illegal migration research paper

About The Journalist’s Resource
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Criminal Justice
Environment
Politics & Government
Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

Building border walls and barriers: What the research says

Are border walls effective at deterring migrants? Do they harm wildlife? How are indigenous groups in the area impacted? We explain the research.

border wall barrier research democratic presidential candidates

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource February 15, 2020

In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, the Journalist’s Resource team is combing through the Democratic presidential candidates’ platforms and reporting what the research says about their policy proposals. We want to encourage deep coverage of these proposals — and do our part to help deter horse race journalism, which research suggests can lead to inaccurate reporting and an uninformed electorate. We’re focusing on proposals that have a reasonable chance of becoming policy, and for us that means several top-polling candidates say they intend to tackle the issue. Here, we look at research on building border walls.

Candidates who oppose expanding the U.S.-Mexico border barrier

Bernie Sanders , Tom Steyer *, Elizabeth Warren *

Candidates who would expand the barrier if experts recommend it

Pete Buttigieg ,* Tulsi Gabbard

Candidates whose position is unclear

Joe Biden , Michael Bloomberg *, Amy Klobuchar *

What the research says

Border barriers can discourage unauthorized border crossings, but the research is mixed in terms of how much they deter migrants from entering the U.S. without permission. Border walls and fences also can damage local habitats and impede the migration of wildlife. A number of academic articles document how the barriers that line the U.S.-Mexico border infringe on the religious and property rights of indigenous nations living in the region.

Meanwhile, hundreds of migrants die or are injured each year trying to go over and around barriers that block off much of America’s nearly 2,000-mile southwestern border. Such structures do not stop foreign visitors from arriving by air and sea and establishing residence without authorization.

Key context

Throughout time, cities, kingdoms and nation-states have built physical barriers to mark their territory, protect their inhabitants and control who and what enters and exits. In just the past few decades, countries worldwide — including the U.S. — have erected thousands of miles of border walls and fences, largely to prevent unauthorized migration. Barriers, writes researcher Elisabeth Vallet , are becoming “a norm of International relations, and a solution in the quest for security.”

“It seems like every month brings news of another border wall going up,” she wrote in The Conversation in 2017 . As of 2019, there were about 70 border barriers in existence across the globe, up from about 15 in 1990, according to Vallet, author of Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity and director of the Center for Geopolitical Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

When the migrant crisis in Europe emerged several years ago, countries there began erecting barriers. Since 2015, “at least 800 miles of fences have been erected by Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia and others — a swift and concrete reaction as more than 1.8 million people descended on Europe from war zones from Afghanistan to Syria,” USA Today reported in mid-2018 .

The U.S. first built a barrier along its southwestern border between 1909 and 1911 — a barbed wire structure in southern California to keep cattle from moving between the U.S. and Mexico, Smithsonian Magazine has reported. The federal government has expanded and reinforced the barrier over time. The Wall Street Journal describes construction efforts in recent decades:

“About 119 miles of barriers were in place before 2005, according to the Government Accountability Office. Work ramped up significantly during the George W. Bush administration, particularly around El Paso, Texas. Over the next 10 years, stretching into the Obama administration, the barriers were extended to cover 654 miles in areas including Tucson, Ariz., the Rio Grande Valley and the San Diego vicinity.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spent $2.3 billion on fencing at U.S.-Mexico border from fiscal years 2007 through 2015, notes a 2018 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s watchdog agency. Of the 654 miles of barrier that line the U.S. border with Mexico, 300 are vehicle barriers and the rest are designed to keep pedestrians out. The border stretches 1,954 miles and runs through four states — California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

While most immigrants living in the U.S. are here legally, nearly one-quarter — 10.5 million — do not have permission to be in the country, according to a 2019 report from Pew Research Center.

Donald Trump made unauthorized immigration a signature issue of his 2016 campaign. The president vowed to build at least 500 miles of new barrier by early 2021 for what will be one of the largest federal infrastructure projects in American history, The Washington Post reported earlier this month.

Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, he signed three executive orders aimed at ramping up federal efforts to control the U.S.-Mexico border and clamp down on unauthorized immigration. The first calls for an improved border barrier. It directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to “take all appropriate steps to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border, using appropriate materials and technology to most effectively achieve complete operational control of the southern border.”

About 110 miles of the new barrier have been finished, and federal officials say a total of 450 miles will be completed or under construction by late 2020, The Washington Post explains. The federal government expects to earmark $18.4 billion for the project — enough to put up nearly 900 miles of new barrier before 2022.

Most of the new wall will replace older and smaller barriers. As the Post describes it , the wall is “far more formidable than anything previously in place along the border. The new structure has steel bollards, anchored in concrete, that reach 18 to 30 feet in height and will have lighting, cameras, sensors and improved roads to allow U.S. agents to respond quickly along an expanded ‘enforcement zone.’”

Over the years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has cited reductions in border apprehensions as evidence of the barrier’s effectiveness. It offers this example: When it installed fencing near Yuma, Arizona, the number of people caught crossing the border without permission plunged 90%.

In late 2017, Elaine Duke, then the acting secretary of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wrote an editorial in USA Today explaining that border apprehensions in Yuma in fiscal year 2016 were about 10% of what they had been in fiscal year 2005. Yuma, she wrote, had been one of the first sectors along the southwestern border to receive “infrastructure investments” under the federal Secure Fence Act of 2006 , which authorized the construction of hundreds of miles of additional border fencing as well as additional checkpoints, vehicle barriers and lighting.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report in 2011 , however, suggesting federal officials were unsure why apprehensions along the entire U.S.-Mexico border fell 61% between 2005 and 2010. It “may be due to a number of factors including changes in U.S. economic conditions and border enforcement efforts,” the report states.

A recent report from the U.S. Border Patrol shows that the number of people apprehended in all nine sectors of the southwestern border rose from a combined 327,577 in fiscal year 2011 to 479,371 in fiscal year 2014. While apprehensions dropped to 303,916 in fiscal year 2017, they more than doubled by the end of the 2019 fiscal year to 851,508.

Recent research

Published research on the effectiveness of border barriers is limited and offers conflicting results in terms of how much of a role barriers play in deterring unauthorized entry in the U.S.

“While advanced as a popular solution, the evidence is mixed on whether walls are effective at preventing large movements of people across borders,” Reece Jones , a political geographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an international expert on border barriers, writes in a 2016 analysis for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute .

Jones notes that border crossings in the U.S. plummeted in the 1990s, after fences were built along the southwestern border and backed up with large deployments of Border Patrol agents. He also points out that the barriers did not prevent all unauthorized crossings, but rather shifted the stream of migrants to other parts of the border.

“As high-traffic urban routes were closed, migrants and smugglers began to cross in the remote and dangerous deserts of western Arizona,” Jones writes. “Child migration from Central America to the United States, which surged in 2014, has also been undeterred by enforcement.”

Border barriers “are not particularly effective at stopping migration on their own,” he explains in the Journal of Latin American Geography in 2018. “They require constant surveillance by agents, high tech sensors, aircraft, and drones or else they can easily be climbed with a ladder.”

A 2017 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, criticizes the U.S. Customs and Border Protection for failing to develop metrics to assess the effectiveness of the U.S.-Mexico border barrier. The report notes that Customs and Border Protection spent about $2.3 billion from fiscal year 2007 through 2015 on fencing there and that, in 2009, the agency estimated fencing maintenance would cost more than $1 billion over the next 20 years.

“Despite these investments, CBP cannot measure the contribution of fencing to border security operations along the southwest border because it has not developed metrics for this assessment,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office writes in the 75-page report.

The federal watchdog agency points out that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection “could potentially use these data to determine the extent to which border fencing diverts illegal entrants into more rural and remote environments, and border fencing’s impact, if any, on apprehension rates over time. Developing metrics to assess the contributions of fencing to border security operations could better position CBP to make resource allocation decisions with the best information available to inform competing mission priorities and investments.”

The report states that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had begun making changes according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s recommendations.

A paper forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics , however, indicates the border barrier has discouraged unauthorized entry. In the paper, Benjamin Feigenberg of the University of Illinois at Chicago looks at how Mexico-to-U.S. migration changed as a result of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which prompted the federal government to add 548 miles of fencing between 2007 and 2010.

Feigenberg estimates the additional fencing resulted in a 39% decline in migration among Mexicans who live close to the border. The reduction is a bit smaller — 38% — among Mexicans who live farther away from the border, in areas of Mexico that, historically, have had little access to smugglers.

Feigenberg concludes that, overall, 41,500 Mexican migrants are deterred by the barrier each quarter, and he estimates the cost of each deterred migrant to be about $4,820.

A 2018 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, updated twice in 2019, also finds that border barriers curbed migration from Mexico to the U.S., but slightly. Researchers from Dartmouth College and Stanford University found the Secure Fence Act reduced the number of Mexican nationals living in the U.S. from 2005 and 2015 by an estimated 46,459 people. That accounts for about 5% of the actual decline in migration during that period.

The paper also finds that even if the U.S. had built a barrier along the entire length of border, that would have had a relatively small impact as well. It would have reduced migration by an estimated 129,438 people, which, the researchers note, “still comprises a small portion (13%) of the observed decline in migration flows between 2005 and 2015.”

Impacts on migrant safety, indigenous rights and the environment

While scholars will continue to study border barriers’ impact on illegal entry, they have established that numerous migrants have died or been injured trying to go over or around them and that the barriers used to separate countries harm natural habitats and local wildlife.

A 2019 study published in Neurosurgery looks at injuries from jumping or falling off a section of the border wall in Arizona. From January 2012 through December 2017, 64 people sought help at Banner University of Arizona Medical Center-Tucson, a hospital adjacent to the border, for treatment of head and spine injuries.

Doctors diagnosed 78% of these individuals with a spine injury and 23% with head trauma, including skull fractures, intracranial hemorrhaging and traumatic brain injury, according to the paper. The authors estimate the cost of patients’ care at Banner totaled $6.3 million, and that public money was the primary source of funds used to pay those bills.

Hundreds of migrants die each year along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in southern Arizona and Texas. Multiple studies over the years have found a direct link between increased border security and migrant deaths. As the U.S. ramped up its border control efforts, more migrants sought entry through remote areas in an attempt to avoid detection, a research team led by Daniel E. Martínez of the University of Arizona writes in a 2014 paper in the Journal on Migration and Human Security .

“Previous research has illustrated that segmented border militarization has resulted in the ‘funnel effect,’ or the redistribution of migratory flows away from traditional urban crossing points into remote and dangerous areas such as the deserts of southern Arizona,” Martínez and his colleagues write. “The Sonoran Desert, which spans much of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, is an ecologically diverse region characterized by rugged terrain, pronounced elevation changes, and relatively little rainfall. Temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer months and drop below freezing in the winter and, at higher elevations, in the spring and fall as well.”

Researchers explain in a 2014 paper in the Journal on Migration and Human Security that more aggressive border enforcement has prompted migrants “to travel for longer periods of time through remote areas in an attempt to avoid detection by US authorities, thus increasing the probability of death.”

The U.S. Border Patrol reported 300 deaths at the southwestern border in fiscal year 2019, up slightly from 283 in fiscal year 2018 but considerably lower than the decade high of 471 deaths in fiscal year 2012.

Researchers warn, though, that government tallies might not be accurate.

David K. Androff and Kyoko Y. Tavassoli of Arizona State University write in the journal Social Work that it’s difficult to know how many migrants have died in the desert after crossing into the U.S. without permission. “Medical examiners can only investigate deaths where remains are recovered; as most of the Sonoran desert is an uninhabited, remote wilderness, the discovery of remains is dependent on their identification by U.S. Border Patrol agents or others, and researchers agree that not all remains are recovered,” they write.

Androff and Tavassoli also note in their paper, published in 2012, that “government figures tend to minimize estimates, whereas advocacy groups use higher estimates to draw attention to an issue.”

While much of the focus nationally has been on whether and how to curb illegal entry at the southwestern border, tens of thousands of foreign visitors arrive by air or water each year and do not leave. A significant number of those who stay required visas to get into the U.S. and then let them expire.

Almost 667,000 foreign visitors who were supposed to leave in fiscal year 2018 did not, including 36,289 from Brazil, 29,723 from Nigeria and 35,931 from Venezuela, according to the most recent Entry/Exit Overstay Report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country did not trek through the desert or wade across the Rio Grande to enter the country; they flew in with a visa, passed inspection at the airport — and stayed,” Miriam Jordan, a national immigration correspondent for The New York Times , wrote last year .

In fiscal year 2019, about 4% of international students and exchange visitors from countries outside North America — a combined 68,593 people — stayed in the U.S. after their expected departure date, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security report shows.

More than 40% of international students and exchange visitors who arrived by air or sea from Yemen, Chad, Eritrea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo did not leave when their visas expired in fiscal year 2019. The largest group of students and exchange visitors who overstayed their visas — totaling 12,924 people — came from China, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security report shows.

In April 2019, Trump signed a Presidential memorandum directing federal officials to find ways to address the “rampant” number of visa overstays.

The total number of suspected visa overstays rose from 482,781 in fiscal year 2015 to 739,478 in fiscal year 2016, according to a recent policy paper from Blas Nuñez-Neto , a former senior advisor to the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection who now is a senior policy researcher at Rand Corp.

A chart in Nuñez-Neto’s paper shows that visa overstays far outpaced border apprehensions between fiscal years 2015 and 2018. However, he writes in the September 2019 paper that “given the ongoing surge in unauthorized migration this year, which has resulted in more than 766,000 apprehensions in FY2019 through July 31, 2019, it appears likely that individuals apprehended along across our southern border will outstrip visa overstays in 2019.”

While U.S. border walls and fences have failed to block all migrants, legal and academic scholars have documented the various ways the structures interfere with the daily lives and rights of indigenous people living in the area.

A 2017 analysis in the American Indian Law Journal , for example, looks at the barrier’s impact on the civil and property rights of the Tohono O’odham Nation and Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona, the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas and other federally recognized tribes. The barriers have kept tribal members from accessing the southern parts of their land. They also impede the sharing of customs and have led to the desecration of burial sites, the author writes.

“Some United States Natives who have forgotten some of their customs depend on the elders on the Mexican side of the border to come teach youth culture,” the author writes. “Some Natives need to gather plants and other materials important to their spiritual practices in the deserts of Mexico, and are either unable to travel into Mexico or unable to return with those items, as overzealous border guards mistake them for forbidden plants.”

According to anthropologist Christina Leza of Colorado College, tens of thousands of U.S. tribal members live in the Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Baja California and Sonora. She wrote in The Conversation last year that her research indicates these individuals routinely cross the U.S.-Mexico border for cultural, ceremonial or social purposes. They are treated as visitors to the U.S., required to pass through security checkpoints, where they can be interrogated, rejected or delayed.

A 2019 article in the American Indian Law Journal examines the U.S. laws that give the federal government vast authority to acquire and use land for immigration security purposes. The paper focuses on how the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and more recent federal actions have affected the Tohono O’odham. The tribe’s 2.8 million-acre reservation includes 62 miles of border between Arizona and Mexico.

“The Tohono O’odham’s mobile way of life and tribal sovereignty has progressively been infringed upon by immigration policies that have continued to tighten border security,” writes Keegan C. Tasker, from the Seattle University School of Law.

She later adds: “The imposition of these sections of the border wall through Tohono O’odham lands would cause irreparable harm to the Nation in several ways, including: (a) implications on the tribe’s sacred lands and environmental resources; (b) implications to the tribe on free movement and tribal sovereignty; and (c) stripping the tribe of sacred natural resources for spiritual and cultural practice.”

Other research finds that border construction has harmed plant and animal life in the U.S. and across the globe.

The Trump administration’s plan to build a continuous wall between the U.S. and Mexico threatens some of North America’s most biologically diverse areas, researchers write in BioScience . In the 2018 article , which includes a call to action, the authors explain that the barrier splits the geographic ranges of more than 1,000 terrestrial and freshwater animal species and 429 plant species, including 62 species the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable.

“Physical barriers prevent or discourage animals from accessing food, water, mates, and other critical resources by disrupting annual or seasonal migration and dispersal routes,” they write.

A 2016 analysis in the Review of European Comparative & International Environmental Law examines the issue from an international law and policy perspective. The authors explain that different types of border barrier affect wildlife differently. Across the globe, barriers are made of a range of materials, including concrete, sand, barbed or razor wire and electrified fencing. In some cases, metal walls extend underground. Some fencing strategies involve land mines.

Barriers are of particular concern in Central Asia, home to a variety of migratory and nomadic mammals, the authors write:

“By splitting populations, impeding migrations and killing animals attempting to cross, border fences pose an actual or potential threat to many of these, including the Mongolian gazelle (Procapra gutturosa), saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus, also known as khulan), Bactrian camel (Camelus ferus), argali sheep (Ovis ammon) and snow leopard (Panthera uncia).”

These barriers “have the potential to undo decades of conservation and international collaboration efforts, and their proliferation entails a need to realign our conservation paradigms with the political reality on the ground,” write the authors, from the Tilburg Law School’s Department of European and International Public Law in the Netherlands.

Another 2016 paper , this one published in PLOS Biology , finds that border barriers in Eastern Europe and Central Asia present a major threat to wildlife. A team of researchers estimates there is a total of 30,000 kilometers of border fencing in the study area and that Central Asia is one of the most heavily fenced regions on the planet.

The researchers express concern for rare or endangered species, including three mammals in Europe — the brown bear, gray wolf and Eurasian lynx. “Large spatial requirements and low population densities make conservation of these species particularly challenging, and the current successes in their conservation rely largely on the ability of individuals to move between subpopulations,” write the authors, who represent several universities and research organizations, including the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology in Austria and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences .

About The Author

Denise-Marie Ordway

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

Publications

Our Methods
Short Reads
Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

Immigration & Migration

Trump and harris supporters differ on mass deportations but favor border security, high-skilled immigration.

A majority of Trump backers say more immigrants would make life worse for people like them, while most Harris backers say life wouldn’t change.

Migrant encounters at U.S.-Mexico border have fallen sharply in 2024

Most u.s. voters say immigrants – no matter their legal status – mostly take jobs citizens don’t want, why asian immigrants come to the u.s. and how they view life here, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings

What the data says about immigrants in the U.S.

In 2022, roughly 10.6 million immigrants living in the U.S. were born in Mexico, making up 23% of all U.S. immigrants.

U.S. immigrant population in 2023 saw largest increase in more than 20 years

The number of immigrants living in the U.S. grew by about 1.6 million people in 2023, the largest annual increase by number since 2000.

In Tight U.S. Presidential Race, Latino Voters’ Preferences Mirror 2020

More Latino registered voters back Kamala Harris (57%) than Donald Trump (39%), and supporters of each candidate prioritize different issues.

1 in 10 eligible voters in the U.S. are naturalized citizens

Naturalized citizens make up a record number of eligible voters in 2022, most of whom have lived here more than 20 years.

The Religious Composition of the World’s Migrants

The globe’s 280 million immigrants shape countries’ religious composition. Christians make up the largest share, but Jews are most likely to have migrated.

Religious composition of the world’s migrants, 1990-2020

Explore our interactive table showing the religious composition of immigrants around the globe and how it’s changed from 1990 to 2020.

How Mexicans and Americans view each other and their governments’ handling of the border

Mexicans hold generally positive views of the United States, while Americans hold generally negative views of Mexico – a reversal from 2017.

What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S.

The unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. grew to 11 million in 2022, but remained below the peak of 12.2 million in 2007.

How the origins of America’s immigrants have changed since 1850

In 2022, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. reached a high of 46.1 million, accounting for 13.8% of the population.

In some countries, immigration accounted for all population growth between 2000 and 2020

In 14 countries and territories, immigration accounted for more than 100% of population growth during this period.

REFINE YOUR SELECTION

Research teams.

901 E St. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 | Media Inquiries

Research Topics

Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts , its primary funder.

Notifications

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

View all journals
My Account Login
Explore content
About the journal
Publish with us
Sign up for alerts
Open access
Published: 03 January 2024

Undocumented immigrants at work: invisibility, hypervisibility, and the making of the modern slave

Paulina Segarra ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1710-4458 1 &
Ajnesh Prasad 2

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 11 , Article number: 45 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

4836 Accesses

2 Citations

10 Altmetric

Metrics details

Business and management

The undocumented immigrant represents a socio-legal category, referring to a subject who does not have legal standing to be in the country in which they are located. Extending from their lack of legal standing, undocumented immigrant workers in the United States occupy spaces marked by extreme conditions of vulnerability, which were exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. The aim of this ethnographic study is to make sense of the experiences of undocumented immigrants under a particularly vicious political rhetoric. Studying the lives of Latinx undocumented immigrant workers in the U.S., our findings capture how the dynamic interplay between the types of labor that they undertake and the socio-legal identity they are attributed function together to systematically disenfranchise them. Specifically, we explicate how doing invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity culminates in extreme conditions of vulnerability. In addition to developing the concept of hypervisible identity, we also inform theory on the idea of modern slavery. We contend that without the existence of invisible labor and hypervisible identity performing as interlocking, constitutive precursors, some forms of modern slavery would be negated.

Irregular migration is skilled migration: reimagining skill in EU’s migration policies

The impact of social exclusion and identity on migrant workers’ willingness to return to their hometown: micro-empirical evidence from rural China

Taking a longer historical view of america’s renaming moment: the role of black onomastic activism within the student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc), introduction.

The undocumented immigrant represents a socio-legal category, referring to someone who does not have the legal standing to be in the country in which they are located. A lack of legal standing is critical in defining undocumented immigrants’ lived experiences. Among other things, it determines “who they are, how they relate to others, their participation in local communities, and their continued relationship to their homeland” (Menjivar, 2006 , p. 1000). While this specific circumstance has a deep impact on the lives of undocumented immigrants, it is an invisible attribute that has a deep impact on their lives.

Extending from not possessing legal standing, undocumented immigrant workers in the United States occupy precarious social and organizational spaces (Heyman, 1998 ; Mehan, 1997 ; Young, 2017 ). The precarity experienced by undocumented immigrant workers was only exacerbated with the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th American president (Giroux, 2017 ). Indeed, the polemical discourse that fermented during the campaign—coupled with the policies that were proposed and enacted in the aftermath of the presidential election—engendered more frequent and more disturbing incidents of symbolic and physical violence against those who embody (and, at times, those who are merely perceived to embody) the category of the undocumented immigrant (Huber, 2016 ).

Several researchers have identified the pressing need to account for the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the backdrop of an increasingly hostile political climate (Chomsky, 2017 ; Ngai, 2017 ). This political climate has established a “war culture” of “normalized violence” (Giroux, 2017 ), with one commentator observing that it is representative of “virulent adherence to white supremacy that opens the discursive doors of public discourses to engage in more overt and violent practices of racism that targets people of color in the U.S. and particularly Latinx immigrants” (Huber, 2016 , p. 216). In response, scholarship published since the presidential election offers preliminary findings into the detrimental outcomes created by political moves towards right-wing populism on the experiences of undocumented immigrants (Romero, 2018 )—especially on critical aspects of life such as health (Gostin and Cathaoir, 2017 ; Reardon, 2017 ) and education (Sulkowski, 2017 ; Talamantes and Aguilar-Gaxiola, 2017 ).

The question of agency is one that frequently arises when talking about immigrants. Mainwaring ( 2016 ) has highlighted the importance of agency when studying migration and asserted that this is a central concept that academics and policymakers should not disregard. On this matter, Schweitzer ( 2017 ) has highlighted the importance of understanding how migrants’ agency has been portrayed as integration and argues that “much of this agency resembles popular understandings and expectations of ‘integration’, that is, of how newcomers, in general, can and should become part of, and accepted by, the receiving society, whether through participation, incorporation or assimilation” (p. 320). Given the substantive and enduring repercussions that the recent transformations in the realm of politics have had on the lives of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., more research on this population is needed.

The aim of this ethnographic study is to understand the experiences of undocumented immigrants under a particularly vicious political rhetoric. Our main research question was: how do Latinx undocumented immigrants experience vulnerability, and how has this condition been exacerbated in the era of Donald Trump’s presidency? Our data collection was guided specifically by the following questions:

What are the lived experiences of undocumented Latinx immigrants in the United States at work and non-work contexts?

What have been the effects of Donald Trump’s rhetoric on undocumented Latinx immigrants’ identities?

What are the effects that precarious work has on undocumented Latinx immigrants’ identities?

This study allowed us to hear the voices of those Latinx immigrants who have left everything behind, hoping to achieve the “American Dream.” In our attempt to understand the extreme conditions of vulnerability under which undocumented immigrants work, we were purposeful in not limiting the scope of our examination predominantly to the nature of the work that they do (Moyce and Schenker, 2018 ; Orrenius and Zavodny, 2009 ) or to the absence of legal standing (Heyman, 1998 ; Menjivar, 2006 ), as has often been the case in extant research on the topic. Instead, we sought to ascertain a nuanced understanding of the myriad of processes occurring in work and non-work contexts by which members of this population are subjugated. Analyzing our data led us to one main discovery, which is this paper’s central contribution: populist rhetoric made the identities of undocumented immigrants hypervisible, and when that new identity is taken in tandem with the types of work that they usually have access to due to their legal—or lack thereof—legal status in the country (i.e., invisible work), has led to conditions of what could be considered modern slavery (Crane, 2013 ).

The remainder of this article unfolds in five substantive sections. First, we offer the theoretical foundation for our study. To capture the contours of life that make work—and other—experiences precarious for undocumented immigrants, we draw upon Butler’s’ ( 2004 ) articulation of vulnerability. Second, we provide a description of the methods of our ethnographic study. In this section, we detail the research context, data collection strategy, and approach to data analysis. Third, we present our findings. Our findings reveal the process by which undocumented immigrant workers experience extreme conditions of vulnerability. Fourth, we discuss the contributions of our study and identify directions for future research. Following our grounded theory approach, our contributions focus on developing a theory on the phenomenon of undocumented immigrants at work. Finally, in the fifth section, we close the article with some concluding remarks.

Theoretical foundations

Judith Butler is a contemporary social theorist whose ideas have meaningfully informed the works of scholars from disciplines across the social sciences and the humanities. Since 9/11, she has devoted much of her attention to conceptualizing the idea of vulnerability. Butler’s ( 2004 ) idea of vulnerability is a germane starting point from which to make sense of the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as it engages the very questions that define their existence—national borders, state violence, and cultural intolerance.

Butler ( 2004 ) conceives vulnerability as the ubiquitous presence of insecurity, exploitation, and exclusion. For Butler, all lives are vulnerable, though vulnerability is not evenly distributed—thus, making some lives more vulnerable than others. She elaborates that within the paradigm of neoliberal capitalism, a value-laden set of social, political, and economic factors render certain lives to merit protections against vulnerability; and, concomitantly, other lives that would not merit such protections. Moreover, Butler specifies which lives need protecting and which lives do not by linking these questions to the discourses perennially invoked in U.S. politics about how to create and maintain invulnerability for its citizens. As she stated in an interview in which she was asked to expand on her position:

And it seems to me that implicitly what’s being promised is that, as a major First World country the US has a right to have our borders remain impermeable, protected from incursion, and to have our sovereignty guarantee our invulnerability to attack; at the same time, others, whose state formations are not like our own, or who are not explicitly in alliance with us, are to be targeted and presumptively treated as expungable, as instrumentalizable, and certainly not as enjoying the same kind of presumptive rights to invulnerability that we do. (Bell, 2010 , p. 147)

Butler elucidates how vulnerability is both socially and corporeally fabricated inasmuch as it ideologically positions certain subjects as others . Once these subjects have been othered, it gives license to cast disproportionate amounts of vulnerability onto them. Indeed, based on this vulnerability, it constructs their lives as “expungable” (insecurity), “instrumentalizable” (exploitation), and not entitled to “presumptive rights” (exclusion).

Interestingly, the bodies of one segment of the population that Butler explicitly qualifies as occupying extreme conditions of vulnerability are undocumented immigrants. Indeed, “illegal immigrants” represent “bodies (that is, human capital) …as becoming increasingly disposable, dispossessed by capital and its exploitative excess, uncountable and unaccounted for” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013 , p. 29). This assertion is consistent with how extant research has characterized the lived realities of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Indeed, prior scholarship has identified the plethora of ways through which undocumented immigrants are relegated to the margins of society (e.g., Fusell, 2011 ; Passel, 1986 ) and, how this relegation, engenders myriad forms of physical, symbolic, and legal violence (e.g., Menjivar and Abrego, 2012 ; Raj and Silverman, 2002 ).

We seek to extend prior studies on this group by unraveling the various repertoires of social life—and, as importantly, the interrelationships between them—that define extreme conditions of vulnerability in the lives of undocumented immigrant workers in the U.S. In other words, we seek to make sense of the specific processes occurring at work and non-work contexts by which extreme vulnerability is inscribed into their experiences. In the following section, we describe the research setting and methods of our empirical study.

Research setting and methods

To develop a theory around the experiences of undocumented immigrants at work in the United States, we followed a grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006 ; Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ; Glaser and Strauss, 1967 ). This approach allowed us to inductively make sense of our data. In this section, we describe the study’s research context, data collection strategy, and data analysis approach.

Research context and empirical setting

The researcher arrived in Southern California in September 2016, a mere couple of months before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. When Donald Trump was, in fact, elected on 8 November 2016, the researcher noticed how Latinx immigrants immediately became even more vigilant and worried. In fact, her fieldnotes reflect the concerns that she noticed the day after Trump’s election. The notes mention how 9 November 2016 was the quietest day she had experienced while she had been in Southern California since everyone around her seemed to be shocked by the news and the changes this would bring to their lives.

Choosing Southern California to perform a study on undocumented immigrants was not a coincidence. Through research aiming to find the most suitable place to develop a study on undocumented Latinx immigrants, the researcher found that the U.S. is home to approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants, 78% of whom are of Latin American origin (Hayes and Hill, 2017 ). While undocumented immigrants are dispersed across the country, a study by the Pew Research Center has found that southern California houses more undocumented immigrants than any other region in the United States (Passel and Cohn, 2017 ).

Data collection

The researcher adopted an ethnographic approach, relying on fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and documentary data. The data collection for this study occurred between September 2016 and May 2017. After almost nine months in the field, theoretical saturation had been achieved. Even when the stories and observations that participants were sharing were still undoubtedly interesting, they had become repetitive. The researcher’s participation in the ‘Resist’ protest, which occurred on May 1st in Los Angeles, marked the conclusion of the data collection process.

Gaining, securing, and maintaining access to research participants is particularly challenging when studying a highly vulnerable population. Undocumented immigrants are ostensibly vulnerable as they are under constant fear of arrest, prosecution, and deportation for not possessing legal documents to be in the country (Fussell, 2011 ; Hernandez et al. 2013 ). Access was a significant consideration for this study, given that undocumented immigrants were encountering a new wave of political and social backlash during the period of data collection. Namely, at the start of data collection, the leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was running on a xenophobic, anti-immigrant campaign. A couple of months into the commencement of data collection, Trump was elected as president. Making matters even more uncertain for the target population of the study, once he was inaugurated as president, among the first actions Trump took was the issuing of two executive orders that targeted refugees and undocumented immigrants.

The researcher was born and raised in Mexico and is fluent in Spanish. These facts offered her an initial level of legitimacy with the target population—Latinx undocumented immigrants. She also took several other steps to increase her legitimacy. Heeding Pettica-Harris, DeGama, and Elias’ ( 2016 ) observation that modifying physical appearance is an important factor in gaining access, the researcher darkened her hair and dressed modestly to be more esthetically relatable to the research participants. Ultimately, her cultural background, language skills, and esthetics increased her status of “insiderness” (Labaree, 2002 , p.102). A methodological advantage of a researcher being an insider is that it lowers the probability of encountering distrust, aggressiveness, and exclusion (Geertz, 1991 ).

Being an insider, namely, speaking the same language and aiming to somehow look like the research participants, allowed the researcher to eventually become part of the community. When reflecting on the implications that making such changes had on both the researcher and research participants; it was not done with the intention to deceive them but aiming to fit in an already vigilant community. The researcher always presented herself as a doctoral student from Mexico and when people asked more questions regarding her degree, she was always happy to answer.

Ethnographic approach

To build trust with the target population, the researcher volunteered at a large Church in Southern California that attended a Latinx congregation. This Church has a dedicated social services office that serves undocumented immigrants, the elderly, and the homeless. The social services office employed one full-time staff member, who was an undocumented immigrant herself.

In her role as a volunteer, the researcher participated in all the activities of the social services office by working closely with the full-time staff member, working 8-hour shifts at least 4 days a week, starting by the end of her first month in the field. A regular presence at the Church’s social services office allowed her to interact with and earn the trust of undocumented immigrants who sought the services of the office—and who would have likely otherwise viewed her with suspicion.

Through one of the research participants she originally met at the Church, the researcher also volunteered at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). CHIRLA was founded in 1986 as a response to the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which made the hiring of undocumented immigrants a crime (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, n.d. ). At CHIRLA, the researcher became an active participant in the organization. On occasion, she also did office hours at CHIRLA’s offices, where she would pick up phones and provide basic information to immigrants who contacted the agency. Alongside these activities, dozens of informal conversations were carried out with fellow CHIRLA members, which were recorded as fieldnotes.

In order to interview undocumented immigrants who made a living as day laborers, the researcher visited five Home Depot locations. Day laborers typically gather in and around Home Depot parking lots awaiting potential jobs. Given that day laborers at these locations were exclusively men, at CHIRLA, she recruited the assistance of an older man who was himself an undocumented day laborer. He introduced her to the day laborers in and around the parking lots. The presence of this person—as both a man and an undocumented immigrant who was known to some of the day laborers—provided another layer of legitimacy to this population.

In sum, physical and social access to the target population was enabled by “gatekeepers” at various sites who “offered efficient and expedient routes to participants that would otherwise be difficult to access” (Clark, 2011 , p. 489). These gatekeepers were paramount in this study as they created trust between the researcher and the research participants by mitigating suspicion (Clark, 2011 ).

Finally, to achieve a deeper understanding of the scope of the work that undocumented immigrants perform, the researcher joined some of the participants during their work shifts at various locations. For example, on three separate occasions, she went with the Church’s social office worker, who held a second job as a cleaner, on her overnight shifts at a local Best Buy. While participating at these work sites, the researcher not only observed the participants’ work, but also performed many of the activities herself.

Semi-structured interviews

During the fieldwork stage of the study, the researcher conducted 62 interviews with undocumented immigrants from Latin America, each of which lasted between 45 minutes and two hours. While language preference for the interviews was left to the discretion of the research participants, all participants elected to have their interviews conducted in Spanish. These interviews were audio-recorded and later transcribed into verbatim text. This text was subsequently translated into English. The research participants were mostly cleaners, domestic workers, and day laborers, whom the researcher met at the Church, CHIRLA, Home Depot parking lots, and through the adoption of the snowballing technique. The questions in the interviews mostly revolved around research participants’ life and work circumstances in their countries of origin and in the U.S., as well as the challenges they encountered as a result of being undocumented immigrants. The interviews took place at different locations; sometimes, people would agree to talk with the researcher at the Church’s basement, other times on the streets while day laborers were waiting for a job, and she was once invited to one of the participants’ homes to have lunch and interview some of her friends.

Documentary data

Documentary data were collected during data collection, which included meeting minutes of CHIRLA, ‘Know Your Rights’ workshop materials, flyers which were provided by the Mexican consulate, ‘Preparing Your Family for Immigration Enforcement’ documents provided by the Roman Catholic Diocese, and ‘Lobbying Guidelines’ provided by CHIRLA from the Sacramento visit. In order to capture how undocumented immigrants were being represented in the media during the data collection period, targeted searches of newspapers, magazines, and websites were also conducted. Specifically, Time Magazine , the CNN website, The Wall Street Journal , and The Guardian were scanned to ascertain a national perspective, while the Los Angeles Times and the Voice of San Diego were examined to acquire a local perspective. In addition, Univision News was also scanned as it represents a widely consumed media outlet by the American-based Latinx population. The search yielded a total of 26 media articles that were considered relevant to the phenomenon under study. This collection of documentary data provided us with a real-time set of documents that illuminated the most pressing issues confronting undocumented immigrants in the wake of Trump’s presidential nomination and election.

Data analysis

In Footnote 1 following the tradition of grounded theory, hypotheses were not developed prior to the data being collected (Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ). Data analysis was performed in an iterative manner, which commenced while the researcher was in the field. As initial interviews and documentary evidence were collected and analyzed in the early stages of fieldwork, unforeseen aspects of the undocumented immigrant experience emerged. The interview guide evolved as a result (Charmaz, 2014 ) and, whenever possible, the researcher went back to previously interviewed research participants with new questions.

Grounded theory charges researchers with the task of observing data in ways that allow them to develop theoretical insights by conceptualizing the connections between the ideas revealed by the data, of which research participants themselves might not be aware (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton, 2013 ). After reading the interview transcripts, a list of relevant concepts and themes was developed, which sought to identify passages in which research participants spoke about their thoughts and feelings, their lives in the U.S., and their experiences at work.

NVivo software was used to analyze data comprehensively and systematically. This process reduces the opportunities for data not to be captured during analysis (Bazeley and Jackson, 2013 ). Using NVivo allowed the authors to apply the approach to the grounded theory proposed by Gioia et al. ( 2013 ). More specifically, during the first phase of data analysis, transcripts were analyzed with the intent to allow codes to surface. Comparative analysis (Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ) was then used in order to find connections and dissimilarities between the identified passages. While comparing these quotes, we aimed to find the most prevalent issues raised by the research participants, which led us to first-order concepts. Focused coding (Charmaz, 2006 ) further allowed us to use the most meaningful initial codes to distill and classify data. Additionally, axial coding allowed us to build links between our data (Charmaz, 2015 ). Subsequently, second-order themes were ascertained based on the similarities between the first-order concepts, leading to more “theoretically revelatory” categories (Eury et al. 2018 , p. 833). Table 1 provides illustrative excerpts representative of second-order themes. As Gioia and colleagues ( 2013 ) suggested, performing this type of analysis allows for the conflation of informants’ and researchers’ voices, which links the data and allows for the emergence of new concepts and processes.

We went back and forth between the selected excerpts we identified from a set of core themes, which captured three aggregate dimensions: invisible labor , hypervisible identity , and modern slavery . We analyzed the dimensions in pursuance of the attainment of integration (Corbin and Strauss, 2008 ), which entails making sense of how the aggregate dimensions are related. This procedure allowed us to build an inductive model, which illuminates the connections between data and theory (Gioia et al. 2013 ). Our inductive model, which we explicate in our discussion, lends authenticity to our findings as it identifies how the aggregate dimensions are linked. Figure 1 offers the data structure that inductively emerged from the analysis.

Figure 1 identifies what constitutes invisible labor and the process by which hypervisible identity is socially constructed. The model depicts how the doing of invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity engenders a form of modern slavery.

The corpus of the data emanating from this study—including the ethnography, documentary evidence, and interviews—was theoretically revealing. The theoretical revelations inform the process model offered in Fig. 1 , which we use, following Eury and colleagues ( 2018 ), to structure this section. Figure 2 illuminates which themes emerged from our data analysis and shows the relationship(s) between the emergent themes. Specifically, Fig. 1 identifies what constitutes invisible labor and the process by which hypervisible identity is socially constructed. The model then depicts how the doing of invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity engenders a form of modern slavery.

Figure presents the data structure, showing first-order codes, second-order themes, and aggregate dimensions.

Figure 2 presents the data structure, showing first-order codes, second-order themes, and aggregate dimensions. To contextualize our claims and to underscore the interplay between second-order themes and aggregate dimensions, throughout this section, we will include some exemplary quotes from the interviews as well as other sources of data.

Invisible labor

Undocumented immigrants are habitually relegated to doing invisible labor. Invisible labor represents work that is largely unseen and meaningfully underappreciated by others; labor that is taken for granted and is only noticed when it is not performed. The fact that undocumented laborers are not taken into consideration most of the time renders them invisible to American society, which benefits from their work. As Herod and Aguiar ( 2006 , p. 427) observe when discussing cleaners, “most of us know when somewhere has not been cleaned but few of us…stop to think much about the laboring process which goes into maintaining spaces as clean.” Invisible work is especially tenable under circumstances when work is performed outside the formal labor market—such work is classified as not constructively contributing to the national economy (Daniels, 1988 ; Leonard, 1998 ). In our study, research participants reflected on the kind of jobs that are available to them, considering their lack of legal status. Invisible labor performed by undocumented immigrants manifested in two forms: (i) devalued work and (ii) dirty work.

Devalued work

How someone attributes meaning to the work that they do is intersubjectively constructed through the interactions between the individual who does the work and those with whom the individual is socially and professionally related (Wrzesniewski et al. 2003 ). Also, how a worker is treated by others will inform how they make sense of the value of their work as well as their professional worth (Dutton et al. 2016 ). Research participants appeared cognizant of the fact that the work that they do is not valued by others with whom they interact in the community, including those for whom they perform the work. As Rosa, a 43-year-old restaurant worker from El Salvador described, “that’s what they don’t see, it’s what these presidents don’t see…our effort. They think only about their own well-being, but they don’t think about the well-being of Latinx undocumented immigrants.” Rosa had been living in the United States for over 8 years after crossing the Rio Grande using car tires as makeshift rafts.

Undocumented immigrants undertaking devalued work is an established fact in the United States, with the well-recited proverb, undocumented immigrants do the work that Americans refuse to do , only adding veracity to the point. When asked about the reason for why undocumented immigrants do devalued work, Miguel, a Guatemalan day laborer responded: “They charge less, they take the toughest jobs, that’s why Latinxs are chosen. Gabachos (Americans) are going to take longer and will charge more money.” Edgar, a 30-year-old Guatemalan farm worker bitterly stated while waiting for a job at a street corner during a warm day in sunny California: “ Gabachos ( Americans) don’t want to do these jobs because it’s too tough…they’re afraid of the sun.”.

Research participants elaborated on feeling devalued by illuminating what Chang ( 2016 ) refers to as, their own disposability. Oscar, a Mexican man who had previously worked a factory, said: “We [undocumented immigrant workers] are disposable, once one doesn’t perform as needed, they can just bring another one.” This participant had first-hand experience of “feeling disposable” as he was replaced immediately after he had a work accident, which did not allow him to work anymore.

Further, devalued work was personally experienced by the researcher when she accompanied one of the participants on her shift as a janitor at Best Buy. The researcher reflected in her fieldnotes:

I followed her around while she skillfully worked a ghostbuster looking vacuum, leaned down to pick garbage up and pulled a 60 ft. cable around…all at the same time. Incredibly, other Best Buy’s workers wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence and would, nonchalantly, step on the cable. Others would just jump over the cable without even looking at who was cleaning the store.

The term “dirty work” refers to those “tasks and occupations that are likely to be perceived as disgusting or degrading” (Hughes cited in Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999 , p. 413) and are culturally tainted (Ashforth et al. 2017 ; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021 , 2022 ). Participants engaged in a wide array of what they referred to as dirty work, including house cleaning, caretaking, and landscaping. One of the participants, Estela, a Mexican woman who had been living in the U.S. without legal documents for a decade, shared one of her worst experiences with doing dirty work when she reflected on working as a janitor at a large store:

I found that one of the toilets in the men’s room was clogged with a lot of toilet paper. [Once I tried to remove the toilet paper] I saw that it was clogged with the security device that is attached to merchandise to prevent theft…It looked like someone had tried to steal something and when the alarm broke it started to make noise. In order to stop the noise, the person must have thrown the alarm into the toilet. You could still hear a very faint noise. I imagine someone else tried to use the toilet and when he flushed it, it all flooded…When I saw what happened, I cried! I looked at all the mess and thought, ‘I’m going to have to clean it, how am I going to do it?’

Individuals who perform dirty work typically experience some form of social stigmatization for doing such work (Bosmans et al. 2016 ; Duffy, 2007 ). In the study, participants explained how they were ontologically marked; that because they did dirty work, employers considered them to be dirty themselves. While riding the bus to go lobbying in Sacramento along with undocumented immigrants seeking to speak to state senators regarding immigrant rights, the researcher spoke to Claudia, a Mexican cleaning lady who recalled: “Once, a lady told me ‘you can’t use the restroom, but if you must use it, you have to clean it afterwards’…I felt humiliated. I’m not dirty!” Rocío, another Mexican cleaning lady, described an incident experienced by her husband: “They wouldn’t let him sit on the couch because they thought that he was dirty—that he smelled bad.” These denigrating comments have the effect of diminishing the undocumented immigrants’ perception of who they are, which has a lasting effect on their sense of self-worth and their idea of being helpless in a country where they have found opportunities amidst hardships.

The participants were cognizant of the fact that the dirty work they did represented the labor that no one else would want to do. As Claudia, who had previously worked as a seamstress when she arrived in the United States over two decades before, described: “No one wants to do the work that we [undocumented immigrants] do. Not cleaning, sewing, fast food jobs, or working the field.” Similarly, Oscar, a Guatemalan day laborer, who had lived in California for over a decade, asserted: “If Trump is set on getting rid of all illegal people, I don’t think an American is going to go wash toilets for minimum wage.” In both quotes, participants suggest that the “dirty jobs” that they undertake would not be performed by American-born citizens or others with legal residency status would do it for a considerably higher amount of money.

Hypervisible identity

Foucault ( 1977 ) used subjectivity to conceptualize how individuals devise their sense of self (i.e., identity). For Foucault, subjectivity is a discursive, identity-forming project that establishes how individuals perceive themselves, which, in turn, determines how they relate to others. Butler ( 1997 ) adopted Foucualt’s meaning of the term to argue that subjectivity is only possible when one’s identity is recognized in social discourse—that is, when one is recognized by others. Extending the works of Foucault and Butler, we define hypervisible identity as the sense of self that is formed when the recognition from others is cast with the intent to discursively and juridically control one’s existence by rendering their subjectivity to be readily available for social and political interrogation. The study reveals that hypervisible identity emerged as the corollary of three interrelated social phenomena directed towards undocumented immigrants: (i) targeting them in political rhetoric, (ii) moral panic, and (iii) ubiquitous surveillance.

Targets of political rhetoric

While undocumented immigrants have often been the targets of political rhetoric in the U.S., Trump’s toxic anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourse only heightened their vulnerability (Giroux, 2017 ). When announcing his bid for the Republican nomination for president on 16 June 2015, Trump stated: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Koplan, 2016 ). Trump echoed his claim in the following tweet directed at undocumented immigrants: “Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 billion Dollars a year. How was this allowed to happen?” In another tweet, he added: “Mexico is not our friend. They’re killing us at the border and they’re killing us on jobs and trade. FIGHT!” Note how Trump makes a call for action (‘FIGHT!’) that was directed at undermining any sense of security of immigrants who crossed the border into the US illegally. In fact, as Saramo ( 2017 ) has stated, “the rise of Donald Trump…has relied on emotional evocations of violence—fear, threats, aggression, hatred, and division” (p.1).

Trump reified his anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourse by signing executive orders shortly after being inaugurated as president. On 25 January 2017, two executive orders were signed that ostensibly targeted undocumented immigrants. Trump justified his executive orders by asserting: “[A] nation without borders is not a nation…I just signed two Executive Orders that will save thousands of lives, millions of jobs, and billions of dollars” (Smith, 2017 ).

Research participants described the uncertainty engendered by being the targets of political rhetoric. One month after President Trump took office, the researcher had the chance to speak with several women who were part of the domestic workers coalition. During one interview, Rocío, an undocumented cleaning lady originally from Mexico poignantly said:

Now with what’s happening with the president…he made all the people who were already racist to come out. He made these hidden people to come out and feel with the freedom to reject us, disrespect us, yell at us, offend us. He encouraged this.

Similarly, others commented: “I never thought a crazy man would be president…he is encouraging the people who are racist like him” (Edgar) and “the new president wants to separate us from our kids” (Maru).

Being targeted in political rhetoric had direct and far-reaching effects on the undocumented immigrant community. Los Angeles Police Chief, Charlie Beck, cited one such detrimental outcome. Beck stated that undocumented immigrants were refraining from reporting incidents of sexual assault and domestic violence due to the fear that engaging with the police would lead to deportation (Queally, 2017 ).

Moral panic

Being targeted in political rhetoric functioned as a precursor to moral panic. Moral panic refers to “[a] condition, episode, person, or groups of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” (Cohen, 1972 , p. 9). During moral panics, societal harm may either be “alleged but imaginary” or “real but exaggerated” (Goode & Ben Yehuda cited in Laws, 2016 , p. 12). Moral panic developed against undocumented immigrants, who were portrayed as job-stealing criminals whom the citizenry needed urgent protection (Stupi, Chiricos, and Gertz, 2016 ; for a related argument on the outcome of this phenomenon on legal immigrants, see Zatz and Smith, 2012 ). Moral panic against undocumented immigrants is not grounded in any such reality. Extant research has consistently shown undocumented immigrants do not commit disproportionately higher rates of crime than others in the U.S. (O’Brien et al. 2019 ; Wang, 2012 ); in fact, statistically speaking, undocumented immigrants engage in lower rates of crime relative to others (Light and Miller, 2018 ).

Although this moral panic is not based in fact, it did have material consequences on the experiences of undocumented immigrants—and others who were perceived to be “one of them.” Indeed, there was a proliferation of violence against undocumented immigrants from members of the public who perceived them as threats to the existing social order. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, Univision News reported that they received hundreds of cases of anti-immigrant physical and non-physical violence (Weiss, 2017 ). A candid example of this violence was offered by CNN in a report about a homeless man of Latin descent being assaulted and urinated on by two men with one of them declaring: “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported” (Ferrigno, 2015 ).

During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he invoked the death of Kate Steinle, a young woman who had allegedly been murdered in San Francisco by a Mexican undocumented immigrant. Trump stated, “This senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately…This is an absolutely disgraceful situation, and I am the only one that can fix it” (Schleifer, 2015 ). Trump even made a point of meeting with family members of people killed by undocumented immigrants as a part of his political campaign (Gray, 2015 ). When José Inés García Zárate, the man accused of Steinle’s death, was acquitted in late November 2017, Trump responded with two tweets that aggrandized the fear of undocumented immigrants that the American population was already experiencing: “A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people in our Country are so angry with illegal immigration” and “The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!” (Tatum, 2017 ). While conducting fieldwork, the researcher noticed the conspicuous apprehension felt by some Americans who, fostered by toxic political rhetoric, interpreted undocumented immigrants to be an omnipresent threat. This apprehension among Americans was captured during a conversation with a Mexican day laborer who said that after Trump’s statements, he was getting fewer jobs since employers were afraid to take him to their homes, fearing that their physical well-being and their property would be at risk. Trump had previously been seen as a celebrity and a successful businessman, so there were people eagerly willing to follow his ideas (Mollan and Geesin, 2020 ).

The outcomes of moral panic against undocumented immigrants were also represented in the interviews. One of the research participants, María, a woman from Honduras, described how she had been verbally attacked on the streets: “Once I was walking by, and someone said, ‘oh, look! All of them illegal immigrants, all of them, all those people are shit. They are trash.’” Another participant described his experience while waiting for a job as a day laborer: “The gabachos (Americans) go by and say, ‘those are the ones who need to be deported’” (Edgar). In the construction of this moral panic, undocumented immigrants are configured as deviants whose extrication from the country (“need to be deported”) will establish the proper social order.

Ubiquitous surveillance

Political rhetoric and moral panic, when taken collectively, establish ubiquitous surveillance in the lives of undocumented immigrants. Surveillance of this group manifested ubiquitously through two distinct, though mutually constituting, forms: social constructions and discursive constructions. That is, for undocumented immigrants, it involved being both surveilled by others and surveilling themselves. The latter phenomenon is perhaps best reflected in Foucault’s ( 1997 ) idea of the panopticon—the gaze under which subjects monitor their behavior through internalized governance.

The first form of ubiquitous surveillance appeared to be socially constructed. Immediately following Trump’s inauguration, there were some high-profile raids by ICE agents in Southern California. The chilling effects of these raids were felt immediately among undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants became fearful of being constantly watched by authorities who might at any time raid a residence or place of employment to arrest them. The uncertainty of arrest (and subsequent deportation) was evidenced by the numerous individuals who spoke with the researcher when they visited the Church’s social office and CHIRLA seeking advice about what they should do in case of arrest. At the Church, among other things, the full-time employee (and the researcher) handed out a flyer entitled “Preparing Your Family for Immigration Enforcement,” which was prepared by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The document detailed the necessary precautions that undocumented immigrants should take given the increasingly hostile climate towards them (e.g., have an emergency plan, what to do during a raid, what to do if immigration officers visit your home, what your rights are under detention). Similarly, CHIRLA workers would furnish “rights cards” to undocumented immigrants, which they were to provide to ICE officers in case of arrest. The card read:

I am giving you this card because I do not wish to speak to you or have any further contact with you. I choose to exercise my constitutional right to remain silent and refuse to answer your questions. If you arrest me, I will continue to exercise my right to remain silent and refuse to answer any of your questions. I want to speak to a lawyer before answering your questions. I would like to contact this attorney or Organization:

Interestingly, documents such as these only further inculcated, among undocumented immigrants, the omnipresent sense that they are being watched and at risk of arrest.

The second form of ubiquitous surveillance was, in essence, caused by the first form. Specifically, the social construction of ubiquitous surveillance was shown to be experienced discursively. In assuming that they were being watched, undocumented immigrants internalized the surveillance and began to change how they behaved in meaningful ways. For instance, several research participants quit their jobs in fear of encountering ICE. Out of necessity, others kept working, though the fear remained significant. While being interviewed at a Home Depot parking lot, Juan, a 22-year-old day laborer who had arrived in the U.S. only a month before, said:

I’m afraid to come to work because if Immigration [an ICE officer] sees me…I want to be honest with the law. I want to abide the law, what the law says but, how am I supposed to eat now? I have to work, I have to fight for my daughter, for my wife.

Similarly, Roberto, another Mexican day laborer recalled: “On the subway, you do not see so many Latin people that come to work anymore… It has been a problem for me since I am afraid that I might run into an immigration agent in a subway station.”

The discursive effects of ubiquitous surveillance were associated with psychological problems such as anxiety and paranoia. Victoria, an undocumented immigrant of Mexican origin who continuously volunteered at CHIRLA, felt detrimentally impacted by the new stories about the ongoing ICE raids, which instilled into the participant that fear of imminent raid. As she explained:

I don’t want to go out, even yesterday I was locked in all day…I didn’t even want to go to the grocery store which is very close. I didn’t want to go out at all. I heard people going upstairs and I quickly looked through the window to check who it was. I was anxious, completely anxious and on edge…I am taking pills to feel calmer since we heard the news about the raids.

The routines of Victoria’s life were altered dramatically as she internalized the (fear of) ubiquitous surveillance. The following account from her further underscores this point:

Even now when I left the house, I saw someone who was talking, a man who was speaking English with someone and I thought I better went back [home]. I went back because I thought maybe he was talking to someone. And he [my son] is also scared, every time he hears someone knocking on the door, he runs to the bedroom.

Modern slavery

Even after the legal abolition of slavery around the world, slavery is a phenomenon that has not entirely dissipated (Bales, 2012 ). The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that currently, forty million people are under some form of slavery that exacts from them, forced labor (United Nations, 2018 ). Forced labor refers to:

[W]ork that is performed involuntarily and under the menace of any penalty. It refers to situations in which persons are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or by more subtle means such as manipulated debt, retention of identity papers or threats of denunciation to immigration authorities. (ILO, 2012 )

This definition is adopted by Crane ( 2013 , p. 51) in the field of management and organization studies, who describes modern slaves as satisfying the following criteria: “(1) people [who] are forced to work through threats; (2) owned or controlled by an “employer” typically through mental, physical or threatened abuse; (3) dehumanized and treated as a commodity; and (4) physically constrained or restricted in freedom of movement.” Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. all too often meet the conditions of modern slavery. The conditions of modern slavery experienced by undocumented immigrants—as well as their concomitant outcomes—emerged in the study in four distinct ways: i) wage theft, ii) precarious work conditions, iii) workplace bullying, and iv) no recourse.

Latinx undocumented immigrants leave their homelands due “devastating social, political, and economic conditions” (Segarra and Prasad, 2020 : 176) and are desperate to secure a living when they illegally arrive in the United States. In theory, undocumented immigrants in the United States, have the same rights as every other worker with some exceptions such as unions and unemployment insurance; furthermore, the same wage and hour laws apply to every worker, and they have the right to file a wage claim and to collect State Disability Insurance (Legal Aid at Work, 2023). The Immigration Control and Reform Act (IRCA) bans the conscious hiring of undocumented immigrants but does allow them to work independently. This puts workers in vulnerable positions since often, they get precarious jobs and do not know the rights they are entitled to while working in the United States. As García Quijano (n.d.) has asserted, “undocumented workers often lack, in practice, the rights and protections enshrined in the laws that could benefit them.”

Wage theft is defined as “the failure of employers to pay their employees the full amount they have earned” (Galvin, 2016 , p. 325). Wage theft is a common form of victimization encountered by undocumented immigrants (Fussell, 2011 ). Undocumented immigrants experience wage theft extending from the fear of being reported to ICE, and other government authorities, by unscrupulous employers who want to avoid paying them for their work (Bobo, 2011 ).

Research participants described how some employers went as far as to explicitly tell them that their immigration status was the reason why they were not being paid. Luis, a Mexican day laborer who had been in the U.S. for over 12 years recalled such an experience: “The worst experience is that they take you, you work, and there’s no money. They tell you, ‘you can do whatever you want, I’m a citizen, you are an illegal.’” In this situation, the employer even challenged the undocumented immigrant worker (“you can do whatever you want”), knowing that he will not go to the police because of what Fussell ( 2011 ) has termed, ‘the deportation threat dynamic’. During a different interview, Gustavo, a man who had just got back into the U.S. after being deported, agreed to be interviewed at the Church’s basement. He got very emotional while expressing the feelings conjured when employers refused to pay him:

They didn’t pay me because they knew I’m illegal and just like that, nothing happened. They just said they would be right back to pay, and they didn’t come back. I trusted them, and they didn’t return. They do it because you can’t defend yourself…Once I cried because I wasn’t paid… I had plans with that little money and yes, I cried…. I don’t want to remember that.

Another moving response came from María, a homeless woman who described how she felt after not getting paid:

The worst thing is not getting paid because I’m excited, I’m hungry, sometimes asking for money to take the bus to go to work. Then, when I don’t get paid, I let down the person I borrowed the money from…I know what being hungry is like. [When I don’t get paid] I cry all night, I cry and wonder if it’s God’s punishment.

Together these quotes reflect the devastating impact that wage theft has on undocumented immigrant workers, as they often do not have accrued savings upon which they can depend during financial exigencies.

Victoria used to work as a house cleaner and she further elaborated on the cruel reality of wage theft for undocumented immigrants:

My brother and I painted houses, and we painted many. When we were about to finish the job, they would kick us out not to pay us…We would tell them we were there to finish the job, and the owners would say: ‘Who are you? If you don’t leave now, we are going to call the police.’ We would ask: ‘What do you mean you don’t know us? If we came to work yesterday, we were working!’ They would reply: ‘No, go! Otherwise, we will call the police!’

Precarious work conditions

While earlier we described how undocumented immigrants do culturally devalued and dirty work, it is equally important to note that they do such work (and others) under precarious work conditions. Precarious work conditions involve “employment that is uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg, 2009 , p. 2). This definition is extended by Vosko ( 2010 , p. 2), who describes precarious work as, “work for remuneration characterized by uncertainty, low income, and limited social benefits and statutory entitlements.” Precarious conditions often characterize the work done by undocumented immigrants, a claim that has been confirmed in a study by Orrenius and Zavodny ( 2009 ). The authors conclude that undocumented immigrants not only do low-skilled work but also physically dangerous and riskier jobs relative to legal residents.

While working under precarious conditions, undocumented immigrants often become victims of workplace accidents. This is vividly captured by Roberto, a young day laborer who, while sitting on the sidewalk next to the researcher at a Home Depot parking lot, described an accident he had at work:

I got hit by a leaf blower… At first, I wasn’t taken to a clinic…Maybe about two hours later he [the employer] said he would take me to a clinic to get stitches…I got 28 stitches on my head and asked him to help me get an MRI. He said he didn’t have money and that it wasn’t necessary…I couldn’t work for ten days and when pay day came, he refused to pay me.

While Roberto was the victim of a significant workplace injury, he was in no way compensated for the days that he could not work as a direct result of that injury.

Edgar, a 30-year-old day laborer from Guatemala, described a workplace accident in which he was involved and linked it to the consequences of being undocumented:

I tripped with a machine, I used to spray a vineyard in Malibu… I hurt my back while spraying chemicals, I got asthma. They didn’t pay for the hospital, and I was getting the bill. In order to get disability, you need to have social [security number] and if you don’t get a lawyer, you get nothing.

No remuneration was offered to the victim as he would need to get a lawyer and make a legal case against the employer, which would only heighten threats of arrest, prosecution, and deportation.

Precarious work conditions are made more problematic by the fact that most undocumented immigrants do not have access to health insurance. In the specific case of the state of California—a state that is relatively more liberal towards undocumented immigrants than others—health insurance is available for undocumented immigrants only if they are either under twenty years of age or pregnant (Covered California, 2019 ). Not having access to health insurance and knowing that employers will not assume financial responsibility for workplace injuries, Carolina, a Mexican domestic worker, described the need to be especially cautious while on the job and even being advised by employers to be careful: “You have to go upstairs and downstairs carefully… [employers say] ‘be careful! Don’t hurt yourself because here there is no insurance!’”

Workplace bullying

Workplace bullying takes place when someone is “teased, badgered, and insulted, and perceives that he or she has little recourse to retaliate in kind…bullying may take the form of open verbal or physical attacks on the victim” (Zapf and Einarsen, 2001 , p.370). At the crux of workplace bullying is the question of power; namely, one’s ability to exercise power over another in efforts to demean. Given how power is central to workplace bullying, it appears commonly in asymmetrical power relationships where highly skewed levels of power are held by the parties involved, including, especially, between employers and employees.

The participants described workplace bullying to manifest in the form of abuse both on their body and their dignity. Carolina, a domestic worker who kindly hosted the researcher so that she could interview other domestic workers at her home, recalled the following experience:

I knelt down, and I was scraping [the floor]. Then she [my boss] kicked something at me and said: ‘It’s done with this because you are going to stain the floor with that type of cleaner!’ I felt so bad there that I started crying…It was the pain of not being able to say anything or not knowing what to say… I kept scraping and then she grabbed me by the hair and said, ‘don’t tell me that you are crying!’

This was hardly shown to be an isolated incident as similar stories were shared by others—especially house cleaners. While talking with the researcher at one of CHIRLA’s empty call-center offices, Lupita, another 65-year-old Mexican woman, teared up while recalling an appalling event that she experienced during a day at work:

Once my boss asked me to clean silver. I didn’t do it well and she got very mad because I scratched it. I didn’t know how to do it properly. She got the cleaning rag and scratched my hand and said: ‘Look! Now you can feel how my scratched silverware feels!’ I started to cry but I didn’t want her to see my tears because I felt very bad.

Here, the interviewee was not only physically abused by her boss but was verbally attacked when she had her hand scratched, comparing it to what she had done to the owner’s utensils.

Other undocumented immigrants described the bullying at work that they experienced as unmitigated derogation. Dionisio, a young man who often volunteered at the Church, recalled: “When I started to work, I was afraid to say something back…They would call me pinche puto [fucking faggot] and pinche illegal [fucking illegal].”

Participants described how they acquiesced to workplace bullying. Angel, who had worked as a plumber in the U.S. for over 10 years said: “Sometimes people will mistreat you…the best thing to do is keep silent because you are undocumented. It’s better to keep silent… It is humiliation.” Ana, a 40-year-old Mexican woman working as a seamstress, went to the church one day seeking legal help since she was about to be evicted from her home. She agreed to talk to the researcher about her experiences in the United States and poignantly described how she endured bullying to make a living for herself and her family:

They [employers] abuse us [undocumented immigrants] too much because they know that since we’re undocumented, we can’t lose the job and we want to be able to say ‘today, I’m getting money for my kids.’ That’s why you stand so many humiliations.

No recourse

The Department of Labor represents the American government at the ILO and is responsible for ensuring that worker rights are assured. Such rights pertain to, among other things, the elimination of discrimination, occupational health, and safety, as well as wages and hours of work (U.S. Department of Labor, 2019 ). As the previous sub-sections have shown, as a direct outcome of not possessing legal standing, undocumented immigrants are bereft of these rights. Except for a small minority of cases, the deportation threat dynamic effectively thwarts undocumented immigrants from seeking redress to the different types of violations occurring at work (Fussell, 2011 ).

While undocumented immigrants recognized that they frequently had their basic rights violated by employers, they expressed that they did not have any recourse by which to rectify such violations. José, a Guatemalan day laborer, described how impotent he had felt after not being paid for his work and not being able to do anything about it due to his undocumented status:

A few years ago, I went to work in San Francisco to change beds at a hotel. We worked there for seven days. They [the employer] took us there. When we got back, they told us we would get paid the next day because it was late…they ran away without paying us. At the time we wanted to do something, to get a lawyer. But the first thing we were told was, ‘you don’t have papers, there’s nothing you can do.’ So, we didn’t do anything.

Luis, a Mexican day laborer who even described his experience in the United States, as the “American nightmare” expressed sentiments more directly, with one interviewee declaring: “The way I see it, if you don’t have papers, you don’t have rights.”. Lidia, a young woman of Mexican origin working as a caregiver of Mexican origin, explained some of what being denied worker rights means for her in practice: “The most difficult part of being in the United States is not having rights to have paid days off, sick leaves, holidays…that’s the most difficult part.”

Overall, the research participants pointed to how not possessing legal status meant that they did not have access to the same labor rights afforded to other workers. There is no recourse available to them when they encounter any number of work-related violations. From the interviews, it became abundantly clear that no recourse functions as the antecedent that provisions for specific work-related violations to occur, three of which were captured in this study—wage theft, precarious work conditions, and bullying. Undocumented immigrants described acquiescence and silence to be the normative response to gross mistreatment at work. Indeed, having no recourse translated, for undocumented immigrants, into a form of indentured servitude, wherein they worked without basic protections that workers in the U.S. (and most other countries) are assured.

Based on a rich dataset that included 9-month ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and myriad sources of documentary evidence, our grounded study revealed several important theoretical insights for understanding undocumented immigrants at work. These theoretical insights are visualized in Fig. 1 . This grounded study developed the concept of hypervisible identity, which is not only new to the extant literature but is, at face value, contradictory to what is known about the social identities of undocumented immigrants. In particular, existing studies suggest that these individuals possess social and professional identities that are largely invisible because of their undocumented status and because they do invisible work Bell et al. 2010 ). This study moves beyond such a reading of undocumented immigrants’ identity by showing that their identity can be made hypervisible for ideological purposes. To add veracity to this position, we identify the external and the internal process mechanics by which this hypervisible identity is socially and intersubjectively constructed.

The study also demonstrates the possibilities for hypervisible identity to engender modern slavery when the former intersects with invisible labor. Namely, there is a dynamic interplay between the types of labor that undocumented immigrants undertake and the socio-legal identity that they are attributed to function together to systematically disenfranchise them. The study depicts how the denial of legal and non-legal recourse is crucial in explaining the prevalence and the types of workplace violations that undocumented immigrants regularly encounter.

We now turn to discuss, in-depth, our three main, though interrelated, theoretical contributions that emerged from this study. Following this discussion, we identify limitations and future research directions.

Invisible labor and hypervisible identity

Our study identifies the imbricated, yet seemingly contradictory nexus between doing invisible labor and possessing a hypervisible identity. Buchanan and Settles ( 2019 ) have argued that invisibility and hypervisibility work in tandem “to maintain a social hierarchy where marginalized groups are constrained to the periphery” (p.2). Indeed, while researchers have studied how historically marginalized subjects do devalued and dirty work, they tend to point to how doing such work renders their identity invisible to others (e.g., Dutton et al. 2016 ; Herod and Aguiar, 2006 ; Rabelo and Mahalingam, 2019 ). This is especially the case for undocumented immigrants whose work and identity are routinely unseen by others (Bell et al. 2010 ; Samers, 2003 ). Our findings move against the current of perspective by revealing how extreme conditions of vulnerability (Butler, 2004 ) are tenable when the identity of undocumented immigrants is made hypervisible for ideological purposes.

Our findings also illuminate the specific process by which the subjugated identity is made hypervisible and the implications that emerge thereof. As Fig. 1 depicts, undocumented immigrants become targets of political rhetoric. This political rhetoric is invoked with the intention to allow their racialized bodies to be easily located and, from there, to make them available for interrogation by the disciplinary gaze of the state. Once undocumented immigrants have been targeted in political rhetoric, which represent them as an imminent danger to the proper social order, moral panic develops among the citizenry. This moral panic achieves two outcomes: (i) it legitimates the public to engage in castigatory actions against targeted subjects, and (ii) it creates public demands on the government to eliminate what is perceived to be an existential threat. There is historical evidence to support this position. For instance, during the era of Nazi Germany, Hitler targeted Jews through political discourse. Moral panic ensued, resulting in public backlash against Jews as well as calls for more laws to be created in an effort to protect the German population from the demonized group (Marti and Fernandez, 2013 ). As such, political discourse and moral panic should be read as being mutually reinforcing.

Moral panic catalyzed by political rhetoric foregrounds a culture of ubiquitous surveillance. That is, undocumented immigrants begin to conceive of omnipresent monitoring from both authorized enforcers of the state (e.g., ICE) as well as others in the community (e.g., neighbors, co-workers). It merits underscoring that ubiquitous surveillance is as much a discursive phenomenon as it is one that is enacted by external actors. In other words, it is undocumented immigrants who regulate their own behavior as they believe that they are constantly being watched. There may be little veracity upon which such an assumption is predicated. Indeed, as recent reports have shown, even with Trump’s enactment of draconian measures on undocumented immigrants, there has not been “any surge of arrests or activity or round-ups” (Valencia, 2019 ). Nonetheless, simply the belief that ubiquitous surveillance exists is enough for undocumented immigrants to meaningfully alter their behavior in efforts to abscond arrest and deportation.

Another theoretical contribution emerging from our study informs the notion of modern slavery. While modern slavery is illegal worldwide (Sigmon, 2008 ), it continues to prevail across myriad sites and manifests in different forms of human exploitation (Walk Free Foundation, 2018 ). The phenomenon is certainly not relegated only to countries that are predicated on relatively illiberal values and is clearly present not only in impoverished countries, but it is part of the reality of developed ones (Crane et al. 2019 ). Indeed, the Global Slavery Index estimates that there are more than 400,000 modern slaves in the U.S. alone (Walk Free Foundation, 2018 ). Crane ( 2013 ) has introduced the idea of modern slavery to the field of management and organization studies. Specifically, he conceptually examined the ways in which management practice and various institutional factors together allow modern slavery to occur and to be sustained. Crane called for rigorous empirical study of the mechanics that enable modern slavery and explication of how exactly such mechanics function. This study heeds Crane’s call for more empirical inquiry into the phenomenon in the management literature. We also observe Harrison et al.’s ( 2019 ) call to develop research focused on immigrant employees.

Through our study of undocumented immigrants, we offer insights into some of the precursors and the catalysts that perform as boundary conditions to certain manifestations of modern slavery. Namely, we contend that doing invisible work and occupying a hypervisible identity function, concomitantly, as interlocking, constitutive properties for modern slavery in cases when affected individuals are not considered to be legal persons from the perspective of the state. We contend that without the existence of these constitutive properties, conditions of modern slavery currently being experienced by non-legal persons would be negated.

Moreover, we identify some of the process dynamics that sustain and shape modern slavery. As Crane ( 2013 , p.61) notes, slavery enterprises “need to develop capabilities that enable them to carry out the institutional work that sustains favorable contexts and shapes unfavorable ones.” For Crane, these capabilities consist of moral legitimization and domain maintenance. That is, the existence of modern slavery is dependent on slave enterprises rationalizing such an immoral phenomenon (moral legitimization) by managing various stakeholders—through either placating or coopting them—in efforts to sustain it (domain maintenance) (Crane, 2013 ). Caruana et al. ( 2021 , p.258) have identified how modern slavery is also enabled by a “supply chain of workers” which puts people in a position in which their basic rights are denied. Our study reveals how moral panic is critical to rationalizing modern slavery within the communities in which it operates. Although the outcomes of modern slavery identified in this study would unequivocally be considered morally illegitimate in ordinary circumstances, when moral panic is cast against target subjects, they become dehumanized. Dehumanization results in them not being considered as worthy of the same basic rights and freedoms afforded to everyone else (Segarra and Prasad, 2018 ). In the study, we also see evidence of how actors of authority, who are charged with the responsibility of curtailing illegal acts like modern slavery, come to perform in the service of modern slavery. Such was the case of Los Angeles County sheriff Jim McDonnell opposing California Senate Bill 54, which would have offered some safeguards to undocumented immigrants.

Undocumented status

Finally, our study also illuminates how, for undocumented immigrants, it is, specifically, their lack of legal status that provisions for invisible labor and hypervisible identity to engender modern slavery. If not for being undocumented, these individuals would ostensibly have some agency to evade, what we identified to be, the defining features of modern slavery. Namely, they would have access to types of legal and non-legal recourse when encountering work-related violations. When an employer improperly withholds an employee’s wages, for instance, the employee with legal standing can seek financial (and punitive) redress from the local labor board or industry ombudsman. It is in the case of the employee being undocumented that systems of recourse are undermined if not entirely rendered inaccessible. Indeed, having no recourse explains why undocumented immigrants remain silent when they experience even fundamental violations of their dignity. As the model depicts, having no recourse foregrounds specific types of workplace violations, including wage theft, precarious work conditions, and bullying.

While this point would return us, once more, to the matter of not qualifying as a legal person in the eyes of the state, it is critical to note, here, the paradoxical circumstances that emerge when an individual is undocumented. Menjivar and Abrego’s ( 2012 ) analysis of legal violence that is enacted against members of this group is insightful for articulating the nature of this paradox. As they explain, immigration and criminal law function, in tandem, “to punish the behaviors of undocumented immigrants but at the same time push them to spaces outside the law” (Menjivar and Abrego, 2012 , p.1385). This is a meaningful paradox in the lives of undocumented immigrants insofar as it defines their experiences in virtually all critical aspects of life, including work. That is, punitive criminal laws subject undocumented immigrants to the juridical purview of the state, which is enabled when the identity of the target subject is made hypervisible. However, by not having legal status, complementary immigration laws compel affected individuals to engage in invisible labor that, by necessity, operates outside of the purview of the formal economy. There are numerous cases of how this phenomenon is operationalized in practice. For example, in June 2018, when ICE agents raided Corso’s Flower and Garden Center in Ohio, over 100 undocumented immigrants, and low-skilled workers were arrested for violating immigration law as they did not have the legal right to live or work in the US. These same undocumented immigrants would be charged under criminal law with identity theft and tax evasion (Schmidt, 2018 ).

In short, undocumented immigrants must acquiesce to the existing laws of the country yet are not entitled to any of the rights and protections that these laws afford. Without these rights and protections, unscrupulous employers are permitted to exploit the labor and undermine the dignity of undocumented immigrants with impunity. Indeed, this is the logical corollary of no meaningful recourse being available for redress.

Limitations and future research directions

This study was limited in several ways. These limitations can be redressed in future research. First, the ethnography was conducted during a specific time period (September 2016 to May 2017). The timing was particularly useful in understanding the role of political rhetoric in informing the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as it represents periods of time immediately before and immediately after Trump’s election. It would be interesting to study undocumented immigrants in light of the proposed and newly enacted public policies that affect this population. For example, it was only after the completion of fieldwork that California Senate bill SB 54 was ratified, which presumably offers greater protections to undocumented immigrants. Likewise, the potential suspension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy would expectedly worsen existing vulnerabilities of undocumented immigrants. Future research can offer empirical insights into how specific laws and public policies influence the experiences of this group.

Second, this study did not limit its scope to undocumented immigrants in the U.S. from a particular country or region—though it did solely focus on individuals from Latin America. As such, there were different motivating factors that caused research participants to leave their country of origin and assume the undocumented immigrant status in the U.S. For instance, one of the informants from Mexico identified extreme poverty and better job opportunities as the main reasons for migrating to the U.S., while informants from El Salvador identified violence posed by local guerilla groups and gangs as the primary reason for migrating. It would be useful for future research to comparatively account for how the geopolitical determinants of migration shape the undocumented immigrants’ experiences in the U.S.

Third, this study was conducted in Southern California and, thus, only considered the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. It would be beneficial to pursue cross-country studies on how undocumented immigrants—and other non-legal populations—experience and negotiate vulnerability. For example, many European countries today are seeing an influx of refugees entering and settling within their geographical boundaries. Cross-country studies would explicate how a country’s historical background and institutional arrangements’ structure and pattern the experiences of non-legal persons living there. Such studies could also reveal the different mechanisms by which non-legal persons are regulated around the world as well as potential opportunities for ameliorating the constitutive properties of modern slavery identified in this article.

To conclude, it seems apropos to return to Butler. Butler ( 2012 , p. 134) has considered the ethical obligations we have, specifically to those with whom we live in what she calls “unwilled adjacency.” By unwilled adjacency, she refers to individuals or groups who live in geographical proximity by circumstances beyond their willful choice. Legal citizens (and other legal residents) residing within the same community as undocumented immigrants are, perhaps, the quintessential example of unwilled adjacency in practice. For Butler, unwilled adjacency impresses upon us, as an ethical obligation, to recognize the humanity of whom we did not choose “to inhabit the earth…[who] we may not love, those we may never love [and] do not know” (p. 150). This study has illuminated the process dynamics by which extreme conditions of vulnerability are enacted and to which undocumented immigrants are subjected. In doing so, we hope that this study contributes to ongoing debates about the ethical obligations that are owed to this vulnerable population—which ought to inform their treatment in society.

Data availability

As research participants with whom interviews were conducted were assured anonymity, we are unable to provide access to raw data. Metadata is available upon request.

For the data analysis and the findings presented in this paper, all of the informants’ names have been changed to respect their anonymity.

Ashforth BE, Kreiner GE (1999) How can you do it?: Dirty work and the challenge of constructing a positive identity. Acad Manag Rev 24:413–434

Google Scholar

Ashforth BE, Kreiner GE, Clark MA, Fugate M (2017) Congruence work in stigmatized occupations: a managerial lens on employee fit with dirty work. J Organ Behav 38:1260–1279

Article Google Scholar

Bales K (2012) Slavery in its contemporary manifestations. In: Allain J (Ed) The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary. Oxford University Press, Oxford, Oxford, p 441–476

Bazeley P, Jackson K (2013) Qualitative data analysis with NVivo, 2nd ed. Sage, London

Bell MP, Kwesiga EN, Berry DP (2010) Immigrants: the new “invisible men and women” in diversity research. J Manag Psychol 25:177–188

Bell V (2010) New scenes of vulnerability, agency and plurality: an interview with Judith Butler. Theory, Cult Soc 27:130–152

Bobo K (2011) Wage theft in America: Why millions of working Americans are not getting paid and what we can do about it. The New Press, New York

Bosmans K, Mousaid S, De Cuyper N, Hardonk S, Louckx F, Vanroelen C (2016) Dirty work, dirty worker: stigmatization and coping strategies among domestic workers. J Vocat Behav 92:54–67

Buchanan NT, Settles IH (2019) Managing (in) visibility and hypervisibility in the workplace. J Vocat Behav 113:1–5

Butler J (1997) The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press, Stanford

Book Google Scholar

Butler J (2004) Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso, New York

Butler J (2012) Precarious life, vulnerability, and the ethics of cohabitation. J Specul Philos 26:134–151

Butler J, Athanasiou A (2013) Dispossession: The performative in the political. Polity, Malden

Caruana R, Crane A, Gold S, LeBaron G (2021) Modern slavery in business: the sad and sorry state of a non-field. Bus Soc 60:251–287

Chang G (2016) Disposable domestics: Immigrant women workers in the global economy, 2nd ed. Haymarket Books, Chicago

Charmaz K (2015) Grounded Theory. In: Smith JA (Ed) Qualitative Psychology: A Practical Guide to Research Methods. Sage, Thousand Oaks, p 53–83

Charmaz K (2014) Constructing Grounded Theory. Sage, Thousand Oaks

Charmaz K (2006) Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. Sage, Thousand Oaks

Chomsky A (2017) Immigrants’ rights are workers’ rights. NACLA Rep Am 49:206–211

Clark T (2011) Gaining and maintaining access: exploring the mechanisms that support and challenge the relationship between gatekeepers and researchers. Qual Soc Work 10:485–502

Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (n.d.) Who we are. Retrieved on 1 May 2018 http://www.chirla.org

Cohen S (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers. MacGibbon and Key, London

Corbin J, Strauss A (2008) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, 3rd ed. Sage, Thousand Oaks

Covered California (2019) Immigration status and health coverage. Retrieved on 1 May 2018 https://www.coveredca.com/individuals-and-families/getting-covered/immigrants

Crane A (2013) Modern slavery as a management practice: exploring the conditions and capabilities for human exploitation. Acad Manag Rev 38:49–69

Crane A, LeBaron G, Allain J, Behbahani L (2019) Governance gaps in eradicating forced labor: from global to domestic supply chains. Regul Gov 13:86–106

Daniels AK (1988) Invisible work. Soc Probl 34:403–415

Duffy M (2007) Doing the dirty work: Gender, race, and reproductive labor in historical perspective. Gend Soc 21:313–336

Dutton JE, Debebe G, Wrzesniewski A (2016) Being valued and devalued at work: A social valuing perspectiv. In: Bechky B, Elsbach K (Eds) Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research (Vol. 3). Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, p 9–52

Eury JL, Kreiner GE, Trevino LK, Gioia DA (2018) The past is not dead: Legacy identification and alumni ambivalence in the wake of the Sandusky scandal at Penn State. Acad Manag J 61:826–856

Ferrigno L (2015) Donald Trump: Boston beating is ‘terrible’, CNN. Retrieved on 7 March 2018 https://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/20/politics/donald-trump-immigration-boston-beating/index.html

Foucault M (1997) Panoticism (extract.). In: Leach N (Ed) Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Routledge, New York, p 356–366

Foucault M (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, New York

Fussell E (2011) The deportation threat dynamic and victimization of Latino migrants: Wage theft and robbery. Sociol Q 52:593–615

Galvin DJ (2016) Deterring wage theft: alt-Labor, state politics, and the policy determinants of minimum wage compliance. Perspect Politics 14:324–350

García Quijano, JA (2023) Workplace discrimination and undocumented first generation Latinx immigrants. The University of Chicago. https://crownschool.uchicago.edu/student-life/advocates-forum/workplace-discrimination-and-undocumented-first-generation-latinx

Geertz C (1991) Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight. In: Mukerji C, Schudson M (Eds) Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. University of California Press, Berkeley, p 239–277

Gioia DA, Corley KG, Hamilton AL (2013) Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: notes on the Gioia methodology. Organ Res Methods 16:15–31

Giroux HA (2017) White nationalism, armed culture and state violence in the age of Donald Trump. Philos Soc Criticism 43:887–910

Glaser BG, Strauss AL (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine, Chicago

Gostin LO, Cathaoir KEO (2017) Presidential immigration policies: endangering health and well-being? JAMA 317:1617–1618

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Gray N (2015) Families of slain victims meet with Trump. CNN. Retrieved on 7 March 2018 https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/02/politics/donald-trump-undocumented-immigration-victims-families/index.htm

Harrison DA, Harrison T, Shaffer MA (2019) Strangers in strained lands: learning from workplace experiences of immigrant employees. J Manag 45:600–619

Hayes J, Hill L (2017) Undocumented immigrants in California. Public Policy Institute of California. Retrieved on 2 May 2018 http://www.ppic.org/publication/undocumented-immigrants-in-california

Hernandez MG, Nguyen J, Casanova S, Suárez-Orozco C, Saetermoe CL (2013) Doing no harm and getting it right: guidelines for ethical research with immigrant communities. New Directions for Child and Adoleschent Development 2013:43–60

Herod A, Aguiar LLM (2006) Introduction: cleaners and the dirty work of neoliberalism. Antipode 38:425–434

Heyman JM (1998) State effects on labor exploitation: the INS and undocumented immigrants at the Mexico-United States border. Crit Anthropol 18:157–180

Huber LP (2016) “Make America great again!”: Donald Trump, racist nativism and the virulent adherence to White supremacy amid U.S. demographic change. Charlest Law Rev 10:215–248

ILO (2012) What is force labour, modern slavery and human trafficking General survey on the fundamental conventions concerning rights at work in light of the work of the ILO declaration on social justice for a fair globalization. International Labor Organization. Retrieved on 7 May 2018 https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/definition/lang--en/index.htm

Kalleberg AL (2009) Precarious work, insecure workers: employment relations in transition. Am Sociol Rev 74:1–22

Koplan T (2016) What Donald Trump has said about Mexico and vice versa. CNN. Retrieved on 8 May 2018 https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/31/politics/donald-trump-mexico-statements/index.html

Labaree RV (2002) The risk of ‘going observationalist’: negotiating the hidden dilemmas of being an insider participant observer. Qual Res 2:97–122

Laws DR (2016) Social control of sex offenders: a cultural history. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Leonard M (1998) Invisible Work, Invisible Workers: The Informal Economy in Europe and the US. St. Martin’s Press, New York

Light MT, Miller T (2018) Does undocumented immigration increase violent crime? Criminology 56:370–401

Article PubMed Central Google Scholar

Mainwaring Ċ (2016) Migrant agency: negotiating borders and migration controls. Migr Stud 4:289–308

Marti I, Fernandez P (2013) The institutional work of oppression and resistance: learning from the Holocaust. Organ Stud 34:1195–1223

Mehan H (1997) The discourse of the illegal immigrant debate: a case study in the politics of representation. Discourse Soc 8:249–270

Menjivar C (2006) Liminal legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants’ lives in the United States. Am J Sociol 111:999–1037

Menjivar C, Abrego L (2012) Legal violence: immigration law and the lives of central American immigrants. Am J Sociol 117:1380–1421

Mollan S, Geesin B (2020) Donald trump and trumpism: leadership, ideology and narrative of the business executive turned politician. Organization 27:405–418

Moyce SC, Schenker M (2018) Migrant workers and their occupational health and safety. Annu Rev Public Health 39:351–365

Ngai M (2017) A call for sanctuary. Dissent 64:16–19

O’Brien BG, Collingwood, L and El-Khatib, SO (2019) The politics of refuge: Sanctuary cities, crime, and undocumented immigration. Urban Aff Rev 55:3–40

Orrenius PM, Zavodny M (2009) Do immigrants work in riskier jobs? Demography 46:535–551

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Passel JS (1986) Undocumented immigration. Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 487:181–200

Passel J Cohn, DV (2017) 20 metro areas are home to six-in-ten unauthorized immigrants in the US. Pew Research Center. Retrieved on 3 October 2017 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/09/us-metro-areas-unauthorized-immigrants

Peticca-Harris A, DeGama N, Elias SR (2016) A dynamic process model for finding informants and gaining access in qualitative research. Organ Res Methods 19:376–401

Queally J (2017) Latinos are reporting fewer sexual assaults amid a climate of fear in immigrant communities, LAPD says. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved on 8 May 2018 https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-immigrant-crime-reporting-drops-20170321-story.html

Rabelo VC, Mahalingam R (2019) “They really don’t want to see us”: How cleaners experience invisible ‘dirty’ work. J Vocat Behav 113:103–114

Raj A, Silverman J (2002) Violence against immigrant women: the roles of culture, context, and legal immigrant status on intimate partner violence. Violence Women 8:367–398

Reardon S (2017) Health toll of immigration policies begin to emerge. Nature 544:148–149

Article ADS CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Romero M (2018) Trump’s immigration attacks, in brief. Contexts 17:34–41

Samers M (2003) Invisible capitalism: political economy and the regulation of undocumented immigration in France. Econ Soc 32:555–583

Saramo S (2017) The meta-violence of trumpism. Eur J Am Stud 12:165–192

Schleifer T (2015) Trump: San Francisco killing shows perils of illegal immigration. CNN. Retrieved on 10 May 2018 https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/03/politics/trump-san-francisco-killing

Schweitzer R (2017) Integration against the state: Irregular migrants’ agency between deportation and regularisation in the United Kingdom. Politics 37:317–331

Schmidt S (2018) ‘Utter chaos’: ICE arrests 114 workers in immigration raid at Ohio gardening company. The Washington Post. Retrieved on 8 March 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/06/utter-chaos-ice-arrests-114-workers-in-immigration-raid-at-ohio-gardening-company/?utm_term=.86318e4b3416

Segarra P, Prasad A (2020) Colonization, migration, and right-wing extremism: the constitution of embodied life of a dispossessed undocumented immigrant woman Organization 27:174–187

Segarra P, Prasad A (2018) How does corporeality inform theorizing? Revisiting Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil. Hum Stud 41:545–563

Sigmon JN (2008) Combating modern-day slavery: issues in identifying and assisting victims of human trafficking worldwide. Vict Offenders 3:245–257

Smith D (2017) Trump signs bill to begin Mexico border wall in immigration crackdown. The Guardian. Retrieved on 1 March 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/25/donald-trump-sign-mexico-border-executive-order

Stupi EK, Chiricos T, Gertz M (2016) Perceived criminal threat from undocumented immigrants: antecedents and consequences for policy preferences. Justice Q 33:230–266

Sulkowski ML (2017) Unauthorized immigrant students in the United States: the current state of affairs and the role of public education. Child Youth Serv Rev 77:62–68

Talamantes E, Aguilar-Gaxiola S (2017) POTUS Trump’s executive orders—implications for immigrants and health care. Ethn Dis 27:121–124

Tatum S (2017) Trump says Steinle verdict a “travesty of justice. CNN. Retrieved on 6 March 2018 https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/30/politics/kate-steinle-verdict-reactions/index.html

United Nations (2018) Over 40 million people still victims of slavery. United Nations. Retrieved on 18 March 2018 https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/12/1027271

U.S. Department of Labor (2019) What are workers’ rights? Retrieved on 18 March 2018 https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/workers-rights

Valencia N (2019) ICE official: ‘No mass arrests’ so far. CNN. Retrieved on 7 March 2018 https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/ice-raids-undocumented-immigrants-arrests/index.html

Vosko LF (2010) Managing the margins: gender, citizenship and the international regulation of precarious employment. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Walk Free Foundation (2018) Global Slavery Index 2018. Global Slavery Index. Retrieved on 7 April 2018 https://downloads.globalslaveryindex.org/ephemeral/GSI-2018_FNL_180907_Digital-small-p-1563639048.pdf

Wang X (2012) Undocumented immigrants as perceived criminal threat: a test of the minority threat perspective. Criminology 50:743–776

Weiss J (2017) Six months of hate: how anti-immigrant sentiment is affecting Latinos in the United States. Univisión News. Retrieved on 8 March 2018 https://www.univision.com/univision-news/united-states/six-months-of-hate-how-anti-immigrant-sentiment-is-affecting-latinos-in-the-united-states

Wrzesniewski A, Dutton JE, Debebe G (2003) Interpersonal sensemaking and the meaning of work. Res Organ Behav 25:93–135

Young JG (2017) Making America 1920 again? Nativism and US immigration, past and present. J Migr Hum Security 5:217–235

Zapf D, Einarsen S (2001) Bullying in the workplace: recent trends in research and practice. Eur J Work Organ Psychol 10:369–373

Zatz MS, Smith H (2012) Immigration, crime, and victimization: rhetoric and reality. Annu Rev Law Soc Sci 8:141–159

Zulfiqar G, Prasad A (2022) How is social inequality maintained in the Global South? Critiquing the concept of dirty work. Hum Relat 75:2160–2186

Zulfiqar G, Prasad A (2021) Challenging social inequality in the Global South: class, privilege, and consciousness-raising through critical management education. Acad Manag Learn Educ 20:156–181

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Universidad Anáhuac México, Mexico, Mexico

Paulina Segarra

EGADE Business School, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City, Mexico

Ajnesh Prasad

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

Both authors contributed to the conceptualization and writing of this article. The first author is referred to as “the researcher” as she was responsible for the data collection and analysis.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ajnesh Prasad .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethical approval

Research was conducted based on institutional and national norms of the Mexican university at which the study was conducted. As the lead author is affiliated with a Mexican university that does not have an institutional review board, no ethical approval was required to undertake this project. Nonetheless, the research was performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments.

Informed consent

All research involved voluntary participation, and the study’s participants were told what the contents of their interviews would be used for. The informants were ensured the anonymity of the data generated from their interviews.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Segarra, P., Prasad, A. Undocumented immigrants at work: invisibility, hypervisibility, and the making of the modern slave. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 45 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02449-5

Download citation

Received : 28 June 2023

Accepted : 22 November 2023

Published : 03 January 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02449-5

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

The business of (im)migration: bodies across borders.

Vijayta Doshi
Arturo Osorio

Journal of Business Ethics (2024)

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

IMAGES

Illegal Migrations 2020
Curbing Illegal Migration
2nd phase of illegal migration awareness program launched, initiative to train youth on online
Illegal Migration Bill will 'traumatise' asylum seekers
Refugees, Illegal Migrants, Have Been Proven To Be Assets To Host Countries Throughout History
Illegal Migration Bill: Ministers overturn Lords changes

VIDEO

The Economics of Migration, Junior Seminar session 77, 01/10/2024
The Economics of Migration, Junior Seminar session 64, 24/10/2023
Legal/Illegal migration will destroy your culture
Concepts Of Migration
South-South Migrations and the Law from Below: Case Studies on China and Nigeria
Migration paper kese nikale #shorts #ytshorts #youtubeshorts #viralvideo #trending #darbhanga

COMMENTS

Fixing What’s Most Broken in the US Immigration System: A ...
Moreover, while the legal immigration system prioritizes family-based immigration, backlogs incentivize illegal entry, relegate intending immigrants to long-term undocumented status, and prolong the insecurity of their mixed-status US families.
5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S. | Pew Research ...
The origin countries of unauthorized immigrants also shifted during that time, with the number from Mexico declining and the number rising from Central America and Asia, according to the latest Pew Research Center estimates. Here are five facts about the unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S.
Twenty-First-Century Globalization and Illegal Migration
We argue that illegal migration emerged as a structural feature of the second era of capitalist globalization, which emerged in the late twentieth century and was characterized by international market integration.
The US Immigration Courts, Dumping Ground for the Nation’s ...
This paper attributes the backlog to systemic failures in the broader immigration system that negatively affect the immigration courts, such as: Visa backlogs, United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) application processing delays, and other bottlenecks in legal immigration processes.
Building border walls and barriers: What the research says
The paper focuses on how the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and more recent federal actions have affected the Tohono O’odham. The tribe’s 2.8 million-acre reservation includes 62 miles of border between Arizona and Mexico.
Immigration & Migration - Research and data from Pew Research ...
Trump and Harris Supporters Differ on Mass Deportations but Favor Border Security, High-Skilled Immigration. A majority of Trump backers say more immigrants would make life worse for people like them, while most Harris backers say life wouldn’t change. reportSep 24, 2024.
Deportation, harms, and human rights - Taylor & Francis Online
Brock begins the fifth chapter of Justice for People on the Move by depicting five categories of allegedly illegal immigration cases: 1) The Windrush Generation in the UK, 2) Overstaying Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the USA, 3) Young Children Brought by Parents, 4) Tacitly Approved Irregular Migration, and 5) Migration in Response to ...
Undocumented immigrants at work: invisibility ... - Nature
Extending from their lack of legal standing, undocumented immigrant workers in the United States occupy spaces marked by extreme conditions of vulnerability, which were exacerbated by the...
Towards a Theory of Illegal - JSTOR
Papademetriou identifies four common forms of illegal migration namely, unauthorised entry, fraudulent entry (ie with false documents), visa overstaying, and violation of the terms and conditions of a visa.5 Even these four broad categories are insufficient to cover all major aspects of illegal migration.
Illegal Immigration, Labour Supply, and Fiscal Policies
This paper explores the economic impact of illegal immigration in a dynamic general equilibrium model when the domestic labour supply is elastic and the fiscal policies include various taxes and income transfers.