To the untrained eye, it might appear that the Trump administration has been just as hardline on immigration as it promised it would. It has attempted to deport students over speech and activism related to the war in Gaza, and it has resorted to legally dubious measures in order to send hundreds of Venezuelan and Central American migrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
The crackdown has been accompanied by highly produced advertisements, combative press conferences, and photos of shackled prisoners ushered out of the country onto military jets. Never missing an opportunity to claim victory and provoke its opposition, the White House’s official X account has used cartoon AI images and ASMR-style videos to trumpet its harsh approach.
Naturally, these efforts have prompted fury in the media. Most Americans will now be under the impression that President Trump is delivering on his biggest campaign promise. But the theatrical measures and draconian legal measures mask the reality that this administration’s immigration policy is much more business-as-usual than it would care to admit.
It’s true that the number of attempted crossings of the US-Mexico border have plummeted. But, despite the vast numbers of illegal migrants still in the US, Trump’s actual deportation record is below that of last year, when the Biden administration sent back more people on a month-to-month basis. Perhaps most significantly, Trump has so far ignored the biggest magnet for those crossing the border without authorisation: the many corporations luring migrants with the promise of employment. There is a discrepancy between the White House’s rhetoric and policy, and it raises profound questions about the administration’s true priorities and whom it ultimately serves.
Consider the likeliest destinations of illegal migrants. Those without documentation tend to make up a significant portion of the workforce in construction, slaughterhouses, restaurants, hotels, janitorial work, and gig delivery services. Yet businesses in these industries have reported few significant raids from US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These pillars of the economy are virtually untouched by the supposed crackdown.
What’s more, despite ample laws that exist to prosecute employers for knowingly employing or recruiting illegal labour, Fortune 500 American executives have faced no scrutiny. You might expect the largest housebuilder in the country, KB Home, to have been bothered by ICE agents since the change in administration. But Robert McGibney, the company’s president, told investors on a recent call that “We’ve seen nothing at all related to immigration”.
Similar quiescence was reported to investors of Taylor Morrison Home, another homebuilder. “We’re happy to report that we haven’t seen anything hit the job site,” said an executive. A counterpart at Tri Pointe Homes reported that the apparent crackdown had resulted in “no impacts at all”.
This is not to suggest impropriety on the part of KB, Taylor Morrison or Tri Pointe. I mean simply to point out that the construction industry, being one of the industries believed to employ illegal migrants, seems to be receiving little scrutiny. There is a considerable distance between the media firestorm and business reality.
And the collective sigh of relief from corporate employers comes as the administration has officially signalled leniency for business interests. Trump has, in fact, offered a generous reprieve to industries involved in employing illegal migrant labour. For all the suggestion of zero-tolerance, he has recently mooted the idea of allowing undocumented agricultural workers to leave the country and return as guest workers. “We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people,” the President told reporters earlier this month.
The contradiction at the heart of the administration’s approach reveals a fundamental tension between populist rhetoric and pro-business reality. While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual. This disconnect could ultimately undermine the economic nationalism that propelled the Trump campaign to victory.
“While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual.”
What has caused this disconnect? For a clue, we should look to high-dollar donations. The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee Inc, in a filing last week, revealed that its biggest single contributor was Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, a chicken processing company in the United States. The egg-producing conglomerate gave $5 million to fund the inauguration, far outpacing business donors with much deeper pockets, such as Amazon, Meta, ExxonMobil, and Pfizer.
Pilgrim’s Pride has much to gain from a lax approach. Last year, the company confirmed reports that it used buses to transport Haitian workers to its plant in Russellville, Alabama. It also employs thousands of migrant workers, many of whom are alleged to be without documentation, at its poultry facility in Moorefield, West Virginia.
The activity of Pilgrim’s Pride, then, exemplifies the industrial-scale employment of undocumented workers that has become standard in certain sectors of the American economy. In this, the company is representative of an industry that has done more than any other to ruthlessly exploit migration.
Other firms have been accused of using child labour to work dangerous jobs for low pay. The New York Times, for instance, has identified immigrant children employed in poultry plants from Delaware to Mississippi. This sort of exploitation goes beyond the food industry; the newspaper also reported that 12-year-old migrants were working in the construction sector as roofers.
All of this is at odds with the promises that the Trump campaign made before taking office. Last year, the soon-to-be Vice President, JD Vance, said that migrants’ below-market pay had “undercut the wages of American workers”.
Accepting the nomination, Vance said: “We’re done importing foreign labour — we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations.”
Such remarks represented an incursion into the traditional, labour-centric offering of the Democratic Party. It is the kind of argument that is likely to have contributed to GOP success last year. In this way, the Republicans have taken advantage of the slow abandonment by Left-leaning politicians of blue-collar industries. They have adopted trade and immigration-friendly policies that have brought American workers directly into competition with foreigners willing to work for far less. In all, the Democrats have shifted their concern away from physical labour and brick-and-mortar workplaces and toward the professional service sector and the highly-educated knowledge economy. As such, it has left itself vulnerable to such a challenge from the populist Right.
Studies have shown the negative impact of immigration on wages for competing American workers, especially those with lower levels of education. And over the past five years, the US has inadvertently conducted a live experiment on reduced migration and wages. During the early years of Covid, when the border was shut down, migration levels plummeted to record lows. According to new analysis, the corresponding tight labour market produced rapid salary increases among those working at the bottom of the income scale, particularly those in leisure, hospitality, and transportation — the very industries with the highest concentrations of migrant workers.
The rapid “wage inflation” rate angered corporate America and provoked a furious push to import more workers. The major business lobby groups, including the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce, successfully pressured the Biden administration to loosen immigration restrictions and to grant protected status to a variety of immigrant groups so they could take jobs in American factories, restaurants, and meatpacking plants, thus alleviating the pressure to continually raise wages. As migrant workers streamed into the country, wages for blue-collar industries returned to stagnation.
Again, investor calls reveal the interests of corporate America. “Any pro-immigration policies that would be implemented will benefit us [by] increasing the availability of labour throughout the country,” said Andrew Masterman, then a leading landscaping executive, on one such call.
There is no doubt that the Trump administration could level the playing field and hold business groups liable for their role in fuelling the migrant crisis. Even now, employers and staffing agencies routinely place advertisements in social media and in Latin American newspapers, beckoning workers across the border for better employment opportunities. There is ripe potential for a crackdown on corporations tapping illicit forms. The legal framework for such enforcement already exists; what appears to be lacking is the political will to implement it systematically.
Instead, there has been a broad relaxation of accountability towards corporate actors. In recent months, the government has announced an abrupt rollback of investigations for corporate crimes on a variety of matters. The Department of Justice recently abandoned a foreign bribery inquiry into the outsourcing giant Cognizant, while financial regulators have voluntarily dismissed fraud lawsuits against Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase. These developments signal a broader retreat from corporate accountability. The retreat encompasses not only immigration enforcement, but other regulatory domains.
What’s more, if the first Trump administration is any guide, there will be no significant criminal enforcement actions on employers soliciting illegal labour. Even in the aftermath of the largest employer raid during the four-year period — an August 2019 ICE raid on several Mississippi poultry plants, which rounded up about 680 illegal workers — the only corporate leaders to face charges were low-level supervisors and human resource officials. The owners of the plants were not prosecuted.
In December, there was a rare outbreak of migration-related concern among information technology workers. Grassroots supporters of the President pointed out that major corporations have used H-1B visas to ruthlessly outsource and replace American employees with lower-wage Indian tech workers. Executives such as Elon Musk angrily defended the foreign worker programme, calling it essential. Trump was forced to pick a side.
Should he remain committed to his campaign promises to clamp down on migration of all types and do away with the H-1B program, which he had previously called “very, very bad for workers”, or should he largely keep the programme in place, as Silicon Valley executives had demanded? This decision represented a critical test of the administration’s priorities and its willingness to challenge powerful business interests.
Ultimately, Trump sided with business executives such as Elon Musk, whose companies have long relied on a significant H-1B workforce.
The immigration issue will come down to similar priorities. So far, the administration has focused on splashy enforcement actions that do little to resolve the root causes. Draconian arrests of students over speech concerns and symbolic arrests of alleged gang members may play well to the conservative tabloid press, yet these actions do little to address the systemic causes of mass migration and its impact on the American worker. Revamping the way corporations exploit foreign labour will require a crackdown on the businesses that have long fuelled the crisis. Doing so would mean upending the traditional cosy alliance between politicians and corporate donors, an act that appears not to be attractive to the White House. Nevertheless, the administration’s ultimate legacy on immigration is likely to be judged not by the spectacle of enforcement actions, but by whether it fundamentally changed the economic incentives that drive illegal immigration in the first place.
