Employers as Subjects of the Immigration State: How the State Foments Employment Insecurity for Temporary Immigrant Workers

Abstract

The state plays a key role in shaping worker precarity, and employers are key actors in mediating this process. While employers sometimes may act as willing extensions of the deportation machinery, they are also subjects of the immigration state. In this article, we highlight the impact of state-employer dynamics on migrant workers with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These workers have only provisional permission to live and work in the United States, but are not tied to any single employer. Even though they are privileged over unauthorized workers and employer-sponsored guest workers, TPS holders experience their own brand of state-induced precarity. Their employers risk civil or criminal liability if they are not in compliance with work authorization requirements and must repeatedly navigate an unpredictable and confusing immigration bureaucracy. Drawing on interviews with 121 low-wage TPS workers and two dozen of their advocates in the New York City metropolitan area, our findings reveal that the intertwined coercive and bureaucratic arms of the immigration state together make hiring TPS workers a more risky and costly proposition for employers, thereby exacerbating the job insecurity that TPS workers already face due to an at-will employment regime that offers few protections against firing.

Centering Race in Studies of Low-Wage Immigrant Labor

“…These enforcement efforts do not simply operate through the actions of local law enforcement and immigration agents working in the interior. When the workplace itself becomes an arena for immigration enforcement, it erodes workplace protections for undocumented and other liminal-status workers (the overwhelming majority who are people of color) and constrains their mobility within the low-wage labor market (Gleeson 2016). Surveillance technologies multiply mechanisms of worker control (Sampaio 2015) and degrade their access to workplace rights.…”

Spillover Effects of Restrictive Immigration Policy on Latinx Citizens: Raising or Lowering Earnings?

“…Some employers attempt to maximize their profits by taking advantage of negative policy enforcement effects on undocumented workers (Gleeson and Griffith 2021; Goldstein and Alonso-Bejarano 2017; Hall and Greenman 2015). Rocio Rosales (2020) finds that some of the self-employed Latinxs who own the fruit carts profit when their workers are vulnerable to deportation.…”

Immigrant workers' movements in the U.S.: Where are high‐skilled ‘nonimmigrants’?

“…It is generally assumed that their legal status, high skills and high wages produce privilege. Some scholars challenge this assumption (Banerjee, 2022; Gleeson & Griffith, 2020; Lowell & Findlay, 2001; Purkayastha, 2005a). But even they have not explained if high‐skilled nonimmigrants' precarity leads to labor activism.…”