scenes where a cartoon Christopher Columbus suggests “being taken as a slave is better than being killed. ” Although these accounts contradict seventy-five years of historical scholarship, they are now being shoved down the throats of K-12 students in several states, including Florida students just coming off an overnight shift.
Trump’s attack on education and public memory clears space for practices once thought confined to the past. As the immigration detention system expands with federal investment, the record profits netted by private prison concerns are just the beginning of a bonanza for corporate capital. These firms profit twice over: by collecting government funds for each occupied bed and by subcontracting the labors of detainees, who are paid little or nothing.
The war against immigrants is really a war against all workers — inside and outside the proliferating prison and detention gulags. Coerced labor drives down wages and undermines fair labor standards. Immigrants never “took” American jobs, but the resurgence of forced labor does threaten the rights and livelihoods of everyone.