As our nation celebrates American workers on Labor Day 2024, this holiday cannot be fully honored without highlighting the essential and critical work of immigrants, including those without legal status. These immigrant workers – and there are millions of them – feed us, take care of our children and loved ones, build our homes and repair the bridges that take us to work and school, and care for us when we’re sick in addition to the billions they contribute to our economy annually.
Immigrant labor feeds us and sustains the nation’s food supply. Nearly three-quarters of all agricultural workers in the United States are foreign-born, meaning that if we were to eliminate the critical labor of immigrant workers, our food supply would face catastrophic collapse. At least half of these workers lack legal immigration status. In California, undocumented immigrants could make up as much as 75% of all farmworkers in the state. Wisconsin, meanwhile, couldn’t be America’s dairyland without immigrants. The National Milk Producers Federation estimated that over half of the state’s dairy workers are immigrants, many of them undocumented. “It seems foolish to just pretend that foreign-born workers aren’t here and that we don’t need them,” one dairy farmer said. In Florida, immigrant workers helped make the state number one in the U.S. in the value of production of bell peppers, sugarcane, tomatoes, and watermelons, as well as one of the top producers of all oranges. And in Iowa, meatpacking plant workers have helped reverse challenges posed by an aging population, as well as alleviated key labor shortages. It’s hard work, but for many immigrant workers a “first rung on the American ladder to success,” said The Storm Lake Times.
These essential workers also feed us rain or shine during pandemics, and in cold or extreme heat. “On average, 43 farmworkers die from heat-related illnesses every year, according to studies,” Reckon reported. “They are 20 times more likely to die from heat than civilian employees.” In July 2023, Florida farmworker Efraín López García died while harvesting tropical fruit on the hottest day on record in at least four decades. Following years of advocacy, farmworkers won a long-awaited, first-of-its-kind federal rule protecting millions of indoor and outdoor workers from extreme heat, including implementing requirements for drinking water, rest breaks, and injury and illness prevention plans.
Immigrants are the backbone of the construction industry. “Construction work has long played a critical role for the immigrant community as a fundamental employer, a skill-building opportunity, and a source of entrepreneurialism,” Dr. Carlos Martín, Project Director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, noted in 2016. Indeed, roughly 2.2 million construction workers are immigrants, a historic high according to Census figures. In the Baltimore and Washington region, immigrants make up nearly 40% of the construction workforce, specializing in carpentry, drywall, roofing, brick masonry, and painting. In some portions of the American Southwest, “all work crews are immigrants,” Dr. Martín continued. “This trend is even more pronounced in some hazardous occupations, like construction laborers, roofers, and drywallers.” The Washington Post reported in March that the construction industry “is especially dangerous for foreign-born Hispanic and Latino workers, 274 of whom died in 2021.”
The March 2024 accident that resulted in the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge was a tragic reminder of these hazards. The six workers that perished in the collapse – Miguel Luna, Dorlian Cabrera, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, Jose Mynor Lopez, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, and Carlos Hernández – were all immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and were laboring in the early morning hours to repair the bridge for the benefit of all drivers. “They were providing for our state,” Luna’s neighbor and friend said following the tragic accident. “While they were just fixing potholes, they were making the state better.”
Immigrants are our children’s teachers, caregivers for our loved ones, and frontline workers keeping our nation healthy. Roughly 20,000 teachers across the U.S. are protected by the DACA program. They include Angélica Reyes, a Los Angeles educator who has used her own experience as an undocumented immigrant to empower her students. “As a student, I felt isolated, helpless and scared,” she wrote in 2019. “So I work to break that cycle for my students by supplementing district resources and sponsoring clubs and events that address their needs and create space for their stories.” More than 200,000 DACA recipients have worked in occupations “at the forefront of the COVID-19 response,” including in health care, the Center for American Progress said in 2020. These workers have included Jesus Contreras, a Houston-area paramedic who worked for six days straight during Hurricane Harvey to rescue members of the community. Nearly 12,000 TPS holders also work in health care, including as nursing assistants, orderlies, and technicians caring for patients.
142,000 undocumented immigrants, many of them TPS holders, work as childcare workers, personal care, and home health workers. These workers include Maria Barahona, a southern California home care provider who cares for two senior citizens, including a U.S. military veteran. “These individuals have dedicated their lives to their families, their communities, and their country, and it’s my job to make sure they receive the dignified care they deserve,” Barahona said.
Immigrants are not only major participants in the U.S. workforce, representing one in six U.S. workers, they are significant contributors to our economy and help keep critical social programs alive. Recent research from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) revealed that undocumented immigrants contributed an astounding $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. More than a third of the tax dollars they paid went to Social Security, Medicare taxes, and unemployment insurance – all programs they’re currently blocked from accessing, ITEP said. Immigrants, with their hopes and skills, are also natural entrepreneurs, starting companies at a much higher rate than US-born Americans.
Immigrants are essential, and their labor should be appreciated and respected not just on this day, but all year round.
RELATED: This Labor Day, Remember That Immigrants Are An Essential Part Of Our Workforce And Economy
