If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater.
More than a decade after he first got deported, Marco was staring into the United States from a bank of the Rio Grande. Across the turgid river he could see a tangle of mesquite and huisache trees in the town of Eagle Pass. U.S. Border Patrol agents milled about, but Marco felt undaunted. “I know it wasn’t the legal way,” he told me recently, “but I was about to fulfill my dream of getting to be in this great country.”
Marco (a pseudonym) had spent a year traveling north from his home, in Honduras, stopping to work construction jobs along the way to save money for bus tickets. Worried about getting kidnapped and held for ransom, or killed, by cartel members, he had plotted how to avoid gang turf, researching the least treacherous routes through Mexico. Instead of heading to a migration hub such as Juárez or Tijuana, he aimed for Piedras Negras, a smaller town across the river from Eagle Pass where, he had heard, criminal gangs were less active.
Unfortunately another danger lurks on this stretch of the border—the Rio Grande itself. Here the steel-gray river flows deep and fast, over sunken trees and hidden rocky depths. Hundreds of migrants have drowned in these waters in recent years. Marco, a broad-shouldered 34-year-old, knew how to swim, but two of the four who had traveled north with him did not, and for a couple of days in October 2021 they walked back and forth along the banks of the river, looking for the safest place to cross. On their third day of searching, a man wearing a black ski mask and holding a M14 rifle emerged from the bushes behind them.
“Who are you people?” the man asked. “Who are you with?”
Marco didn’t know if the man worked for a cartel or if he was a freelance thug. The group members explained that they were migrants. “Wait here,” the masked man said without identifying himself. He turned and headed back toward Piedras Negras. Marco felt dread pooling in his stomach. As soon as the man was out of sight, Marco and his four friends ran into the river. “Those guys didn’t know how to swim,” Marco recalled. “But damn, they learned pretty quick after that.”
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None of this had been part of Marco’s original plan. When he was first deported from the U.S., in 2010, he had tried to make peace with life back in Honduras. Driving a bus in the industrial city of San Pedro Sula, he earned less than a tenth of what he could make working at construction sites in the U.S., but he got by. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, changed everything. As the virus cratered the economy, Honduran gangs began pushing for higher impuestos de guerra,“war taxes,” from residents. When Marco got an eerily specific death threat, he left home, “basically in the middle of the night.” At first he tried to find work in southern Mexico, but his Honduran accent made him a target for gangs. Eventually he decided to head back north, where American employers hungered for manual laborers. He believed he could easily find a job again. When I asked him if the U.S. immigration officers he spotted across the river frightened him, he told me, “I didn’t even think about that. Mexico is what really scared me.”
After the men struggled to the other side of the river, the Border Patrol appeared almost immediately and shouted at them to freeze. The five men sprinted away. Agents ran down three, but Marco and one friend, another Honduran, managed to elude them. They climbed a hillside and hid, lying belly-down in the dirt. They stayed there for 24 hours, with no food and just two bottles of water, but they had a plan.
At Eagle Pass, Union Pacific freight trains haul cargo from Mexico into the United States. Texas is engaged in a historic building boom, erecting hundreds of thousands of new structures every year. Trains run day and night, carrying gypsum for wallboard and cement for driveways and foundations. In recent years, the same trains have also carried the workers who will build new houses, offices, and shops.
As the trains pass the border, they stop at a portal, where each car is inspected for contraband and stowaways. Migrants have found a simple work-around. They hike past these search points and then run to board the cars as they pull out. Thousands have made their way north into Texas this way, certain that if they make it, they can find well-paid construction jobs.
Marco and his friend finally heard a train ease across the border bridge, pause at the inspection point, and then lurch forward. The two men popped up and broke into a sprint. They lunged at the passing cars, grabbing on to any handhold they could. Marco felt the train’s acceleration trying to pull him under its wheels.
Yet again he was risking life and limb to get back to the States. He and his friend were far from the only ones.
Marco arrived in Piedras Negras just as the scrub-covered lands between Del Rio and Eagle Pass underwent a massive shift. The old-time ranchers in these parts tell stories from the nineties of occasionally running into migrants walking through the brush. The travelers would show up every few months. Some locals would offer them water and then point them toward the nearest road.
At the end of the first year of COVID-19, however, ranchers began regularly stumbling upon groups of several migrants crossing their property. Three years ago, illegal immigration approached record highs across the entire southern U.S. border, from the Pacific to the Gulf. Perhaps no place was as overwhelmed as the stretch the Border Patrol calls the Del Rio sector, which includes 47 Texas counties. By 2022—just months after Marco splashed across the river—the once sleepy region had become home to the most trafficked stretch of the frontier. Border Patrol agents encountered almost half a million migrants here in the 2022 fiscal year, compared with just 57,269 in the fiscal year before the pandemic.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the extent of the humanitarian crisis that ensued. The Border Patrol couldn’t handle the numbers and began rapidly processing migrants and releasing them at local bus stops with vague instructions about appearing in courts; those migrants slept on gas station curbs and benches as shelters quickly exceeded capacity. Along the Rio Grande, authorities found a record number of drowned migrants, washed up beside downed tree limbs and makeshift rafts. They found others who had suffocated in train cars and commercial trucks that smugglers had locked them into. Marco was lucky not to be among those.
He and his friend managed to pull themselves clear of the train wheels and into an open-top carriage, gritty from the industrial cargo it normally carried. For a while the two men hid. But as they left the outskirts of Eagle Pass, Marco decided to climb up and sit on the top edge of the car. “I wanted to see the scenery,” he recalled recently, laughing at himself. He was finally back in Texas.
As the train crossed into Kinney County, Marco gazed at the rolling hills. He felt a mix of emotions. He had left his aging mother behind in Honduras and didn’t know when, or if, he’d see her again. In the U.S., however, he expected to earn enough to send her the money she needed for health care and other bills. Driving a bus in San Pedro Sula, Marco made 8,000 lempiras—about $325—a month. Working just a week on a construction site in the States, he could make $1,120. He could change his mother’s life.
After a while Marco turned and stared toward the locomotive pulling him steadily north. In the distance, he saw a cavalcade of black SUVs and ATVs driven by Texas state troopers and National Guardsmen. They were part of Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star.
In 2021, to address what he decried as the federal government’s “open border policies,” the governor fashioned the Department of Public Safety and National Guard into his own border patrol, which he loudly trumpeted as a new deterrent for migrants thinking about crossing into Texas. Abbott has deployed thousands of police and troops to border counties. They do not have authority to enforce U.S. immigration law, but they can arrest migrants such as Marco for trespassing on private property. In the past four years, they’ve helped detain hundreds of thousands, and the state reports it has made more than 43,000 criminal arrests.
The operation has failed to make a dent in the metrics that matter most. The number of border crossings remained high in the first years of the program and never meaningfully decreased until around the time migration across the entire U.S. border dipped in summer 2024—after the Biden administration issued new restrictions on asylum and pressured Mexico to increase its immigration enforcement. In a 2023 analysis by The Wall Street Journal, the counties that participated most actively in Operation Lone Star during its first two years saw the greatest increase in the number of border crossers over that period.
This could have been predicted. For more than a century the threat of arrest—whether by Border Patrol agents in green uniforms or Texas state cops in white Stetsons—has not stopped undocumented workers from moving north. Recently Latin American migrants have kept coming, for the same reason millions of Scots, Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Russians first arrived at Ellis Island. The U.S. economy—the most powerful engine of wealth in human history—has been built on successive waves of foreign-born workers and entrepreneurs. The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.
One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.
Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.
The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally. In a survey conducted this September by another trade group, 77 percent of construction firms with job openings, and 74 percent of those in Texas, reported that they were struggling to fill them.
The obvious economic solution for a tight labor market is to raise wages. But here some in the construction industry are hobbled by long-entrenched attitudes. Since at least the eighties, when Ronald Reagan led a crackdown on unions, firms have become addicted to cheap undocumented labor. Blue-collar wages had, for decades, failed to keep up with inflation, though that trend started to shift in 2020.
But the industry also faces a labor-force problem it cannot address quickly simply by raising pay. For two decades, the number of U.S.-born workers entering the construction trade has nosedived. Even if tomorrow all companies raised wages high enough to lure Texans away from their laptop jobs, it could take years of training to condition these newcomers to the rigors of building.
Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber. Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings. So an inviolable relationship has developed between new construction and migrants: If you build, they will come.
Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.
Today, Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants, according to a Pew Research Center study of 2022 census data. No industry in the state employs a greater number of unauthorized workers than construction, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute found. Since 2000, Texas’s population has grown by around 10 million, with many new arrivals chasing the “Texas Miracle”—a fast-growing economy that’s the envy of other states. Construction workers lacking legal status have laid the foundations for this miracle. They erected the work camps housing pipe fitters and roughnecks out in the oil fields. They rebuilt Houston after Hurricane Harvey. And they built thousands of apartment complexes and homes, helping Texas avoid the worst of the affordable-housing shortage that is crippling other states.
In a Texas prison, Marco would meet many others drawn to the U.S. by the construction boom.
Shortly after Marco felt his train slow to a stop, he slid back down into the car. “It’s the cops,” he shouted over the sound of the locomotive. He watched as his friend curled into a fetal position. Law enforcement officers banged open the railcar ahead of theirs and arrested other migrants. Marco was huddling at the edge of his open-topped car, looking up at the sky, when he saw a state trooper in a bulletproof vest looking down at him. “Well, they caught us,” Marco called to his friend.
“How do you know?” his friend asked, his voice muffled; his head was still buried in his arms.
“ Because I’m looking at one of them right now,” Marco replied.
Police officers handcuffed Marco and his friend and sat them along the edge of the tracks with four other migrants. In clumsy Spanish, one of the cops told them that they were under arrest, charged with misdemeanor trespassing. He added that a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle was on the way. After some time, a federal agent pulled up in a white-and-green truck. She was Hispanic, and Marco says she told the men in Spanish: “Listen, don’t be mad at me, I’m just doing my job.” She said she understood that they were leaving behind danger and corruption in their home countries; she knew they had come to work. But they had broken the law. “Tell your friends and family not to cross here,” she said. “Because Texas is arresting people for trespassing.” Marco knew that even if he did tell the friends he had met in southern Mexico, it wouldn’t make a difference. They would cross anyway.
Before Operation Lone Star, a misdemeanor trespassing charge did not typically involve time in a Texas prison. But Marco spent a few months in the Dolph Briscoe Unit, south of San Antonio, before being transferred to the Segovia Unit, near McAllen, both of which had been converted to hold migrants. He couldn’t afford bail, and the local courts were backed up with charges filed under the operation. In spring 2022, Texas transferred Marco to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, where he officially requested asylum. He was released with a court date and traveled to New Jersey, where he had family friends. A month later at his hearing, he stood in an empty courtroom before a judge. His pro bono immigration lawyer appeared via video. The proceeding moved quickly. The judge denied his claim.
But then something surprising happened. In Marco’s telling, the judge stood up and began to leave the room. No one came in to detain Marco. “Should I wait here?” he asked her as she opened the door. “No, you can go,” she said over her shoulder. Confused, he simply walked out of the courthouse and returned to his lodgings, where he started looking for a job.
Eventually, Marco got in touch with a Honduran he had met in jail. The man told him that he knew someone in Houston who was hiring. Marco worked for a time for that man painting water towers in Arkansas and Wyoming. About a year and a half ago he landed in Georgia, where he was on an asbestos-removal team. Now he picks up day jobs in construction and landscaping.
A well-established gray economy for undocumented workers flourishes in Texas and across the country. At Mexican groceries, locals can spot a newcomer, and they may help set him or her up with a gig. (“They’ll say, ‘Hi, are you new here? Are you looking for work?’ ” Marco explained.) If a migrant strikes out there, they can head to la esquina, a corner in many cities where day laborers congregate, to be picked up by landscapers and construction contractors in pickup trucks.
In 2021 researchers with the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank, looked at census data and estimated that 23 percent of those they classified as construction laborers nationwide were undocumented. The percentages were higher for specific trades—for instance, 38 percent of drywall installers. Those numbers are likely much higher in Texas, which for years has led the country in new building. A decade ago, a Texas labor-advocacy group called the Workers Defense Project surveyed 1,194 workers across sites in Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, and San Antonio. Fifty percent reported that they were undocumented.
When I asked Marco how many of the workers he meets on jobs don’t have legal status, he laughed at me. “Everyone, man—even my boss is undocumented.”
Say the name Stan Marek around leaders in the Texas construction industry, and you’ll get their attention. Marek serves as the CEO of one of the largest commercial specialty contractors in the region. It was founded by his father and uncles, the sons of Czech immigrants who arrived in Texas with, as Marek tells it, just one asset: skill in carpentry. But that’s not the only reason why Marek’s name raises eyebrows. Most construction CEOs keep quiet about their industry’s reliance on undocumented labor. Marek won’t shut up about it. In speeches, a book called Deconstructed, a video series, and opinion articles (including one in Texas Monthly), he has blown the whistle. This March he wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle arguing that the border surge would not stop, because “the magnetic pull of jobs is so strong.” He’s spent a hefty chunk of his fortune lobbying for immigration reform—including a revamped visa system that would let workers already on job sites across the state get legal guest-worker status in return for submitting to a background check and paying taxes. His proposal would require that all immigrant workers be issued tamper-proof ID cards and be listed in a national registry, which employers would be required to check before they hired someone.
In February, I met Marek in Houston, in the ornate Mediterranean Revival building that hosts the Baker Institute, the public policy center on Rice University’s campus that became something of a retirement home for officials from the first Bush administration. Marek, a wiry 77-year-old with a firm handshake and a charismatic drawl, was wearing a blue sport coat and a tailored shirt. Above his cuff links, his initials were monogrammed in red. During our conversation, he casually pointed upward: “We built this interior,” he said, referring to his company. Intricate crown molding lined the edges of the ceiling, and a smoky-glass chandelier hung over our heads.
Marek said he has never knowingly hired undocumented workers. But he told me how some construction companies have used them. Finding laborers who want to do the work and have the proper identification is a persistent struggle.
Some contractors claim they can’t raise workers’ wages without passing on the cost to consumers. We should be suspicious of that argument. In recent years, many companies have shown that they can pay more to employees even if it eats into their profits. But there’s reason to believe that raising wages isn’t enough to fix current vacancies. Marek said his company has improved pay in the past four years but noted that the labor force hasn’t increased in proportion. Employers such as him are fighting against two global trends that transcend their industry.
The first: Fewer and fewer Americans have been willing to work with their hands. Across two decades, the rate of American-born workers entering manual trades has plummeted. In 2017 the National Association of Home Builders polled 2,001 young adults, asking them what careers they wanted to go into. Of the respondents who told the pollsters they were “undecided,” 63 percent reported that there was “no or little chance they would join the trades, regardless of pay.”
A critical shortage of construction workers is simultaneously hobbling Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Many nations—in particular those in Europe, where trade unions remain strong—offer attractive salaries to blue-collar workers. But the children of accountants and schoolteachers don’t seem to want to lay bricks, even if laying bricks were to pay better than accounting and teaching.
The supply of blue-collar workers in the U.S. is also crimped by the country’s falling birth rate. In 1970 the median age in the U.S. was 28; today, as the youngest baby boomers approach retirement, it’s 39. This presents a huge problem for construction. Building, for the most part, is a job for the young—hauling joists and swinging hammers takes a toll on the body. Yet the average age of those in the field has risen faster than that of workers in other industries. Today, one of every five construction workers in the U.S. is 55 or older. As they retire, they’re leaving a huge hole.
“That’s the fundamental constraint that we have to face up to: We just don’t have enough people,” said Brent Orrell, an expert on workforce development at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He told me he believes that what we’re seeing in the construction industry is just a harbinger of a broader labor shortage as our population ages. He cautioned that the U.S. fertility rate could get so low that the only practical source of growth in our population will be from immigration, whether legal or illegal.
The current system for granting legal residency in the U.S., and thus the right to work here, heavily prioritizes family members of U.S. citizens. Relatively few green cards are given to workers not related to one. In 2021, according to a New York Times analysis, 24 million foreigners officially applied to come work in the U.S.; just 200,000 were admitted. That’s a pittance compared with the reported need. In January the Associated Builders and Contractors estimated that construction alone faced a shortage of 501,000 workers.
The unique composition of the construction industry makes it easier to hire undocumented workers. A framing crew doesn’t work like, say, a restaurant staff, where the same employees show up at the same place each day. Contractors aren’t building the same kind of structure, at the same size, at the same speed every day of the year, so their workforces are constantly in flux. Every time a project needs laborers with more specialized skills, such as plumbing and electrical know-how, general contractors hire subcontractors. Today home builders subcontract an average of 84 percent of the project’s cost. Most Americans hire one general contractor to build a house. But by the time they move in, an average of 24 subcontractors have worked on the site.
Contract labor is far less regulated than full-time employment. While companies are prohibited from hiring independent contractors they know to be unauthorized, they are not required to verify that those contractors are legally eligible to work. And even if a business asks prospective employees for their documents, those are easy to fudge. In some Texas cities, migrants can buy cards bearing fraudulent Social Security numbers at flea markets for $250 or less. Others try an even simpler fix: They give their employers a random string of nine numbers and hope no one checks their validity.
This means that undocumented immigrants are paying billions in taxes to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid without qualifying for any of the benefits. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., estimates that in 2022, undocumented workers in Texas alone paid $4.9 billion in taxes—a sum that would increase to $5.3 billion if these workers were granted legal status.
It’s not just contractors skimming profits from undocumented immigrants’ labor. All U.S. citizens are getting a cut.
I ’ve spent years reporting on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, meeting migrants headed north. For most of that time, it seemed that the bustle of law enforcement activity at the frontier—with all its razor wire, Border Patrol agents, and Operation Lone Star SUVs—was not only failing to achieve its stated goal but also operating at odds with the state’s economic needs. We are pouring billions of dollars into arresting and jailing potential new Texans whom businesses from McAllen to Dallas are eager to hire.
But on one recent evening, as the sun set over the scrublands north of Eagle Pass, I could sense a great invisible hand above the Rio Grande. While the militarized border fails to stop many hopeful migrants from journeying north, it does something else to them. It roughs them up. It puts them in debt. It renders them vulnerable. It makes them scared to ask the government to protect their rights. The border, then, is a sort of anti-union. It turns each migrant into a worker who is boxed in and alone, quiet and open to exploitation. In that way, our immigration policy keeps the cost of construction, consumer goods, and groceries low for Texans and other Americans.
In Dallas, Veronica Carrasco organizes laborers through the Workers Defense Project. This summer she took a break from her job painting a home to sit in her car and join a video call with me. I could see paint stains on her shirt. She was working inside a new apartment building, and the air conditioning wasn’t yet fully functional, so she blasted the air in her car as we talked.
Like hundreds of thousands of construction workers in the state, Carrasco is undocumented. (She agreed to be identified as such to signal to others not to be afraid.) Fourteen years ago, she left Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital, without much of a plan. “I was a nomad then,” she said. “I was very independent—maybe too independent.” In Reynosa, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Carrasco learned a dangerous lesson: The gangs don’t like migrants crossing the border without their permission—or without paying their toll. A mula, one of the local cartel’s professional smugglers, spotted her as soon as she got into the city. That meant that when Carrasco eventually crossed the Rio Grande in a tiny boat, she arrived in the U.S. with debt to pay off. Luckily for her, the smuggler had charged her only a few hundred dollars to get her across the river. Other migrants pay $8,000 to $15,000 for the whole trip northward.
For many who make it to the U.S., the collateral on this debt is precious: their loved ones. Some smugglers will threaten to torture and kill migrants’ family members back in their home countries. The smugglers’ demands for consistent payments create a tremendous pressure on migrants to work any job they can—and employers in Texas are eager to bring them on board. Arriving in Houston, Carrasco met a friend who showed her a number of groups on Facebook where employers recruit undocumented workers. She was shocked by how easy it was; there were dozens of listings. She appreciated the freedom it gave her, the options of places she could go. However, she quickly learned that not everyone offering work was proposing a fair deal.
While she’s found steady work these days, Carrasco still occasionally searches for jobs on the Facebook groups, and in the past couple of years she’s noticed a stark change in the listings. “It’s very easy to see that, these days, it’s rare for companies to be looking for workers; now it’s contratistas,” she said. Some of these posts are from a particular type of contratista (“contractor”), who essentially offers the services of a staffing agency, promising to connect workers with jobs. Carrasco has responded to these kinds of offers twice in the past, when she was struggling to find work. “This is a test job,” one of them told her after a day of labor. Carrasco would toil for a day or a week, and then her work would be evaluated before she got hired full time. It appears to have been a dishonest scheme. What had likely happened is that an actual construction contractor had paid a contratista for temporary laborers, and that contratista had sent Carrasco. When Carrasco finished the job, the scammer kept her wage—he told her she hadn’t passed the work “test.”
“It’s an injustice. It’s akin to slavery,” Carrasco said.
In the boardrooms of Texas’s largest construction contractors, CEOs have noticed that job sites are increasingly getting staffed by dedicated agencies, or what Marek calls “labor brokers.” These brokers handle every part of the hiring. They recruit the workers, often through social media, and set up payroll. The workers just show up, signed, sealed, delivered. “It all looks legitimate on the surface,” Marek said. And sometimes it is. Some labor brokers recruit workers legally and fairly. But it’s an open secret among general contractors that many brokers are hiring undocumented workers.
Some do so deliberately. In 2016, for example, Homeland Security Investigations agents busted a North Texas construction company, Speed Fab-Crete, for hiring unauthorized immigrants: The Feds found that 43 of the builder’s 106 employees lacked legal status. Speed Fab agreed to a settlement with the government, promising to fire the unauthorized laborers and hire new ones legally. The company then approached a staffing agency, Take Charge Staffing, to help fill the holes in its workforce. According to a subsequent announcement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, owners at Take Charge Staffing and Speed Fab concocted a scheme to disguise the undocumented immigrants, after six months of struggling to find eligible workers. On a Friday, Speed Fab fired 39 of its undocumented workers but sent 23 of them to Take Charge, where they were hired and assigned to their former company. They were back to work at a Speed Fab worksite the following Monday.
The feds eventually caught on. In 2020 the owners of the two companies pleaded guilty. Speed Fab agreed to pay the government $3 million, and culpable leaders in both companies were fined $69,000 each, with some spending time in prison.
Marek noted that most companies aren’t as flagrantly flouting the law but that there’s a culture of looking the other way. Even when companies try to be scrupulous, labor brokers can show up with all the right documents. Determining the legitimacy of those papers would take a resource-intensive investigation, and many general contractors reason that that is the government’s job.
But the government isn’t regularly enforcing the law either.
Long before he began taking on crooked labor brokers and long before he learned how deeply they had integrated into the economy, Jeoff Williams worked as a narcotics officer for the Texas Department of Public Safety. He started his career as a clean-cut highway patrolman, but when he first got stationed in Garland, northwest of Dallas, he grew his beard down near his stomach, ZZ Top style, and procured a chain for his wallet. He wanted to blend in with the drug traffickers he was investigating. In the mid-2010s, his higher-ups at DPS convened a meeting about starting the agency’s first dedicated human trafficking squad. Williams, who had risen through the ranks to lieutenant, raised his hand.
Like most such units, the new DPS team focused primarily on sex trafficking. Most of the agents had narcotics backgrounds and were unsure how to start. They began by working the phones. Williams—who today is clean-shaven and bald as a cue ball—said that before working his first cases, he imagined his team would be tracking down small-scale operations. After identifying one known pimp in Dallas, however, he was stunned by what they discovered. The squad pulled the man’s phone records and began collecting details on everyone he was calling, trying to map out his local network. But the network wasn’t local. The pimp’s contact in Houston was dialing Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, as well as Atlanta; Houston; Jackson, Mississippi; and Memphis, Tennessee. The agents had—by accident, Williams said—discovered a transnational human trafficking organization. Women and teenagers in Central American and southern Mexico were being recruited for nannying and housekeeping positions that didn’t exist.
Williams eventually came to understand that many migrants were trafficked not for sex but to work other jobs. The Department of Homeland Security says 80 percent of trafficking victims today are coerced into forced labor. The work ranges from blatant slavery and indentured servitude to loan sharking. “If people cross the border with debt [to a smuggler], and they don’t have the money to pay it off, well, they’ve got to pay it off another way,” Williams said. “If you’re a young, attractive girl, they gotta go work in a massage parlor. If they’re not, if they’re a, you know, twenty-two-year-old guy, well then you gotta go to Nashville, Tennessee, and lay concrete.”
Williams told me that few cops—at any level of government—are going after these kinds of labor smugglers. He cited a lack of resources and personnel. “I mean, if I had an agent who understood the multiple tiers of the construction industry, and he wanted to work these kinds of cases and he told me, ‘Hey, boss, I got this case—these workers aren’t getting paid properly for hanging sheetrock,’ I would tell him: ‘Look, here’s a case of a little girl who is getting raped twelve times a day,’ ” Williams said. At any given time, Williams could reach into his case files and find multiple ongoing investigations into the sex trafficking of minors. He wasn’t going to prioritize any other case over that.
Williams also explained that labor-broker cases—even forced labor cases—are much harder for authorities to prosecute than sex trafficking. “When a guy is paying off debt hanging sheetrock, and he even says he’s happy because they’ve got him a place to sleep, it’s harder to prove the crime.”
In 2017, after Donald Trump first moved into the White House, his acting ICE chief, Thomas Homan, declared that he intended to increase worksite enforcement by “four hundred percent.” He largely succeeded. By the end of 2018 ICE had quadrupled investigations of undocumented workers, and agents had arrested seven times as many immigrants in workforce raids compared with the year before. But one metric stayed virtually static: the number of managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants. In 2019 the Associated Press reported that convictions of managers who hired workers without legal status had even declined.
Williams made an argument I heard from Marek and others: that the government doesn’t have an interest in shutting down construction projects, which is what would happen if it required contractors to hire only legal workers. Of all the immigration-related crimes to prosecute, why go after those building the houses the country so badly needs?
Last year Williams, who had worked his way up to deputy director in Dallas, started thinking about what he would do after he retired from DPS. One day he got a call from an FBI agent named Matthew DeSarno, who had been the special agent in charge of the Dallas office. The two had become friendly while working some brutal assignments together, including responding on the scene of an active shooter at a church in White Settlement, around Christmas 2019. DeSarno had retired from the FBI in 2022, and he told Williams that he had a job waiting for him at his new company, Verfico.
Verfico’s central service is to protect companies from unscrupulous labor brokers and subcontractors. DeSarno’s brother owns Rock Spring Contracting, a drywall installer in the D.C. area from which the idea for the software developed. In 2019 the company, which used a variety of subcontractors to complete its projects, faced a legal crisis: the D.C. attorney general investigated it and determined that it had misclassified 75 drywall laborers as independent contractors. Rock Spring managers pored over all their payroll data and realized that they had an incomplete picture of the laborers their subcontractors were using—and, crucially, of how much the subcontractors were paying those workers.
This was the subcontractor model in action: Accountability had been buried under layers of contracts, like a Russian nesting doll. Eventually Rock Spring settled with the attorney general, agreeing to pay $57,000 in restitution to workers and $225,000 in penalties. The company maintained that the subcontractor, not Rock Spring, was the party at fault. Still, Rock Spring’s leaders determined they needed to create a way to keep track of all those hired on their projects. The suite of software that became Verfico was born.
A general contractor will have subcontractors use Verfico to upload all their workers’ contracts, as well as records of how much the laborers are being paid each day. On the job sites, laborers punch into work by scanning a QR code on their phones, which creates a record on the platform of who is present at a site on any given day. When Rock Spring began using an early version of Verfico, one of the company’s subcontractors quit, but the rest agreed to participate.
In 2023 Williams came on board as the chief revenue officer. This summer I listened as he and DeSarno gave their standard pitch for the company. “The immigration challenge is nuanced and big, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of incentive for policymakers to actually solve it,” DeSarno said. “But part of the challenge that can actually be solved is the wage theft part.” He said many large contractors have a financial interest in preventing worker exploitation because it creates a serious liability if they’re sued. “I don’t think the [largest construction companies] of the world are intentionally trying to exploit undocumented workers,” DeSarno argued. “Those workers who are undocumented who are working for companies that are two, three, or four [subcontracting] levels below them.”
Williams said when subcontractors use Verfico software, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not using undocumented laborers. It means they’ve gotten records for those they hire: legitimate 1099s or maybe less-than-
legitimate Social Security cards. Verfico also guarantees that workers are getting paid correct wages, without anyone siphoning off the top. In Williams and DeSarno’s pitch, this is a win-win. Today more than seven thousand laborers use the software, and the company’s client list includes multiple firms with more than $1 billion each in revenue, as well as the City of Grand Prairie, in North Texas.
Williams expressed doubt that the federal government, under current laws, could replicate what his company does. He offered an economics lesson he had learned going after drug dealers and human traffickers: As long as there is demand—for drugs, for sex—suppliers will rise up to meet that demand. The same thing, he said, holds for the high demand for labor in the U.S. The former lawman said, “You cannot arrest your way out of this problem.”
Marco has long understood that any day might be his last in the U.S. The first time he got deported was after a routine stop in Portland, Oregon. But he’s starting to feel more worried. He’s living in Georgia with his brother, who’s a painter, and his two young nieces. In the mornings, he heads to a corner outside a gas station to take a day gig. In the evenings he follows the news on his phone. He told me that on the job sites each day, the workers are talking about the prospect of Donald Trump’s returning to office. “There’s a lot of fear,” Marco said.
At the Republican National Convention, in July, posters were distributed across the arena in Milwaukee. They read, “MASS DEPORTATION NOW.” Delegates waved the banners and shouted as Republican dignitaries, including Senator Ted Cruz, gave speeches decrying “an invasion” on the southern border under Joe Biden. As he did with “Build the Wall” in 2016, Trump has made “Mass Deportation Now” one of the central slogans of his campaign, promising to deport more than 10 million undocumented immigrants if he wins back the White House.
Biden has directed ICE to prioritize the arrest and deportation of what experts describe as “the worst of the worst.” The agency pursues drug dealers, human traffickers, and terrorists first. So for now, Marco, who has no criminal record besides the trespassing conviction, isn’t a primary target. A mass deportation program, however, would almost certainly make him one: Marco, like about a million immigrants, remains in the country despite an open removal order. He told me he has a plan if Trump takes office. He’ll go to work in the mornings and then straight home after his shift. He’ll leave the house only to grab groceries down the street.
If he were to be arrested, his family would be split apart; like 70 percent of undocumented immigrants, he lives in a mixed-status house, where some relatives have citizenship or green cards and some have neither. If ICE came for his worksite, he estimates that as many as 80 percent of the crew members would be gone. Whatever jobs they were working on would grind to a halt.
Trump has said a mass deportation program would benefit the American worker by freeing up jobs and raising wages. That’s not a new claim. In 1849, miners sifting for gold in California’s High Sierra would glare at the Chinese migrants panning upstream. When the rush abated, nativists in San Francisco blamed Chinese immigrants for taking jobs the same way they took precious metals, and in 1882 the country passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—our first major immigration restriction.
By the 1960s, labor unions fiercely opposed illegal immigration as a threat to their members’ livelihoods. In fiery speeches in the 1960s, Cesar Chavez slurredthe “wetbacks” he said were scabbing in the fields, breaking the United Farm Workers strikes. Today the UFW, like other labor unions, supports a path to legal status for undocumented workers already in the U.S., while also pushing for immigration reform that would create legal pathways to work authorization.
Many experts argue that the economy reaps net benefits from undocumented workers who are already here and that it would cause enormous damage to deport them. The Pew Research Center estimates that 8.3 million laborers—almost 5 percent of the U.S. workforce—are undocumented. In Texas the share is even higher, at 8 percent. In 2016 researchers at the left-leaning Center for American Progress modeled the impact of deporting 7 million migrant workers. They concluded that it would result in an economic downturn approaching the scale of the Great Recession in 2008. National income would shrink by $4.7 trillion over ten years. Supply chains would be disrupted and, depending on the response by Congress and the Federal Reserve, inflation could run rampant. According to one estimate from Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service, without any immigrant labor the cost of milk would nearly double.
As for the effects of further undocumented immigration? Some economists argue, based on the logic of supply and demand, that a large flow of low-wage workers would depress pay for low-wage workers already here. Many researchers—including from conservative think tanks—have historically found, however, that the effect is minimal. And one new study, yet to be peer-reviewed, even finds that pay goes up for some native workers. Tarek Hassan, a professor of economics at Boston University, analyzed 130 years of immigration records in the U.S. On average, when immigrants arrived in large numbers, local wages rose. It wasn’t entirely equitable. Those without high school educations, for one, didn’t see bumps. But Hassan emphasized that for no group was there a decline. “There are valid reasons why people may want to restrict immigration,” Hassan said. “But if you’re looking at economic data, trying to find an argument for decreasing immigration, you’re just not going to find it. Immigrants improve economies.”
Every new immigrant is also a new consumer—as the population grows, cities need more grocers, more firefighters, more builders. Undocumented immigrants also tend not to compete with native-born workers for employment. As Laura Collins, director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative, put it: “Economic data shows that one job complements the other.” In other words, they’re taking jobs many Americans don’t want.
Anyone who pays taxes would foot the bill for mass deportations. The average removal costs around $10,000, according to estimates. When you consider the tens of billions in government spending and the crippling of companies across the country, you begin to understand why so many old-school conservatives—the “business-friendly” types that surrounded Ronald Reagan and both Bushes—firmly oppose mass deportations. The solutions they propose vary, but most come down to this: Get immigrants on the books and get them paying taxes while at the same time discouraging future unauthorized border-crossing and expanding legal immigration. That was the idea behind the Immigration Act of 1986, the “amnesty” bill Reagan signed that granted green cards to some three million immigrants and set many on a path to citizenship.
In places such as the Baker Institute, at Rice, that strain of thought survives. Tony Payan leads the Center for the U.S. and Mexico there. On one of the first hot days of spring, I listened as he shared a novel policy proposal: The number of work visas for construction workers offered each year could be pegged to the unemployment rate in that industry. In times of labor shortages, such as the one after the pandemic, visas would be plentiful, but when work dried up, visa rates would also go down. Payan thinks that pegging legal documentation to an “economic measure” would help Congress sidestep the ugliness of immigration politics. An objective number, rather than politicians, would set rates. (There’s strong evidence that migration already decreases when unemployment goes up: In the wake of the Great Recession, Mexican migration to the U.S. reversed—there were more Mexicans leaving the U.S. to return home than there were Mexicans arriving, according to the Pew Research Center.)
Congress, however, has not passed meaningful immigration legislation in three decades. There’s a perverse equilibrium at play: Politicians, especially in the Republican Party, benefit from the status quo. Fanning fears of “murderers” and “rapists” flowing across “open borders” helped Trump win the White House in 2016, and it might help him return there in 2024.
While many Republican business owners and executives have pushed for increased legal immigration—especially of highly educated workers such as engineers and software developers—those who employ large numbers of undocumented workers are often comfortable keeping them that way and paying them less than would be necessary if they were here legally. Trump offers an excellent example of this dynamic: In 2019 The Washington Post interviewed 43 undocumented immigrants employed at various Trump properties: waiting tables at his clubs, cutting the grass on his golf courses, and building walls at his wineries.
This pattern—of national Republicans demonizing workers but saying little about those who are hiring them—has repeated itself in Texas. Under Operation Lone Star, the state has allocated $11 billion for patrolling the border. In the raucous legislative session in 2023, lawmakers sent a raft of further enforcement bills to Abbott, including the massive Senate Bill 4, which he signed. It’s tied up in the courts, but if it goes into effect, Texas would deputize state and local police to enforce immigration law.
It’s notable, however, which bills did not reach Abbott’s desk. In the Senate, Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican from Brenham, introduced legislation that would have mandated the use of E-Verify, the software the federal government created for employers to confirm whether their laborers were eligible to work in the U.S. Steve Toth, a far right-winger who represents north Houston suburbs, introduced the House version of the bill. Neither was ever brought to a vote of the full chamber. According to one report, too few Republicans would vote for the proposal, perhaps recognizing the pain it would impose, at least in the short term, to some of their campaign donors and to the state’s economy.
Because of this tacit understanding, undocumented workers continue to labor in the shadows in the United States. Marco, for one, plans on staying. He isn’t hopeful that in his lifetime Honduras will ever be safe enough or offer wages high enough to lure him back. “I think it’s impossible,” he said. “But if I could, of course I’d return to my beautiful country.” When I talked with him this summer, his two nieces would frequently wander into the room, pulling at his shirt—a soccer jersey—trying to get his attention. He would laugh and throw his arm over them.
If Marco does get deported—say, after a routine traffic stop—it might be hard for his boss, for a few days at most, to find someone to pull asbestos or resod a lawn. Marco would try his best to get back into the country through Texas, but in his place other undocumented immigrants could easily be hired. His family are the ones who would truly miss him—the girls waiting for their uncle to get home each sundown, with mud on his boots and wood chips on his shirt.
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