Published July  11, 2025;

Fear has gripped America’s undocumented workers. Many are staying home. The impact is being felt not only in immigrants’ homes and communities, but also in the industries that rely on immigrants as a source of willing and inexpensive labor, including residential construction, agriculture, senior care and hospitality. U.S. consumers will soon feel the pain.

An estimated 20 percent of the U.S. labor force is foreign born, and millions of immigrant workers lack legal immigration status. 

Hundreds of thousands more have been shielded from deportation and have work permits under a program called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), offered to nationals of countries in upheaval. But Trump has already announced that he will phase out the program, starting with Venezuela and Haitian beneficiaries. 

Refugees from around the globe, who have settled in the United States after fleeing persecution, have supplied a steady pipeline of low-skilled labor for poultry plants, warehouses and manufacturing. But that pipeline could dry up since Trump shut down the U.S. refugee program. Last month, a federal judge restored it temporarily while a lawsuit is pending, but the program remains at a standstill, and no refugees are arriving.

 Kesia Scales, vice president at PHI, a national research and advocacy organization focused on long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities, said her industry was already facing a “recruitment crisis.”

In construction, up to 19 percent of all workers are undocumented, according to independent estimates, and the share is higher in many states. Their contribution is even more pronounced in residential construction, where industry leaders have warned of an acute labor shortage.

Commercial building relies on many workers with TPS; some have been in the industry for decades.

The elder care industry faces a similar challenge; growing demand for workers, and not enough native-born Americans to do the work. Those jobs have increasingly been filled by immigrants with varying legal status.

Business is thriving and a silver tsunami is on the horizon. The number of adults 65 or older in the United States totaled 60 million in 2022 and is projected to exceed 80 million by 2050.

Five million people work directly with clients in what is considered the formal senior care industry, made up of those who can legally hold a job in the United States. In New York, two-thirds of those in homes are foreign born, as are nearly half in California and Maryland. Countless others take part in the vast gray market, potentially worth billions of dollars, employed by families who hire in-home aides, many of them undocumented, by word of mouth or online. The caregivers in private homes support seniors with essential activities of daily life, helping them eat, dress, bathe and use the toilet. They escort them to doctors’ appointments and manage their medications. It is a low-skill, low-pay work, but it requires a certain temperament, physical strength and patience.

Often green-card holders and U.S. citizens have undocumented relatives, and these mixed-status families have been under strain as immigration crack-downs have intensified.

The U.S. farming sector has suffered a labor shortage for decades. Immigrants mainly from Mexico and Central America have filled the void. Farmers say they cannot find American-born laborers to do the strenuous work. More than 40 percent of the nation’s crop workers are immigrants without legal status, according to estimates by the Department of Agriculture, and many have lived in the United States for decades. 

Jobs in the agriculture sector- or elder care, or residential construction are low-wage, low-status, and high-exploitation unless workers organize unions.

A three-day crackdown in California’s central valley in January before Trump took office, showed the potential effects of large-scale enforcement in farming areas. Absenteeism soared after Border Patrol agents conducted sweeps in Bakersfield. They stopped and arrested people at Home Depot, at gas stations and along heavily trafficked routes to farms, according to the Nesei Farmers League, a grower association. Some 30 to 40 percent of workers failed to report to the fields in the days that followed, according to the League, which represents about 500 growers and packers.

President Trump has broadcast plans for “mass deportation”, and the opening weeks of his second term have brought immigration enforcement operations in cities across the United States, providing a daily drumbeat of arrests that are quickly noted in group chats among migrants.

by Cynthia Bueno