So, what’s in it for Amazon?

For corporations like Amazon, immigration policy is just one piece in a much larger puzzle of viability and profit. The United States is a market economy, where companies compete with one another to produce goods or services that consumers are willing to buy. Each business is incentivized to produce goods and services as cheaply as possible so that it can charge competitive prices while still making a profit. Unless it can feasibly automate its processes, a business needs workers. 

But with competition and profit top of mind, businesses have every incentive to keep wages as low as possible. The business community is generally hostile to unionization, for example, because collective bargaining often makes companies choose between paying workers more or losing access to workers during a strike.

As Amazon’s recent lobbying shows, corporations are not merely passive recipients of immigrant labor.

Immigration fits into this picture by increasing the supply of available workers. As a result, businesses are less likely to have to raise wages or improve conditions to compete against each other for workers, especially in tight labor markets. 

Amazon, for instance, has been chronically short of warehouse workers for years. It has raised wages slightly over time, but a 2023 study found that wages for Amazon warehouse workers still lag behind those at other warehouse companies. In 2024, researchers found that half of Amazon workers interviewed in a national survey struggled to afford enough food or a place to live. According to another study from 2024, injury rates at Amazon warehouses are seventy-one percent higher than those at other similarly-sized warehouses.

Despite these conditions, Amazon has been described as “a life raft for many immigrants with work authorization” since “it hires regularly, in part to replenish its ranks because of high turnover.” 

Indeed, Amazon started a program in 2022 specifically designed to recruit refugees, like Issakh, and recipients of other similar types of visas to work at the company. While Amazon likely designed the program in part to signal virtue to the company’s consumers, in the same year, a leaked internal research memo exposed that the company believed it would run out of people to hire at the wages it was offering for warehouse work by 2024 if it did not make changes. In 2025, when President Donald Trump eliminated visa programs that gave work permits to individuals fleeing political turmoil, Amazon warehouses were particularly hard hit. 

This setback did not deter Amazon from its pursuit of foreign-born workers, however. In 2025, Amazon reported that of the nearly $18 million that it spent on lobbying the federal government, an undisclosed portion went specifically towards “issues related to immigration…”

Powerful corporations like Amazon have sought to keep production costs low by relying on low-wage, foreign-born workers since time immemorial. But, as Amazon’s recent lobbying shows, corporations are not merely passive recipients of immigrant labor. They also use their influence to shape the laws that determine how many foreign-born workers are available to them. To see how businesses interests have affected the immigration laws of today, it is necessary to look back several decades, starting with the 1960s and 70s.

When Amazon was a just river and Business Roundtable was just getting started

The 1960s and 70s were different times in the United States. Back then, the word “amazon” called to mind one of the world’s longest rivers rather than one of the world’s largest corporations. Yet during those decades, two forces began shaping American politics in ways that continue to impact immigration policy today: the decline of the labor movement and rising immigration rates. 

In many industries, corporate pressure in the latter half of the twentieth century steadily eroded worker power. In the 1950s, approximately thirty-three percent of workers in America belonged to a union. Since then, union membership has steadily declined, dropping below fourteen percent in 2022. 

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a federal law lobbied for by corporations, placed strict limits on organizing rights in the workplace and allowed states to enact right-to-work laws, which permitted workers to receive union benefits without paying union dues. In the decades that followed, decisions by the courts and the National Labor Relations Board further weakened union power, and many corporations grew emboldened to resist new union organizing as a result.

By 1972, a corporate group dedicated to combatting unions emerged and began organizing and lobbying across the country for anti-labor policies. It was none other than Business Roundtable, originally named “The Business Roundtable—For Responsible Labor-Management Relations.”

As worker power weakened, pay and conditions stagnated or worsened in many industries, making jobs in those industries less attractive to American-born workers and leading to worker shortages. Take, as an example, the meatpacking industry. 

As worker power weakened, pay and conditions stagnated or worsened in many industries, making jobs in those industries less attractive to American-born workers and leading to worker shortages.

“There was a time when white men dominated the workforce in slaughterhouses and they had good, middle-class jobs. They were able to make a good salary and balance their work and life,” says Amal Bouhabib, Senior Staff Attorney at FarmSTAND, a legal advocacy organization dedicated to fighting for a food system free from extraction and exploitation. “But starting around the 1970s, there was a pretty concerted effort throughout the slaughterhouses to crack down on unions and unionization efforts.” As union membership declined, so did wages, making jobs in meatpacking less desirable.

Workers in a Minnesota slaughterhouse circa World War II. Public domain photo from drussano35.getarchive.net.

The construction industry went through a similar transformation around the same time. At its inception, Business Roundtable was particularly focused on combatting union activity in construction. As Business Roundtable’s power and influence grew over the course of the 1970s, union membership in the construction industry declined. Today, nine of out ten construction workers are nonunion, and nonunion construction workers make eighty-six cents for every dollar made by the average American worker, usually without health or retirement benefits. The industry faces chronic labor shortages today. 

Amid eroding worker power, another profound change was taking place in the 1960s and 70s. The number of immigrants in the United States was beginning to rise for the first time in decades. In the 1920s, responding to a swell of anti-immigrant sentiment, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law a highly restrictive “national origins” quota system. That law, the Immigration Act of 1924, capped both the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States and assigned immigration quotas explicitly based on race and ethnicity to decide who could enter the country. 

The quota system finally came to an end in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). INA created a new system that largely gave preference to immigrants who had American citizen or permanent resident family members. However, INA also capped immigration from the Americas for the first time, creating a large group of prospective immigrants from Latin America with no legal pathway to entry. 

This was a particular problem in the agricultural industry because of the Bracero Program, an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that began during World War II and allowed migrant workers from Mexico to work seasonally on U.S. farms. The Bracero Program came to an end one year prior to INA, yet many farmers continued to depend on the labor of seasonal migrant workers to harvest the nation’s crops. As a result, INA made migrant workers who continued to fill this labor need “unauthorized,” “undocumented,” or, in the parlance of some, “illegal.”

In the wake of INA, both authorized and unauthorized immigration levels rose, and authorized immigrants came increasingly from parts of the world discriminated against by the earlier quota system.

Declining worker power and rising immigration rates combined in a way that was particularly helpful to businesses that employed low-wage workers in the latter half of the twentieth century. While stagnating wages and worse conditions made jobs in certain industries less palatable to American-born workers, newly arrived immigrants who were eager for employment were often willing to take these jobs despite the hardships. Many businesses acted decisively to capitalize on these shifting conditions.

Turning back to the example of the meatpacking industry, “In the 80s and 90s, some of the slaughterhouses came up with the idea of recruiting undocumented workers, which was hugely successful, as they could pay undocumented workers less, they could cut corners, and these workers were very unlikely to stand up for their rights or complain out of fear of retaliation or deportation,” said Bouhabib. 

Some poultry processing companies sent scouts to border states like Texas and Florida and ran ads in Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations. Tyson Foods, one of the country’s largest meatpacking firms, was even indicted in 2001 for recruiting workers directly from Latin America and helping them obtain fraudulent work authorization documents, though the government failed to prove at trial that the practice was company-sanctioned.

The business community was not going to let any change in immigration policy take place without its input.

Similarly, in the construction industry, immigrant workers joined the industry at a faster rate than U.S.-born workers over the course of the following decades, responding to the “pull” of available jobs.

Of course, the business community was not the only group interested in the rising immigration rates. By the late 1970s and early 80s, as immigration continued to climb, anti-immigrant sentiments climbed in tandem, and a national debate emerged about whether and how the U.S. should change its immigration policies. However, many businesses had come to rely on the growing number of foreign-born workers, including some companies that had learned to depend specifically on undocumented workers because they were easier to exploit. The business community was not going to let any change in immigration policy take place without its input.

It’s (not so fun) to stay at the IRCA

In a joint hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1981, Chairman Alan K. Simpson, shared his view that, “The current flow of immigrants and refugees to the United States is out of control.”

He was not the only one who felt that way. Anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise in America, as demonstrated by the formation of groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, founded by white nationalist John Tanton in 1979. 

Labor unions, too, felt threatened by rising immigration rates during this time because they worried that immigration, and particularly unauthorized immigration, depressed wages for American workers. The labor movement has since dramatically changed its stance. But in the 1980s, the AFL-CIO frequently spoke out in favor of restrictive immigration policies. 

This left an odd coalition of business interests, immigrant rights groups, and civil rights organizations like the ACLU playing defense against a rising tide of immigration restrictionism in national politics. Of particular concern to the business community was an effort to hold companies that hired undocumented workers liable through fines, called “employer sanctions.” These sanctions were intended to both eliminate the “pull” of available jobs on unauthorized immigrants and to punish unscrupulous corporations who hire and exploit these workers.

As Congress debated immigration reform, corporate interests got to work lobbying. Business lobbyists, in particular the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and agricultural industry lobbying groups, were deeply involved in the negotiations that would culminate into what is still the United States’s most recent comprehensive immigration reform law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA).

In its final form, IRCA included a watered-down version—due to corporate influence—of employer sanctions. But it also did much more. 

It allowed undocumented immigrants who had been living in the United States prior to 1982 to apply for legal status, a provision that became known as “Reagan Amnesty.” It increased funding for immigration enforcement by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), a precursor to today’s immigration enforcement agencies. And it created the modern H-2A visa program, which allows agricultural companies to hire migrant farm workers on a seasonal basis with no total annual limit on the number of workers allowed, unlike other guest worker visa programs. 

It is worth noting that early in the legislative process, agricultural companies openly opposed amnesty. In explaining why, they were not afraid to state the ugly truth: they worried that giving undocumented farm workers a pathway to legal status would cause them to move into professions with better pay and working conditions. The companies argued that farm worker shortages would ensue as a result. This, of course, was just another way of saying that these companies did not want to compete with other industries for workers, as that would require raising wages and improving working conditions. 

It was only after the modern H-2A visa program was added to the bill that the agricultural industry ceased its pressure campaign. The program has since been compared to a form of legalized slavery. Because H-2A workers’ visas are tied to their specific employer, they are vulnerable to widespread abuses, such as being cheated out of wages, forced to live in poor conditions, and subjected to human trafficking. But the agricultural industry got what it wanted: a near limitless source of easily-exploitable labor.

For the wider business community, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as its spokesperson, employer sanctions were the real battleground. The sanctions provision required companies, for the first time in American history, to fill out an I-9 form attesting that they had verified a prospective employee’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States before hiring them. Corporate interests argued that the provision, as it was originally proposed, would cost money, create burdensome paperwork and, perhaps cynically echoing the genuine concerns of their civil rights organization allies, could lead to discrimination against workers perceived to look “foreign.” 

Almost as soon as IRCA went into effect, it became clear that corporate lobbyists had successfully ensured that the law worked in favor of business.

However, the business community softened its stance when a later version of the bill added an “affirmative defense” clause to the employer sanctions section, which released employers from any obligation to confirm the authenticity of identity and work authorization documents presented to them by prospective workers. Essentially, so long as a company could prove that it collected work authorization documents that appeared genuine on their face, the company would avoid sanctions. 

Almost as soon as IRCA went into effect, it became clear that corporate lobbyists had successfully ensured that the law worked in favor of business. The law did not stop unscrupulous companies from hiring and exploiting undocumented workers. In fact, businesses could easily game the system. 

Rather than hire workers suspected to be undocumented directly, some businesses turned to middlemen like temp agencies and labor brokers to avoid potential sanctions. At the same time, a cottage industry dedicated to producing fraudulent work authorization documents for undocumented workers sprang up. Under IRCA, so long as these documents arguably appeared genuine, companies that collected them had generally complied with the law “in good faith.” 

In industries like construction, companies could rely on day laborers, since under IRCA employers are not required to collect I-9 forms during the first three days of employment. As a result, companies could pick up undocumented workers at the start of each day, pay them in cash for the day’s work, and “re-employ” them the next day, as needed.

IRCA also did not impose any obligation on companies to verify the citizenship status of employees hired before the law was enacted, and who had worked continuously for the same company since that time. Essentially, this meant that any undocumented worker who did not qualify or did not apply for “Reagan Amnesty” could continue to work in the shadows and at the mercy of the employer they worked for before the law was passed.

President Ronald Reagan signing IRCA into law. Public domain photo from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website. At the same time, companies that continued to rely on undocumented workers after the passage of IRCA typically had relatively little to fear in terms of enforcement. The INS failed to effectively enforce even the meager sanctions provision that survived corporate lobbying, largely due to inadequate funding.
IRCA gave the INS a seventy percent increase in its overall agency budget, but congressional initiatives and internal INS decisions meant that employer sanctions enforcement received only one quarter of the new funds. Given its inadequate resources, the INS partnered with the Department of Labor to increase its capacity to review I-9 forms. Even so, as of 1990, the two agencies only reviewed the I-9 forms of less than one percent of all U.S. employers annually.
Even when the INS did enforce sanctions, one study found that it did so sparingly, focusing on the “bad apples,” so as not attract the ire of the business community. The same study found that enforcement fell most heavily on small firms with non-white owners who were often immigrants themselves.
Companies that did face fines were even allowed to negotiate them, often resulting in substantial reductions. The INS also rarely re-inspected companies. So, if a business underwent one inspection, it could employ undocumented workers with relative impunity going forward.
All the while, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce carefully watched the INS to ensure that it was not too “heavy-handed” in its enforcement tactics. Then-labor relations attorney for the Chamber of Commerce Virginia Lamp—known after her marriage as Ginni Thomas—told the media in 1998, “We’re going to be joining in litigation if we see they have stepped outside their bounds.”
All in all, employer sanctions are widely considered to be a failed experiment in corporate accountability. In 1990, thirty-five percent of companies contacted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office openly admitted that they were not complying with IRCA’s requirements.]

Of course, despite the toothlessness of employer sanctions, many companies would not and do not intentionally hire undocumented workers. Undocumented workers tend to be clustered in certain industries, like construction, food service, agriculture, and manufacturing. Even within these industries, practices vary and some businesses care more about following the law than others.

But the fact remains that market competition rewards companies who can keep their labor costs lower than their competitors, even if their business model involves hiring and exploiting undocumented workers. And notwithstanding high hopes on Capitol Hill in 1986, IRCA is not a meaningful deterrent to bad behavior. As a result, undocumented workers are left in a vulnerable position.

An unscrupulous company, for example, might hire an undocumented worker with false papers and then withhold their wages, betting, often correctly, that the worker will avoid reporting the company to authorities due to fear of deportation. If an undocumented worker tries to start a union or otherwise speak out for workers’ rights, the company might suddenly choose to look more closely at the worker’s I-9 form and related documents, abruptly “learning” that the worker was undocumented all along and firing them. Such unscrupulous companies have little to fear under IRCA, but undocumented workers, by contrast, facing losing their livelihoods, not to mention arrest and deportation.

In principle, federal employment and labor laws apply equally to all workers regardless of immigration status. Likewise, the legislative history of IRCA does not show that Congress meant to curtail these rights for undocumented workers. Yet in practice, courts have undercut these rights and used IRCA as justification for doing so. 

For example, firing an undocumented worker for union organizing is not allowed under federal labor law. But, in 2002, the United Stated Supreme Court decided that IRCA prevents undocumented workers from recovering lost wages if their employer fires them for union organizing. As a result, undocumented workers may in principle have the right to form a union, but they are afforded essentially no remedy if their employer retaliates against them. Other courts have extended the Supreme Court’s ruling to justify the denial of other benefits for undocumented workers, such as workers’ compensation. 

These are the rules we still live under today, according to Steve Churchill, an attorney and the co-founder of Fair Work, P.C. According to him, it is common in certain industries, such as construction and agriculture, for companies to “turn a blind eye to obviously fraudulent documents.” If an undocumented worker’s rights are later violated by an unscrupulous company, the worker runs the risk of detention and deportation if they speak up. 

This dynamic can affect an entire industry because an unscrupulous company’s competitors might not want to evade the law by hiring undocumented workers, but under market pressures, they may decide to do so anyway to stay competitive.

Chuck Schumer, then a Representative in Congress and one of the chief architects of IRCA, described the law when it was passed as, “A gamble, a riverboat gamble. There is no guarantee that employer sanctions will work or that amnesty will work.” In hindsight, if IRCA was a gamble, it was one that powerful business interests put money on and won.

But the story does not end there. Our immigration system has evolved since the 1980s, with big business continuing to exert its influence along the way.

Big problems, no real solutions

In 1990, My father immigrated to America from Morocco after marrying my American mother and getting his green card. As soon as he arrived in the U.S., he started looking for work. His first job was with a temp agency, working in factories throughout Michigan and western New York.

My father on the day he received his American citizenship in 1998. Photo provided by Berka Mou.

“When you walk into the agency, they give you some tests to find out how fast you can move your hands, and also some logical questions, which I didn’t understand very well at the time because I didn’t speak much English yet,” he told me. “But they hired me anyways.”

He worked for several years in cardboard factories, coat hanger factories, poultry processing plants, and even for a short stint at the Lifesavers candy factory. I asked him why he thought he was able to find work so easily, even though he likely did not pass the temp agency’s tests. He responded, “There was a worker shortage. They hired me because they needed me.”

While my father was working in the factories, he noted that many of the Americans he worked with did not last long. “They did not feel like it was worth the payment,” he said. “At the time I was getting $4 an hour. It was hard work. A lot of the Americans thought $4 an hour was too low.” By contrast, he and other foreign-born workers without better prospects stuck around.

Congress has failed to do more than tweak our existing immigration system since the passage of IRCA, with corporate interests continuing to influence the system behind the scenes. 

As my father’s story shows, IRCA did not change corporate dependance on foreign-born workers while many companies kept their wages low and working conditions subpar. So, how did the law react next?

My father today in 2026, holding the photo of him on the day he got his citizenship almost thirty years ago. Photo provided by Berka Mou.

In many ways, it did not. American immigration law has grown increasingly dysfunctional over time. Despite constrained legal pathways to come to the United States, immigrant population levels have continued to rise exponentially from about 10 million immigrants in 1960 to over 50 million in 2024, largely due to increased undocumented immigration. 

All the while, Congress has failed to do more than tweak our existing immigration system since the passage of IRCA, with corporate interests continuing to influence the system behind the scenes. 

In 1990, George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which modified the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 by raising the number of immigrant visas issued annually by about 150,000 to 675,000 per year after 1994, which is still the overall cap today. 

During the legislative process, corporate interests again joined forces with civil and immigrant rights organizations to successfully lobby for new and expanded worker visa categories, as well as the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. The TPS program provides temporary protection from removal and provides work authorization for individuals already in the United States whose home country is undergoing conditions like armed conflict that prevent a safe return. 

El Salvador received the first TPS designation in 1990. Over time the program has expanded, with seventeen countries designated for TPS as of the end of the end of 2025.

In 1996, Congress stood poised to pass the most severe and restrictive immigration legislation since the 1920s, largely in response to flaring anti-immigrant sentiments and “tough on crime” rhetoric that conflated undocumented immigration with criminal behavior. The bill as it was initially proposed would have slashed legal immigration by 40 percent. 

Eager to present himself as “tough” on immigration, President Bill Clinton issued a statement embracing the proposal during the legislative process. Yet the final bill that President Clinton would later sign into law, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), contained no such cuts to authorized immigration. 

Why? A broad coalition of powerful business interests, including the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, and nascent Silicon Valley tech companies partnered with advocates as diverse as the ACLU and the Cato Institute to ensure that no cuts occurred. It was a tenuous alliance, but business interests motivated to protect employment-based visas from threat threw their weight behind the effort to soften the bill and succeeded. 

One year later, the business community again successfully lobbied Congress, along with immigrant rights organizations, to relax a provision in IIRIRA that threatened to uproot hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who had applied for legal status before IIRIRA took effect. IIRIRA requires undocumented immigrants to leave the country for three to ten years to apply for lawful status. But under pressure from business lobbyists, who likely did not want the disruptions to the foreign-born workforce that would otherwise ensue, and other groups, Congress grandfathered in anyone who had applied for status before a certain date.

While the business community played an important role in the IIRIRA legislative process and took stances that benefitted immigrant rights in some instances, noting the provisions of IIRIRA that did not mobilize corporations helps to reveal their motives more fully. 

It is possible that for some unscrupulous companies, so long as cheap, easily exploitable workers kept entering the country, the extreme fear those same workers lived under was deemed none of the company’s concern. 

In its final form, IIRIRA took a hardline, zero tolerance approach to unauthorized migration that even Republican politicians criticized not long after its passage. Its provisions made it easier to deport anyone convicted of a crime or anyone apprehended within one hundred miles of the border. It required INS to detain more people before deportation. It also made it harder for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status by extending the length of time necessary to apply and imposing a stricter legal test to qualify. 

It is worth wondering why the business community, though motivated to expand and protect legal immigration avenues, did not take a greater interest in these punitive provisions. Perhaps it was because any talk of mercy or amnesty for undocumented immigrants grew increasingly politically toxic as attitudes towards undocumented immigration soured over time. But perhaps it was also because, despite President Clinton’s assurance that IIRIRA would “crack down on illegal immigration” including “in the workplace,” unauthorized immigration rates continued to climb, to the benefit of the industries dependent on it. It is possible that for some unscrupulous companies, so long as cheap, easily exploitable workers kept entering the country, the extreme fear those same workers lived under was deemed none of the company’s concern. 

In many ways, we continue to live in the world IIRIRA wrought today. Though in the twenty-first century, much would change.

The Rust Belt, Raids, and Reactionism

As the twenty-first century dawned, ushering in a new era of globalization, some argue persuasively that the business community took a less active role in shaping immigration policy. In her book Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization, UCLA Professor Margaret Peters contends that as free trade agreements like NAFTA arose in the 1990s and 2000s, it became easier for large corporations to move their operations across borders or overseas where labor is cheaper. 

The Lifesavers candy factory where my father worked in the 1990s, for example, moved to Canada in 2002, where the company could pay workers three dollars less per hour. 

With access to cheap labor in other countries without costly tariffs, argues Peters, corporations had much less of an incentive to lobby for pro-immigration policies in their home countries. Indeed, her research shows that business lobbying activity on immigration issues declined from the 1990s to 2010. As a result, even though anti-immigrant sentiments have existed in American politics for centuries, anti-immigrant voices seemed to grow louder in politics, especially within the Republican Party. 

Still, some in the business community continued to care deeply about U.S. immigration policy. Industries like construction and hospitality, still reliant on low-wage workers in the United States and unable to outsource, turned increasingly to guest worker programs such as the H-2B visa program to maintain access to low-cost, foreign-born workers. Though companies must technically advertise most H-2B positions to American workers first and must promise to pay H-2B workers the local prevailing wage or better, researchers have found that H-2B workers are still paid less than the average national wage for the same work and wage theft is a chronic problem. 

In both 2001 and 2006, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce testified before Congress about the business community’s desire for expanded guest worker programs. In 2001, the Chamber’s President and CEO argued that America’s expanding economy and the future retirement of the baby boomer generation, notably then at least twenty years away, meant America faced a worker shortage that would “cripple American business.” His solution? More guest workers. In 2006, the Chamber repeated its plea for more guest workers, arguing that “the very limited nature of the country’s current temporary worker programs is inadequate to meet the challenges of the future.”

President George W. Bush was receptive to the Chamber’s concerns. Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce event in 2006, Bush emphasized that temporary worker programs were integral to his vision for future immigration reform. Said Bush, “A temporary-worker program would meet the legitimate needs of American employers, and it would give an honest immigrant a chance to contribute to our economy and, at the same time, provide for their families.” Notably, however, such programs would not give workers a pathway to American citizenship, nor the same protections against workplace abuse, practically speaking, as those enjoyed by American citizens.

However, the immigration reform that Bush dreamed of never materialized. So instead, the Bush administration decided to conduct high-profile, militarized immigration raids to appease anti-immigrant sentiment in the Republican Party and to project an aggressive image on immigration enforcement. Such raids terrorized immigrant communities. But even in infamous raids like the Postville, IA raid, in which nearly 400 undocumented workers were arrested, the owners of the offending companies were rarely held accountable. 

President Barack Obama shifted away from the militarized raids of the Bush-era, though his administration continued to conduct so-called “silent raids” to aggressively enforce IRCA. In such raids, ICE audited I-9 records from afar and forced companies to fire undocumented workers en masse.

But President Obama’s focus on enforcing existing immigration law certainly did not dampen corporate interest in pressing for immigration policy change. In 2013, Congress came close to passing an immigration reform bill. In the throes of the Senate’s debate, Business Roundtable publicly prodded Congress—albeit ultimately unsuccessfully—to keep up its momentum and pass the bill. The legislation would have created a new “W” guest worker program, explicitly backed by business interests, capable of expanding over time based on workforce needs, as opposed to the H-2B program, which is capped at 66,000 visas per year. Though the bill passed in the Senate, it failed in the House due to opposition from a faction of Republican Representatives opposed to any increased immigration at all.

President Barack Obama drops by a meeting of the Business Roundtable’s CEO Committee in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjoining the White House in 2013. Official White House photo in the public domain.

Though anti-immigrant sentiments were strong enough in Republican Party politics to overpower the business lobby in 2013, they would soon be turbocharged by the entry of Donald Trump into politics, leading corporations to step up their defensive game.

The Anti-Immigration Trump vs. The Pro-Business Trump: Who will win?

In 2016, Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement rose to power, in part on the promise to “build a wall” on the United States’s southern border. President Trump has often claimed that immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented, are to blame for America’s ills.

Rather than casting the blame on corporations for diminishing union power, exploiting undocumented workers, moving manufacturing jobs overseas, and using every tool in their tool kit to suppress wages, Trump has claimed falsely that undocumented immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans. At a rally in 2024, Trump told the crowd, “Last month, American-born workers lost 1.3 million jobs. Meanwhile, the migrants picked up 630,000 jobs, plus another seven or eight thousand jobs, at least”

“To save your jobs,” he added, “You must vote for Trump.”

The Statute of Liberty amid darkening skies. Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash. Photo free to use under the Unsplash license.

Now in his second term, Trump has ramped up immigration raids and has sought to make examples of various Democrat-leaning cities, like Minneapolis, making corporations increasingly nervous in the process. Just after the killing of protestor Alex Pretti by immigration enforcement officials in Minneapolis this year, more than sixty CEOs of Minnesota-based companies issued a letter through the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce urging “an immediate deescalation of tensions.”

Writ large, the business community has been using its power to quietly influence President Trump’s thinking on immigration during his second term. Branding their campaign “Make America Wealthy Again,” business lobbyists describe imparting the message to Trump administration officials and Congressional Republicans that mass deportations would cripple the economy and worsen inflation. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in particular has been actively, if gingerly, pressing lawmakers and Trump officials to avoid immigration enforcement that could hurt businesses.

“I heard very little about large raids, if any. And I don’t think that that is a coincidence. I think that was part of their lobbying.”

In the meatpacking industry today, for instance, some estimate that thirty to fifty percent of all workers are undocumented. When Trump was re-elected in 2024, meatpacking corporations began to sound the alarm. 

Yet interestingly, Bouhabib says she has heard of few if any raids affecting these companies since Trump returned to office. 

“I heard very little about large raids, if any. And I don’t think that that is a coincidence. I think that was part of their lobbying.”

Where do we go from here?

In today’s political environment, it is easy to feel like there are no good options, especially when it comes to immigration policy. On one hand, the Republican Party led by President Trump argues with not-so-subtle xenophobic undertones to expel as many immigrants as possible and turn the clock back to the 1950s. On the other hand, many Democrats have been eager to compromise with more business-focused Republicans and corporate lobbyists that are interested in immigration policy primary for its potential to increase access to state-sanctioned sources of cheap labor.

In a 2021 interview with Immigration Law & Justice New York, Senator Chuck Schumer mentioned that his commitment to immigration reform stems not just from his concern for humanitarian relief and social justice, but because anti-immigrant policies and enforcement reduce the number of immigrants available to fill essential jobs.

Similarly, Congressional Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee, including big names like Amy Klobuchar and Mark Kelly, released a statement in 2024 in which they asserted that while undocumented immigrants make up a relatively small share of the overall labor force, “They grow, pick, and process Americans’ food; build homes in communities across the country; and provide in-home care to seniors and others.” Without immigrant labor, they noted, these industries would face labor shortages. 

Of course, Democrats are right that the solution is not to acquiesce to President Trump’s vision of mass deportations. And comprehensive immigration reform is desperately needed to bring vulnerable undocumented workers out of the shadows of our economy. But Democrats should think more carefully about who benefits from the economic arguments for certain immigration policies. Is it the vulnerable, low-wage foreign-born worker? Or is it the massive corporation, looking to fill “essential” jobs without raising wages to match the true value of the work?

A perfect illustration of the business community’s continued influence over immigration policy is the bipartisan immigration reform bill currently pending before Congress, the Dignity Act of 2025. The bill would further increase immigration enforcement spending in exchange for a path to a renewable, seven-year legal status for undocumented immigrants who have been in the country since 2020 and who pay $7,000 in fines.

Unlike the recipients of “Reagan Amnesty” in the 1980s, the recipients of lawful status under the Dignity Act would have no pathway to American citizenship. They could only ever work for Americans, not be American citizens themselves. Who are some of the bill’s top supporters? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, of course. The U.S. Chamber states that the bill “addresses critical workforce needs for businesses,” while Business Roundtable notes, that the bill would take steps to “address workforce shortages.”

Of course, any future immigration reform law will have to be a compromise between the many, sometimes diametrically opposed forces invested in immigration politics. As a result, it is never going to be perfect. 

But going forward, Democrats who genuinely care about the well-being of immigrant workers should be more skeptical of pro-business interests in the immigration reform debate. These interests advocate for a dark status quo to which Americans have grown desensitized over time where foreign-born workers prop up our economy, often at the cost of their rights and dignity. 

Returning to Aboulkhassim Issakh’s story, he no longer works at Amazon. While he worked there, he was on the overnight shift, scanning items and placing them into bins for twelve hours at a time. Many of his co-workers were also recent immigrants or refugees. None of them ever had a chance to sit down during their shifts. One night, after working at the company for about six months, the machine Issakh was using malfunctioned, and he did not yet speak enough English to explain what had happened. His American-born manager came over and began screaming. She cursed at him, called him names, and blamed him for the malfunction. He was stunned. He had never seen her do this to the few Americans-born workers on his shift. He changed his position in the warehouse to get away from her. Soon after, he left the company, seeking better working conditions as a home health aide.

We cannot, and should not, abide by an immigration system that lets companies like Amazon profit at the expense of a workforce that has little choice but to accept stagnating wages and poor conditions long after many American-born workers have moved on. Low-wage, foreign-born workers deserve pay and conditions that American-born workers would freely accept too. 

In the words of the AFL-CIO, “The only way to stop the race to the bottom in wages and standards is for working people of all races, religions, and immigration status to stand together and demand an end to policies that put profits over people.”