Migrants in U.S.: Our world is simply a more mobile place than it ever has been before. The number of people who leave their homes to seek better lives in foreign nations has been rising, in absolute and proportional terms, for decades. According to the United Nations, 281 million people were living outside their birth countries in 2020. That’s 3.5 percent more than in 2019 — despite the travel restrictions imposed in response to Covid-19 and before Russia invaded Ukraine.
The U.N.’s report lumps together all kinds of international migrants. It includes professionals with visas working abroad, asylum applicants seeking to permanently change residence and undocumented laborers doing seasonal work. But its figures are useful, nevertheless. They demonstrate both the world’s increasing fluidity and America’s unique status as a favored destination. Though only about a fifth of international migrants head to North America, the United States has attracted more migrants than any other nation for the past 50 years. In 2020, the U.N. notes, the United States held about 51 million international migrants. The runner-up, Germany, had about 16 million.
Migrants dream of America because they are an entrenched part of our economy. This is nothing new; America’s economy has always relied upon a mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit.
Even today, some sectors in the U.S. economy seem almost reserved for workers who have been deliberately kept vulnerable. When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, establishing a minimum wage, they excluded most farmworkers and domestic workers from its protections. These workers were largely excluded again when Congress passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1970. “These spaces that were once filled by slaves are now filled by immigrants,” Anita Sinha, a professor of law at American University told me. “They are exploitative by design.”
Other sectors use foreign-born labor as a more recent strategy. When the anthropologist Angela Stuesse investigated the history of the poultry industry in Mississippi, for example, she found that when African American workers organized for better wages and working conditions in the 1970s, businessmen cultivated an alternative work force of Latin Americans, whom they found in Texas and Florida. As they recruited and transported these migrants, she demonstrates, they catalyzed the demographic transformation of central Mississippi and the poultry industry across the South.
Today migrants are routinely employed in almost every blue- and pink-collar industry in America. Recent Times investigations by Hannah Dreier found unaccompanied minors packing Cheerios, washing hotel sheets and sanitizing chicken-processing plants.
The United States has laws banning these and other abusive labor practices, but many companies have found a workaround: staffing agencies. “They’re all designed to skirt litigations,” Kevin Herrera, the legal director of Raise the Floor Alliance, in Chicago, once explained to me.
Many of these agencies specialize in hiring people who will suffer any number of degrading or dangerous conditions because they are desperate for work. Their offices are sometimes inside the company factories. But if one of their employees files a complaint, is injured on the job or is caught working illegally, the agency runs interference so that the company avoids legal responsibility.
Key facts about U.S. Latinos for National Hispanic Heritage Month
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