Boss mistreating you? Withholding your paycheck? Bullying or sexually harassing you? Better not say anything if your papers aren’t in order. Employers are using the threat of deportation to rob employees of their wages and to punish union activity, according to CBS News.
In a report from June 28, CBS cites Alexis Teodoro of the Pomona Day Labor Center in Los Angeles County, who says wage theft cases have skyrocketed this spring. “Since the immigration operation outside a Pomona Home Depot on April 22, the center has identified 30 instances where day laborers are owed money for their work, more than double the typical number seen during the same time period."
"They finish their shift, and at the end, they don't pay them," Teodoro said. "When they exert their rights to get paid, which is their right under the California Labor Code, employers threaten them with calling immigration."
Here in New Mexico, Somos Un Pueblo Unido suggests that one in four immigrant laborers are victims of wage theft, although only one in ten report the crime, despite laws on the books that are supposed to protect them from exploitation. Somos decried the ICE raid on a Lovington, NM, dairy where eleven immigrants allegedly holding falsified green cards were arrested by ICE last month. Fear of being reported–and deported–discourages undocumented workers (who make up about half the farm workforce) from exercising their rights. It’s the laborers, not the bosses, who get charged, after all. (While Trump has promised to go after employers, only one has been charged among the dozens raided by ICE, according to the Washington Post.)
Unions are often the targets, as in Mississippi during the first Trump administration, where an ICE raid nabbed hundreds of undocumented workers in the chicken slaughterhouses of agribusiness giants Koch and Pecos Foods; the workers, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, had just won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against their employers for sexual and racial harassment, and they were arrested to be deported. It’s part of a pattern, just like a restaurant worker in Brooklyn who was arrested by ICE while giving a legal deposition against his employer for unpaid wages.
In my role as a literacy volunteer here in Santa Fe, one of my students told me about his own experience witnessing female staff in the establishment where he works being groped by the boss, but afraid to speak up lest they face retaliation from ICE.
We need to ask ourselves who are the real criminals here? The workers we depend on to pick our fruit, milk our cows, and harvest our crops, often living in overcrowded, leaky trailers? Or the businesses that hire these men and women (and yes, often children!) at subsistence wages and then threaten to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they object to unsafe conditions on the job?
Undocumented workers are laboring at tasks few Americans want at wages none would accept. They are not threatening U.S. jobs. What they are threatening–by trying to organize at meat packing houses and garment factories and in service industries–is corporate profits and billionaire bonuses. Trump's war on immigrants is also a war on workers. We can’t let him win.
