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Big CITY
Major industries like construction, child care and restaurants rely heavily on undocumented workers, who would be hard to replace, economists and employers say.
By Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics, culture and life of New York City.
As immigration raids got underway in New York City this week, complete with a visit from the new Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, who showed up in body armor talking about “getting the dirt bags off the streets,” it was hard to see where all of these roundups were headed.
In the early days of the second Trump presidency, it remains unclear to what extent this sort of force amounts to a performance of authority versus an expression of commitment to it. On Tuesday, 39 arrests were made in and around New York City, where the emphasis has been on targeting gang members and others suspected of violence — and where the economy is as reliant on the labor of undocumented workers as plants are on sunlight. Given the prospect of mass deportation — the expulsion of working people who are not murderers or rapists or drug dealers or otherwise dangerous — the consequences for New York’s economy could be quite severe.
So much recent political rhetoric has succeeded in portraying undocumented people as driven to crime rather than contribution, which obscures certain realities. As a group, undocumented immigrants paid $3.1 billion in New York state and local taxes in 2022, for example, a sum equal to the city’s early education budget for the current fiscal year.
That number comes not from a left-leaning human rights group intent on fostering sympathy for people who crossed the border illegally, but rather from the wonky Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. The organization’s research also tells us that nationally, more than a third of the tax dollars paid by undocumented immigrants go toward payroll taxes, which are aimed at backing entitlement programs that these workers are not entitled to access.
Some other facts: In New York City, according to municipal data, more than half of undocumented immigrants have been in this country for more than a decade; 41 percent have been to college, and a quarter have a bachelor’s degree. Last year, a report from the mayor’s office looking at immigrant demographics found that 80 percent of undocumented residents were in the work force, compared with two-thirds of New Yorkers born in this country — in part because most immigrants are of prime working age, between 18 and 64. (This is especially meaningful because the city’s population is getting older: Between 2000 to 2023, the share of people who are 65 and over grew by 53 percent, 17 times faster than the population overall.)
Food and Eating Place corporations are one category in which a loss of staff would be felt intensely. According to a new report from the Fiscal Policy Institute, some other nonpartisan think tanks, more than 42,000 chefs, cooks, preparers and Waiters paintings across the state, not to mention the delivery staff who make culture insatiable in the city’s calling imaginable.
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