Progressives Are Pushing for an Economy Built on Migrant Serfdom | Opinion

Something astounding transpired last week when JD Vance sat down with The New York Times. The interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, pressed the GOP veep nominee on the alleged contradiction between his desire to boost the U.S. housing supply and his commitment to a tighter border. Given that a “large proportion” of the construction workforce is here illegally, Garcia-Navarro asked, “how do you propose to build all the housing necessary in this country?”
The organs of the asset-rich usually take more care to disguise their preference for slave-like migrant workers. Yet here was a Times podcaster giving it in unvarnished form: How could America get by without lording over a large underclass of serfs who don’t speak the language and lack the power to organize or demand regulatory protection, and who can be used to put downward pressure on the wages of native workers without a college degree?
Vance rightly pointed out that the nation had no trouble expanding its housing supply in the immediate postwar decades, a period that coincided with a much more restrictive border regime. More recently, elite opinion has taken it for granted that “because a large number of builders are using undocumented labor, that that’s the only way to build homes.” Lulu Garcia-Navarro shot back: “I’m not arguing in favor of illegal migration.”
But that’s exactly what she was doing: defending a trend that, unless reversed, will put the United States on the labor path of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, states that oversee vast numbers of disenfranchised and brutalized migrant workers.
American employer lobbies and libertarian think tanks have long made arguments like those put forward by Garcia-Navarro: There are some jobs that Americans won’t do. America simply doesn’t have enough workers to shore up this or that industry. Americans don’t work hard. These claims are made no more credible when mouthed by ostensibly progressive institutions like the New York Times editorial page.
Here is the key fact: To this day, non-migrants still dominate the industries in which migrants are most heavily employed. According to Pew data, only 18 percent of dry-cleaning workers are migrants; only 19 percent of building-maintenance and landscaping workers are migrants; and only 22 percent of private-household workers are migrants. Even farming, the sector most closely associated with migrant labor, is majority non-migrant, according to the 2019-2020 National Agricultural Workers Survey.
Another key fact: In all the regions where we have lower levels of immigration, Americans are doing the supposedly unwanted or unfillable jobs on the bottom of the economy. In high immigration areas, those jobs are more likely to be filled by illegal immigrants—though again, even in these sectors and regions, the migrant share of the workforce isn’t nearly as high as open-borders advocates suggest.
In other words, plenty of non-migrant Americans are willing to dry-clean your clothes, to clean your office, to landscape your garden, and to wipe your kitchen counters. And more of them would be willing to do that if they didn’t have to compete with serf-like workers willing to work for much lower wages and with little to no bargaining power and regulatory protections.
What about the claim that America’s native-born workers don’t work as hard? Yes, serfs work hard. When one call to immigration authorities can get them removed from the country, serfs will do anything. Serfs aren’t going to organize their workplaces, let alone turn to the National Labor Relations Board to have their newly formed union officially recognized. They aren’t going to complain to the government about discrimination. They aren’t going to alert the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to dangerous work conditions.
Yes, our domestic workers can’t keep up with such pliant, submissive workers. Working-class Americans can’t keep up with serfs. You would think this would be something progressives would see as a good thing.
That last point, especially, should shame the Left. If progressives struggle to muster sympathy for the dispossessed domestic working class, they should at least ponder what the current order means for the migrants themselves.
Earlier this year, for example, when a new bird flu broke out in America’s dairy farms, the general population was largely safe—but the country’s 100,000 or so dairy workers faced a high risk of exposure and illness. As Garcia-Navarro’s own paper reported, the main reason for the spread was the fact that many of these workers are Spanish-speaking and illegal. They aren’t offered sick leave. They are readily terminated when they do take time off. And they are fearful to turn to OSHA or other regulatory authorities to flag unsanitary conditions.
It’s why Cesar Chavez consistently opposed illegal migration: “The illegal aliens are doubly exploited,” he said, “first because they are farm workers, and second because they are powerless to defend their own interests.”
Progressives typically concede that migrants undercut domestic wages and are often subjected to inhumane conditions—but then insist that this can be rectified by building up democratic socialism and labor power, not by restricting the free movement of labor. Put another way: First we’ll let in as many newcomers as we can, and then we will organize them.
Nonsense. As Vance hinted in his response to Garcia-Navarro, the period of peak union density—the share of workers belonging to labor organizations or otherwise covered by collective bargaining—coincided with the restrictionist regime handed down from the 1924 Immigration Act. In 2001, back when progressives were permitted to voice discomfiting facts, the American Prospect writer Harold Meyerson noted that “it was only during the one period in American history when immigration was almost shut off—1923 through 1965—that industrial workers were able to organize themselves.”
Likewise, Vernon Briggs, the preeminent scholar of the relationship between immigration and labor unionism, found that “membership in American unions has over time moved inversely with trends in the size of immigration inflows.” In layman’s terms: When migration levels climb, union membership declines; more immigration means weaker unions.
Libertarian think tanks and employer lobbies openly acknowledge this. In 2022, for example, a Cato Institute study concluded that “immigration reduced union density by 57 percentage points between 1980 and 2020,” or about 30 percent of the “overall decline in union density during that period.”
The causal dots aren’t hard to connect: By making workplaces more ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, mass migration makes it harder to forge solidarity and mount collective action.
Given all this, ask yourself: Who really stands on the side of American workers—JD Vance or the “progressive” apologists for American serfdom?
I’ll go with Vance.
Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.