Immigration Myths Feed Divisions among Workers

The Trump administration’s opening barrage against immigrants—arresting thousands of people around the country and declaring that hospitals, schools, and churches are no longer off limits—has put a chill on immigrant communities.

Rumors of raids are flying. Some parents are scared to send their children to school, go to the hospital, or go anywhere besides work. On the other hand, border czar Tom Holman complained on CNN that Chicagoans are “very well-educated”: “They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it how to escape from ICE.”

Bosses and supervisors will use the terror to get what they want from workers, whether it’s wage theft or forcing people to work in unsafe conditions or demanding sex. They expect immigrants will not dare to complain, with the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement hanging over them.

The power they wield over these workers drives down standards for everyone in the workplace. And employers like Amazon are trying to use the anti-immigrant hysteria to divide workers, which is deadly for solidarity action.

To break through, union members need to be able to talk sense to their co-workers about immigration—why people come to the U.S., what they contribute when they get here, and why everyone having the same labor rights protects all workers from abuse.

Here, Aviva Chomsky tackles some myths that are used to divide native-born workers from immigrants. —Editors

Myth: Immigrants take American jobs.

With all the talk about a flood of new immigrants, unemployment is still close to a record low. This indicates that immigrants are not taking jobs from native-born workers. Analysts from the left, right, and center agree: Immigration contributes to job growth, locally and nationally.

It might seem logical that adding new workers to an economy would increase competition for jobs. But this assumes that jobs and workers exist in a laboratory with only those two factors at play. Real-world economies are much more complicated.

In fact, immigrants contribute work, spend money, and actually increase the size of the economy, creating jobs where there were none before.

Employers eliminate jobs due to lots of factors: recession, automation, business failure, offshoring, government cutbacks, and lowered demand. All these have more impact than immigration. In fact, where immigrants are available to work, it sometimes means companies opt to stay in the U.S. rather than move overseas.

Myth: Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers and drive down wages.

Immigrants who arrive without resources fill essential and often unwanted jobs, with low wages, harsh conditions, and little job security—think agriculture, food processing, cleaning and maintenance, and home health care. Often job conditions and pay are such that employers can’t find workers to do them.

Union members have been fighting to make these jobs better. Over 150 years, many union fights have been led by immigrant workers, despite discrimination. But labor drives have also lost out, especially when workers were divided against each other. The best way to raise everyone’s labor standards is for immigrants to have equal labor rights.

If immigrant workers didn’t have legal threats hanging over their heads, they would be in a better position to demand better wages, raising the floor for everyone. The boss exploits these threats to the detriment of all workers.

Myth: Immigrants don’t pay taxes.

Every person in the U.S. pays taxes on almost every transaction: sales taxes, gasoline taxes, property taxes (whether they own or rent).

When people claim that “immigrants don’t pay taxes,” though, they generally mean payroll or income taxes: the federal, state, and Social Security and Medicare taxes that employers deduct from paychecks. They assume that many immigrants work under the table and are paid in cash, with no taxes deducted.

Most immigrants have legal permission to work (naturalized citizens, green card holders, Temporary Protected Status holders, DACA recipients, refugees, asylum seekers or grantees, and those on temporary work visas) and work in the formal economy, receiving regular paychecks with all the normal deductions. In 2023, 31 million immigrant workers contributed $579 billion in local, state, and federal taxes.

SUPPORT LABOR NOTES

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

Give $10 a month or more and get our "Fight the Boss, Build the Union" T-shirt.

About 20 percent of immigrants in the U.S., 11 million people, are undocumented. Undocumented workers participate in the formal economy too, even though it’s technically forbidden. They may use a friend or relative’s Social Security number, or purchase a false card on the black market.

Using a fake number to work and pay taxes is very different from using a false identity for financial gain, like to drain a victim’s bank account. In fact, undocumented immigrants contributed $25.7 billion to Social Security in 2022. Many will never see a penny of retirement from their contributions.

Still, many people in the U.S.—immigrant or not—are paid in cash. Undocumented workers are overrepresented in this group. If they were not forced into the shadows, most workers would prefer not to work under the table, and in fact many undocumented workers choose to pay taxes by obtaining an IRS-generated ITIN number, created specifically to allow non-citizens without work authorization to pay taxes.

Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in local, state, and federal taxes in 2022.

Myth: Immigrants are a drain on the economy.

When border states offer newly arrived immigrants free transport to liberal northern states, and we see overflowing shelters in cities like Boston and New York, it looks like immigrants are costing public money without contributing. In reality, immigrants contribute to the economy just like everyone else—by working, paying taxes, consuming, providing services, and opening businesses that employ people.

Some public services are available to immigrants regardless of status: public schools, public transportation, libraries. But undocumented immigrants are ineligible for almost all individual benefits (like TANF, SNAP, AFDC, Medicaid, Section 8 Housing), as are most immigrants with temporary status. This means they have less to fall back on if they stand up for themselves on the job, and they often go without health care, food, or adequate housing.

Even legal permanent residents (green card holders) are barred from such individual benefits for five years or longer. Many immigrants are reluctant to apply for even the benefits they’re eligible for, because they fear it will lead to deportation.

During the last months of the Biden administration, new federal programs admitted large numbers of immigrants seeking asylum while creating no provisions for sheltering, feeding, or providing work permits for them. Historically, under the Refugee Resettlement Program, the government has partnered with nonprofits to help refugees settle in areas where housing and jobs are available and to provide them needed support.

In the most recent wave, those legally admitted to the country were left adrift. Many were sent or found their way to cities already in the throes of a housing crisis. The federal bureaucracy took months to process their work permit paperwork.

Migrants—and cities—were left in crisis, and there was plenty of blame to go around. Most of the problems could have been avoided with better transparency, forethought, and coordination by the federal government, and less energy spent on partisan squabbling.

Myth: The country is being overrun by illegal immigrants.

The number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. rose steadily from 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million in 2007, then declined slowly to 10.2 million in 2019, then crept up to 11 million in 2022. That’s 3.3 percent of the U.S. population. Many factors contributed to the rise and fall—the 2008 recession was probably the most important. Border policies seem to play very little role in the trends, instead the availability of jobs seems to be a key factor.

Immigrants (of all statuses) make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population. That’s pretty high—close to the record of 14.8 percent in 1890. But there’s no reason to think of this, or even a higher percentage, as a negative thing.

Half of these immigrants are naturalized citizens; another quarter have green cards. About 20 percent of immigrants are undocumented. (The remaining 4 percent hold temporary legal status.)

Undocumented-ness is a problem—especially for the people who are undocumented. They are excluded and discriminated against, and especially vulnerable to labor exploitation. This vulnerability is bad for all of us, because it drives down standards and gives the boss a wedge to divide us. Immigrant workers don’t drive down wages—the boss who chooses to take advantage of their precarious situation does.

Over the last century, legislation to regularize the status of unauthorized immigrants has been implemented many times, most recently with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

We could do this again. Almost half of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. have lived here for more than 20 years; another quarter for 10-20 years. Mass deportation would rip the heart out of communities, schools, and workplaces.

Myth: Tougher U.S. policies will slow down immigration.

Most immigrants make the dangerous, expensive, and disruptive decision to leave home as a last resort when conditions make it impossible to see a future there. All the resources that the U.S. has spent on criminalizing immigration and militarizing the border have made the process even more perilous and expanded the role of criminal gangs. Yet they have not slowed immigration, because they fail to address the root causes that drive a person to migrate.

Recent administrations, from Bush to Biden, have suggested promoting economic development in migrant-sending regions. Unfortunately, the projects they have implemented, based on foreign investment, tourism, extracting natural resources, and sweatshops, only continue the kinds of “development” that have pushed people off their land and into the migrant stream in the first place.

Many, many migrants would prefer the “right to stay home” if that were possible. U.S. policies (including military interventions) have been central to the crises that are now forcing migrants to leave. On top of that, a growing number of migrants are driven by climate-fueled disasters—floods, fires, storms, droughts—but the U.S.’s official policy now is to do nothing about the climate crisis.

Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history at Salem State University in Massachusetts and the author of They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (2007), Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (2014), and Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration (2021).