How ICE crackdowns are affecting the workforce

NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Adrienne Ma.

And I'm Darren Woods, and it is Jobs Thursday.

That is right, Jobs Thursday for the, I think, the first time, right?

The first Jobs Thursday I've been involved with, for sure.

Yeah,

in maybe several years, because our typical Jobs Friday episode falls on the July 4th holiday.

So we're bringing you our look at the labor market just a day early.

Today we learned that the U.S.

economy added 147,000 jobs in June.

The unemployment rate decreased a little to 4.1%.

It's a solid report.

And it comes right as House Representatives are voting on the big bill that will give a huge funding boost to immigration enforcement.

The Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants might be the most profound change in the American labor market right now.

So, for today's show, we are profiling three industries, areas that employ large shares of people from abroad, agriculture, construction, and long-term care.

Our question, are immigrants showing up for work?

When you bite into your summer cherries, they might have been picked by Gloria.

She's a cherry picker in Washington State.

We start at six in the morning, we leave at midnight, one in the morning.

The truth is, it's very tiring, and we leave with heavy feet.

But we keep going for a good future and to keep being here, paying our bills and our taxes, and everything else we need to pay.

Gloria says she moved to the U.S.

from Mexico in the late 90s.

She's since had kids.

The youngest is 16 years old.

But like one in three crop pickers, she doesn't have legal status or work authorization.

That's why she asked us to use only her first name.

My whole life is here, and all my children are here with me.

Lately, Gloria's been skipping a few shifts.

I've missed work because, yeah, we've even gone to work, but we've passed by.

We don't go in because we see that immigration is there at the work sites.

In late May, the Trump administration ordered immigration and customs enforcement to ramp up arrests.

Around 1,200 people were being arrested each day in June, more than triple the number under Biden.

Gloria says she sees ICE vehicles regularly, and it's affecting her colleagues too.

Many places are being left without workers, and the fruit is going to waste out of fear.

It's out of fear and dread.

See, immigration status is a spectrum.

Naturalized citizens through to unauthorized workers.

But there are all kinds of people in the middle, like those with temporary protected status because their countries are too dangerous to return to.

So we're being broad about who we're talking about here, not just the one in three crop workers who are unauthorized, but the two in three who were born abroad.

From California to Texas, we've heard reports of sparse orchards and vegetables rotting in the fields as foreign-born workers dodge federal agents.

We wanted to know about other industries, too.

Large shares of immigrants also work in construction.

To what extent are they also avoiding their workplaces?

Brian Turmail is a spokesperson for the Associated General Contractors of America.

It's an industry group that represents commercial builders.

The overwhelming response that we're getting is that there's a lot of anxiety among the workforce.

As of yet, though, those workers by and large keep coming to their construction sites.

We have heard

sporadic accounts of higher rates of no-show that typically correlate to some kind of enhanced ICE enforcement activity.

A good example, I got a call from one of the chapters in Texas, said that we had an enforcement activity at a member's project.

And it turned out that the ICE individuals there were looking for a specific person, someone that allegedly was engaged in additional criminal activity.

But the fact that ICE showed up to a job site meant the next day

a large portion of the workforce didn't show on that job site and didn't show on three adjacent job sites.

But I will say that's almost the exception, not the rule.

Most of the enforcement activity that relates to construction seems to be focused on day labor sites, Home Depot parking lots, 7-Eleven parking lots.

Brian says the construction industry is reliant on immigrant labor.

About one in four construction workers were born overseas.

We're in an environment where 80% of construction firms say they can't find enough qualified people to hire in the United States.

We're in a period where we're actually shrinking the size of our workforce by choosing not to renew temporary protected status for individuals from Venezuela, for example.

So the labor pool is actually shrinking, even though we need lots of people to build things.

Somebody may ask, well, why doesn't the construction sector just raise the wages?

It's not that these aren't good paying jobs.

It's not they don't pay more than the average job.

It's that too few new workers or workers know that these career opportunities exist, and too many families still have kind of a negative stigma about a career opportunity in construction.

So for now, immigrants are building our office towers and our bridges, and a lot of them are feeling anxiety and occasionally not showing up out of fear.

What about another big industry for immigrants?

Long-term care for elderly or disabled people.

One in three long-term care workers are immigrants.

Our new Fodela Cruz represents long-term care workers in California.

He's president of the Union SEIU 2015, which is a diverse group.

At our board meetings, we are holding our simultaneous translation in Korean, in Russian, in Armenian, and Spanish, in Mandarin, in Cantonese.

Wow, almost like the UN.

That's exactly how some people have

compared it.

ANUFO has heard about immigration agents from his members.

We've had reports that, you know, there's been enforcement actions at nursing homes and skilled care facilities, and we don't think that's helpful for the quality of care, neither for the patients and clearly for the people who are doing the work.

Now, the workers he represents are still, on the whole, showing up for work.

But there is one measure that'll soon have a big impact on the long-term care workforce.

It's that the Trump administration has ended temporary protected status for people from Venezuela, and it's trying to end status for Haitians and people from other countries.

So a lot of workers will be required to leave the country soon unless they find another legal pathway.

Anufo recalls a worker from El Salvador who has temporary protected status, and she's extremely worried what could happen if that status were to be revoked too.

It's funny because one of the first things she mentioned is who's going to care for the people that I'm caring for, right?

She has a couple of consumers who she's cared for for several years.

You build a relationship almost like a family.

The policy mega bill going through Congress could more than triple immigration and customs enforcement's detention budget.

It's also likely to mean funding for thousands more immigration agents to accelerate deportations.

We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether its leadership was concerned by worker absences, and we got a response from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.

She replied, quote, let's be clear, if there was any correlation between rampant illegal immigration and a good economy, Biden would have had a booming economy, unquote.

We actually checked the numbers, by the way, and the economy grew more under Joe Biden than the first Donald Trump administration, even when he controlled for price and population growth.

Back in Washington State, Gloria has a message for the president in Washington, D.C.

Not all people are the same, and not all people come here to do bad things.

We simply come to work.

Of course, Americans can pick cherries and lay bricks and bathe the elderly.

But the speed of the immigration crackdown is meaning employers are scrambling to find replacements.

Before we go, are you using artificial intelligence at work?

Maybe you're a teacher who uses ChatGPT to help you lesson plan, or a hiring manager that uses Claude to weed out applicants?

Whatever it is, we want to hear from you.

We want to hear your wonder hacks and your horror stories of using AI in the workplace.

Email us at indicator at npr.org with the subject line AI at work.

Tomorrow we have a special episode for 4th of July, a Planet Money Plus episode that we're sharing to all Indicator listeners.

This one's our extended interview with John Cohen, a correspondent with Science magazine.

It's on the cuts to the PETFAR program, which is to fight HIV/AIDS.

This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with Engineering by Jimmy Keely.

It was fact-checked by Sarah Juarez.

Julia Ritchie edited this episode, Kate Kincaden edits the show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.