Undocumented immigrants at work: invisibility, hypervisibility, and the making of the modern slave

Abstract

The undocumented immigrant represents a socio-legal category, referring to a subject who does not have legal standing to be in the country in which they are located. Extending from their lack of legal standing, undocumented immigrant workers in the United States occupy spaces marked by extreme conditions of vulnerability, which were exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. The aim of this ethnographic study is to make sense of the experiences of undocumented immigrants under a particularly vicious political rhetoric. Studying the lives of Latinx undocumented immigrant workers in the U.S., our findings capture how the dynamic interplay between the types of labor that they undertake and the socio-legal identity they are attributed function together to systematically disenfranchise them. Specifically, we explicate how doing invisible labor while, at the same time, occupying a hypervisible identity culminates in extreme conditions of vulnerability. In addition to developing the concept of hypervisible identity, we also inform theory on the idea of modern slavery. We contend that without the existence of invisible labor and hypervisible identity performing as interlocking, constitutive precursors, some forms of modern slavery would be negated.