A man on Threads wore a shirt bragging that everyone eats from the hands of undocumented workers, then said America would let them all in no problem if they worked for free. That’s slavery, printed on cotton, with a hashtag. He got dragged for it. Good.
The mechanism, in numbers
Undocumented workers make up 40 to 60 percent of U.S. crop farmworkers depending on the year and the survey, and roughly 35 percent of all hired agricultural labor as of 2024, per the Congressional Research Service. In construction, 13 to 14 percent of the workforce is undocumented, and in the specialty trades—plastering, drywall, roofing—that figure climbs above a third. Hospitality runs about 7 percent. None of that labor can unionize, report wage theft, or call OSHA without risking removal, and the enforcement side of that arrangement is nearly nonexistent by design: from 2005 to 2023, worker arrests for immigration violations outnumbered employer arrests more than three to one, and fewer than 15 employers per year have faced prosecution for hiring undocumented labor since 1986. That is not an accident of under-resourcing. That is the enforcement ratio you build when you intend to punish the supply and never touch the demand.
Cesar Chavez ran his own border patrol in the 1970s to keep strikebreakers out, because an unorganizable workforce sets the wage floor for every legal worker standing next to it. He had the mechanism right fifty years before either party would say it out loud.
The Democratic number
E-Verify—the system that checks whether a new hire is authorized to work—is used by just 14 percent of U.S. employers nationally as of June 2025, per the Migration Policy Institute, even though MPI’s own estimate puts more than 9 million unauthorized workers in the labor force right now. It has been federal law on the books since 1997. Every Congress since has introduced a bill to make it mandatory nationwide. Every one has failed. That’s not a policy gap that opened recently—it’s a twenty-nine-year-old choice, renewed on a schedule, by both parties, in Congresses controlled by both parties.
DACA covers roughly 535,000 people. It has never addressed the other 9-plus million, and it was never structured to.
The Republican number
Self-deportation, the current administration’s cash-for-departure program, has paid out in three separate tranches: $1,000 at launch in May 2025, tripled to $3,000 as a year-end bonus in December, then set at $2,600 as the standing rate by January 2026. DHS’s own justification is explicit and numeric: the average cost to arrest, detain, and deport someone through normal channels is $18,245; buying a plane ticket and paying the stipend costs roughly $5,100, a claimed 70 percent savings. That arithmetic only works if you already know exactly who you’re targeting—the population with no criminal record, the only group DHS extends the offer to. Nobody buys out a dangerous person. You only buy out someone whose labor you were extracting a year ago and now need to be somewhere else without the transaction looking like what it is.
The domestic version, in numbers
You don’t need a border to run the same math. Roughly 800,000 of the 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons work, and the ACLU’s 2022 national survey found the average pay for non-industry prison labor runs 13 to 52 cents an hour—against a federal minimum wage of $7.25. In Louisiana, cellblock and field labor pays two cents an hour. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas pay nothing at all for most of it. Seventy percent of incarcerated workers surveyed said they couldn’t afford basic necessities on what they were paid. That labor generates at least $11 billion a year in goods and services for state governments and private contractors, according to the same ACLU report—which means the system isn’t failing to pay a living wage. It’s succeeding at not paying one, at a rate of $11 billion a year.
Where the shirt guy actually lands
He collapsed three systems into one sentence: we’ll take them if they’re free. Forty-thousandths of a dollar an hour in a Louisiana cellblock is free. Fourteen percent E-Verify compliance against 9 million unauthorized workers is a policy choice to keep it nearly free. A $2,600 buyout against an $18,245 removal cost is the state doing the arithmetic on how much the free labor was worth in the first place. He said it as a joke. The three systems above have been running the same math for decades without saying it at all.
The number nobody sits with
Mexico received $64.7 billion in remittances in 2024—more than its oil exports, tourism revenue, and foreign direct investment combined, according to Banco de México. The average individual transaction is around $400, sent by workers whose legal status gives them zero standing to negotiate their own wage. Ninety-five percent of that money comes from people working informal or low-wage jobs in agriculture, construction, domestic service, and manufacturing in the United States. Polite company treats that $64.7 billion as an unambiguous act of familial love, and it is. It’s also the receipt. Money that scarce, sent that far, by someone with that little legal leverage, is a direct measurement of how cheap the labor underneath it was bought for. Nobody prices a remittance as a virtue and the wage that produced it as an outrage in the same paragraph without noticing they’ve just filed two receipts for the same sale.
That’s the actual scandal, and it has a dollar figure. Not the shirt. The $11 billion in uncompensated prison labor, the $64.7 billion in remittances, the 86 percent of employers who never have to check a single hire’s status, and the 3-to-1 ratio of workers arrested to employers ever charged—four numbers, four different systems, one mechanism, and neither party has touched it because the number only gets worse for whichever side has to explain it first.
APPENDIX
Counter-arguments
Undocumented workers enter contracts voluntarily. That’s not slavery, that’s a job. True, and worth taking seriously rather than waving off. Nobody is kidnapped into a strawberry field. But “voluntary” is doing a lot of work in a labor market where the alternative to accepting sub-minimum wages under threat of deportation is deportation itself. A contract signed under the threat of the one leverage point the other party controls isn’t the same as a contract signed by someone with an exit. The 3-to-1 worker-to-employer arrest ratio is the actual measure of who bears the cost of that “voluntary” arrangement when it breaks down—it’s never the employer.
Compensated emancipation happened in D.C.—doesn’t that undercut the “the state never pays” framing? It happened exactly once, for about 3,000 people, and never scaled. The Confederacy rejected every broader compensated-emancipation offer Lincoln made, and the 13th Amendment freed everyone else without compensating anyone. One city-sized pilot program that never repeated isn’t evidence of a national buyout. It’s evidence the idea was tried, worked at a tiny scale, and was abandoned—which is closer to the piece’s point than against it.
Prison labor pays for room and board. It’s not comparable to chattel slavery. The 13th Amendment’s penal clause is the specific legal mechanism that makes prison labor exempt from the amendment that otherwise bans forced labor. That’s not rhetorical framing—it’s the literal text. Whether $11 billion a year in state and corporate revenue, extracted at 13 to 52 cents an hour from people who can be disciplined for refusing to work, constitutes “payment for room and board” or something closer to what the amendment was written to prohibit is exactly the question the penal clause was designed to make unaskable.
This is just “both sides” as a dodge to avoid picking a side. The piece isn’t claiming both parties want the same outcome—one wants the labor retained, one wants it removed. It’s claiming both outcomes get produced by the identical mechanism: a population kept legally powerless enough that its price can be set by someone else. That’s not equivalence of intent. It’s identity of method, and the method is the actual subject.
FAQ
Didn’t Democrats try with the 2013 Gang of Eight bill? Yes, and it passed the Senate 68-32 before dying in a Republican-controlled House. That’s a real attempt and a real failure that isn’t on Democrats alone. It also didn’t touch E-Verify enforcement, which stayed at roughly the same weak participation rate before and after the bill died, under administrations of both parties, for a reason that predates and outlasts that one bill.
Isn’t the self-deportation program actually more humane than a raid? By DHS’s own numbers, it’s cheaper—$5,100 against $18,245 for a standard removal—and it avoids the violence of a raid. It is also only offered to the population with no criminal record, which is the same population that was valuable specifically because it had no legal standing to negotiate a wage. Cheaper and more humane than the alternative isn’t the same claim as clean.
Is 40 to 60 percent undocumented agricultural labor even a stable number? No, and that instability is itself informative. USDA’s own data runs from 2020-2022 with nothing more recent officially published; CRS’s 2024 estimate lands at 35 percent of all hired agricultural labor; other estimates go as high as 60 percent depending on whether livestock and dairy are included. The range exists because nobody with the authority to fix the number has an incentive to pin it down precisely.
Numbers cited
35-60%—undocumented share of U.S. agricultural labor, depending on measure (USDA/NAWS 2020-2022; CRS 2024)
13-14%—undocumented share of the U.S. construction workforce; above one-third in specialty trades like drywall and roofing (American Immigration Council, 2022 data)
7.1%—undocumented share of the hospitality workforce (American Immigration Council)
3-to-1—ratio of worker to employer arrests for immigration-status violations, 2005-2023 (Migration Policy Institute)
<15/year—employers prosecuted nationally for hiring undocumented workers in most years since 1986 (MPI)
14%—U.S. employers enrolled in E-Verify as of June 2025, against an estimated 9+ million unauthorized workers in the labor force (MPI)
~535,000—people covered by DACA, out of 9+ million unauthorized workers total
$1,000 → $3,000 → $2,600—self-deportation stipend, May 2025 launch, December 2025 holiday rate, January 2026 standing rate (DHS)
$18,245 vs. ~$5,100—DHS’s own stated cost of standard removal versus a self-deportation payout (DHS press releases)
13-52¢/hour—average U.S. prison labor wage for non-industry jobs, against a $7.25 federal minimum (ACLU, 2022)
$0.02/hour—Louisiana cellblock and field-line pay (ACLU of Louisiana)
$11 billion/year—value of goods and services produced by U.S. prison labor (ACLU)
$64.7 billion—remittances Mexico received in 2024, exceeding oil exports, tourism, and FDI combined (Banco de México / BBVA Research)
~$400—average individual remittance transaction size (Banco de México)
95%—share of Mexico’s remittances sent by workers in informal or low-wage U.S. sectors (Wilson Center / El Colegio de la Frontera Norte)
Timeline
1865-1877—The 13th Amendment’s penal-labor clause becomes convict leasing almost immediately; by 1890, 90 percent of Alabama’s leased convict population is Black.
1962-1975—Chavez and the UFW run the wet line, physically blocking undocumented strikebreakers, because captive labor sets the wage floor for everyone.
1986—Reagan signs amnesty for 2.7 million people and adds employer sanctions that produce fewer than 15 prosecutions a year for the next four decades.
1996—Clinton signs the law that still defines mandatory detention and deportable offenses today.
1997—E-Verify launches. Every subsequent Congress introduces a mandatory-use bill. All have failed.
2001-2016—Bush builds the post-9/11 enforcement architecture; Obama runs it harder, deports a modern-era record, and creates DACA by executive order.
2013—Gang of Eight passes the Senate 68-32, dies in the House, fixes nothing on either side of the aisle.
May 2025—Self-deportation program launches at a $1,000 stipend.
December 2025—Stipend tripled to $3,000 for the remainder of the year.
January 2026—Standing rate set at $2,600.
Glossary
Deportability as discipline—a worker’s legal vulnerability doing the job a wage floor’s absence used to do, measurable in a 3-to-1 worker-to-employer arrest ratio.
Self-deportation—a payment DHS itself prices against an $18,245 alternative, offered only to the population with no criminal record.
The wet line—Chavez’s own 1970s border patrol against strikebreakers, the labor-left’s version of this argument, forty years before either party’s current framing.
The penal clause—the words “except as a punishment” in the 13th Amendment, currently worth $11 billion a year in uncompensated labor.
The remittance receipt—$64.7 billion a year, sent $400 at a time, by people whose legal powerlessness set the price of the labor that produced it.