The Yoruba say, “The fish rots from the head down”. In America’s immigration crisis, the rot starts in corporate boardrooms.
While ICE raids terrorize workers in LA’s Fashion District, the CEOs who recruited, hired, and profited from their labour are sound asleep in gated communities. Outside, Maria, the seamstress, is arrested mid-shift, facing deportation. This is America’s economic theatre, designed to hide capitalism’s dirtiest secret. The system needs undocumented workers, or else there’s no system.
The Market Creates What the Law Destroys
Listen up, family. America has engineered the perfect economic contradiction. A market that rewards hiring undocumented workers and a legal system that punishes being one.
The numbers expose the hypocrisy. Over the past decade, ICE has arrested tens of thousands of undocumented workers. But employer prosecutions? They’ve dropped over 70% since the 1990s (Syracuse University, TRAC Immigration Report, 2024).
The message is clear: hire them, exploit them, but when enforcement comes, the workers pay the price.
Supply, Demand, and Selective Enforcement
America’s demand for inexpensive labour in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and manufacturing creates a significant pull for undocumented workers. Industries have built entire business models around this labour, not in spite of immigration law, but because of how it is selectively enforced. Remember how America was founded with free slave labour – let me stay on the subject.
Consider the agricultural sector. Over 70% of farm workers are undocumented, according to the Department of Labour (2023). These workers harvest the food that feeds America. They work for wages that keep grocery prices low. When ICE raids farms, they arrest the workers. However, they rarely touch the agricultural executives who structured their businesses around undocumented labour.
As the Akan proverb teaches, “When the spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.” Corporate America has woven a web of plausible deniability that keeps executives free while workers get deported.
The CEO Protection Racket
Here’s how the system protects capital while criminalizing labour:
Subcontracting schemes insulate major corporations from direct liability. Companies hire staffing agencies that hire undocumented workers. When raids happen, the corporation claims ignorance. The agency takes minimal heat, and workers face deportation.
Willful blindness laws allow employers to avoid verification requirements through deliberate ignorance. E-Verify, the federal employment verification system, is riddled with loopholes. It covers only a fraction of U.S. employers and remains voluntary in much of the country.
Regulatory capture ensures that business-friendly enforcement focuses on workers, not workplaces. Industry lobbying has consistently weakened employer sanctions.
The result? A system where hiring undocumented workers carries minimal risk for employers.
The Global South Knows This Game
For observers from Africa and the Global South, this dynamic looks familiar. Colonial economies were built on the same principle: extract maximum value from vulnerable populations. At the same time, legal structures that protect the extractors must be maintained.
America’s immigration enforcement operates on identical logic. The economic benefits flow upward to employers while the legal consequences flow downward to workers.
As the Swahili proverb reminds us, “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” America’s unwillingness to embrace the workers it depends on creates the instability it claims to fear.
Case Study: The Fashion District
Let’s examine LA’s Fashion District, ground zero for the recent ICE raids. The district’s competitive advantage comes from rapid production cycles and low labour costs, which are dependent on undocumented workers.
When ICE arrested 118 workers in June 2025, they targeted seamstresses earning $8-12 per hour while the brands selling their garments earn billions. The executives who designed these supply chains faced no consequences.
This isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s wealth protection disguised as law enforcement.
Tiger’s Roar: Follow the Money, Not the Rhetoric
Family, the economics reveal the truth that politics obscures: America doesn’t want to end undocumented immigration. It wants to control it.
When ICE raids factories but ignores executive suites, it is not enforcing immigration law but economic hierarchy. The message to capital is clear: keep exploiting. The message to labour is equally clear: stay silent or face consequences.
But they don’t want workers to understand one dangerous truth: capital trembles when labour organizes, both documented and undocumented.
The ground still remembers 1848, when America seized the Mexican territory. The workers remember why they came. And the executives? They remember only the profits.
Until America prosecutes the demand side of undocumented immigration, the employer enforcement will remain what it’s always been- an economic theatre designed to protect capital.
This isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s wealth protection disguised as law enforcement.
The fish rots from the head. It’s time to clean the water.
Redefining narratives: One uncomfortable truth at a time.
Tiger Rifkin is the creator of The Witty Observer, a Pan-African media platform focused on geopolitics, leadership, and bold commentary on Africa’s global future.