Undocumented immigrants don’t get a vote — but they do hold a lever that can jolt Wall Street before a single ballot is cast: labour.

The scale of that leverage

• Roughly 11 million people were in the country without authorisation in 2022, reversing a decade-long slide.pewresearch.org
• 8.3 million of them were on the job, making up 4.8% of the entire U.S. workforce—a near-record share.pewresearch.org

Who depends on them?

• Agriculture: 42% of hired crop workers lacked work authorisation between 2020-22.ers.usda.gov
• Construction: About a quarter of the national construction labour force—and roughly half in hot-growth states—are undocumented.urban.org
• Hotels, meat-packing, car washes and even horse racing feature similar dependencies, as this week’s ICE sweeps have shown.axios.com

Cash on the table
Far from being a drain, undocumented workers paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022—about $8,900 per person.itep.org Their payroll taxes help prop up Social Security and Medicare even though they’re locked out of the benefits.

What happens if the labour vanishes?
A Senate Joint Economic Committee review warns that deporting the entire undocumented workforce—Trump’s stated goal—would cut GDP by 7.4% and shrink overall employment 7% by 2028. Even a “modest” removal of 1.3 million people drags GDP down 1.2%.jec.senate.gov Oxford Economics puts the impact of the current crackdown at a 0.25% GDP hit already baked in.axios.com

Pre-season scrimmage: #ADayWithoutImmigrants
In February, immigrant-run restaurants and colleges across the Bay Area closed for 24 hours under the banner “No work, no school, no spending.” The one-day boycott shuttered more than half of Latino-owned businesses surveyed.livermorevine.com Multiply that across meat-packing plants, dairies, and construction sites nationwide, and the message writes itself on every earnings call ticker.

Markets hear the whistle
Research on “migration-fear shocks” finds that rising deportation risk lifts stock-price crash risk nearly 20%.sciencedirect.com A coordinated, week-long work stoppage in sectors already tight on labour would spike wage costs, bruise supply chains and rattle equities faster than any poll swing.

The paradox
Because they can’t vote, undocumented workers are the ultimate asymmetry: huge economic footprint, zero electoral voice. Yet, the presidency that threatens them most could also legalise them in one stroke—Reagan did it in 1986, and Trump loves a headline. A grand bargain of “papers for the existing workforce, wall for the future flow” would let him claim both humanity and toughness.

A moment worth seizing
If immigrant communities—and their U.S.-citizen allies on the payroll and the trading desk—organised rolling, lawful strikes, they could put a price tag on mass deportation that even hardliners would notice. The slogan practically writes itself: “No labour, no lettuce, no lumber, no lattes.”

The ballot box may be directly unreachable, but the switchboard of the U.S. economy is not. Pull that cord for a week and watch how quickly pens come out in Washington.