The Pattern
Part 4 of THE SUPPLY CHAIN - A Series on Immigration, Empire, and the Lie We Tell Ourselves
Let’s talk about what actually happens when America decides it has an immigration problem.
Not what it says. What it does.
Because there is a pattern, and it is old, and it is consistent, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Five waves of immigration panic in 144 years. Five different groups. Five different justifications. One identical structure underneath all of them.
The script goes like this: a new group arrives, driven by conditions that American economic and foreign policy either created or exploited. They take the jobs at the bottom — the ones that were already there, waiting, because the economy requires them to exist. They work, they build, and they become indispensable. Then, when the political moment requires a villain, they become the villain. Laws are passed. Rhetoric escalates. Enforcement theater begins. And then — quietly, without acknowledgment — the labor flows continue, because they were never actually the problem. They were the solution to a problem nobody wants to name out loud.
Watch how it repeats.
🏔️ The Chinese, 1849–1882
They built the transcontinental railroad. Sixty percent of the Central Pacific workforce at peak construction, drilling through the Sierra Nevada by hand, suspended in wicker baskets over sheer rock faces to set dynamite charges. They died by the hundreds. The railroad connected a continent and when it was done, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the first and only federal law to ban a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States by name. This was not because the Chinese had stopped being useful. It was because they had started being organized. They had begun forming labor guilds, demanding better wages, and threatening the economic arrangement that made them valuable in the first place. The solution was not to pay them fairly. The solution was to criminalize their presence.
They built the thing and then they were told to leave.
☘️ The Irish, 1845–1870
They arrived in the millions, driven by a famine that British colonial policy had transformed from a crop failure into a genocide. A million dead. A million more emigrating in a single decade. They arrived to find “No Irish Need Apply” signs on storefronts, newspaper cartoons depicting them as apes, a political party — the Know-Nothings, with one million members at their peak — built entirely around the premise that Catholic immigrants were incompatible with American democracy.
And then something interesting happened: The Irish became white. Not immediately. Not automatically. They became white through a specific political transaction — aligning with anti-Black racism as the price of admission into the American mainstream. They joined the Democratic machine in Northern cities, they staffed the police forces that enforced segregation, and they made a deal. The deal was: we will help you keep them down, and you will let us up. And it worked. Within a generation, the group that had been called “white negroes” in the British press was fully absorbed into white American identity. The slur disappeared, the history got soft-focused, and they became the bootstrap story.
The transaction that purchased their whiteness has never been fully reckoned with.
🏭 The Southern and Eastern Europeans, 1880–1924
Italians. Poles. Jews. Greeks. Russians. All arriving by the millions, fleeing poverty and pogroms, filling the factories of the industrial North. These groups were not considered white on arrival. The scientific racism of the era was specific: these were inferior races, genetically distinct from the Anglo-Saxon stock that had built America, and constitutionally unsuited for self-governance. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s — at its peak, four to five million members — was as focused on Catholics and Jews as it was on Black Americans.
The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 was the legislative culmination of this panic. It established national-origin quotas based on the 1890 census — specifically chosen because it predated the mass arrival of Southern and Eastern Europeans; thereby freezing them out. The law reduced immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe by 97%. Its architects were open about their intent: to preserve the racial composition of the United States as it existed before these groups arrived. Adolf Hitler praised it in Mein Kampf, calling American immigration policy a model for what he hoped to achieve in Europe.
Within two generations, Italians and Jews and Poles were white. The same transaction, but with different terms. Absorption into whiteness in exchange for distance from Blackness. The racial category expanded to accommodate them, and the bottom of the hierarchy remained exactly where it was.
🌾 The Mexicans, 1942–present
This is the longest-running act in the play, and the most honest, because it dropped the pretense almost entirely.
The Bracero Program was the federal government formally admitting what had always been true: the American economy required a permanent underclass of imported labor, and the most efficient way to manage that underclass was to keep it legally precarious. Four point six million contracts over twenty-two years. Workers who could be paid less than citizens, housed in conditions citizens wouldn’t accept, fired without recourse, deported when the harvest was done.
The program ended in 1964 under pressure from labor unions and civil rights organizations who understood exactly what it was. But the crops still needed picking. The economy had spent twenty-two years building infrastructure — labor networks, employer relationships, migration routes — premised on Mexican labor being available. Ending the program didn’t end the demand, it just ended the legal pathway. The same workers, now undocumented, continued to arrive because the system required them to.
And then the enforcement theater began in earnest.
Operation Wetback. IRCA. 287(g) agreements. E-Verify — voluntary, because making it mandatory would have required actually punishing employers, which was never the point. Two point seven million deportations under Obama — a record — accompanied by the explicit abandonment of worksite enforcement under political pressure from agricultural and hospitality lobbies. The performance of control masking the continuation of supply.
The numbers tell the story more cleanly than any rhetoric can.
There are currently 8.3 million undocumented workers in the United States. They represent 5.2% of the total workforce. Forty-two percent of all crop workers in this country are undocumented. Thirty to fifty percent of meatpacking workers. Significant majorities in construction, landscaping, domestic work, and food service. These are not peripheral industries. These are the industries that feed, house, and maintain the country.
They paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022. Twenty-five point seven billion dollars went to Social Security — a program they are legally prohibited from collecting. Six point four billion to Medicare they cannot use.
In a representative year, the federal government criminally prosecuted eleven employers for immigration violations. Eleven. Against 125,000 worker prosecutions.
The $150 billion enforcement bill passed in 2025 contained zero provisions for mandatory E-Verify. Zero requirements for employer accountability. One hundred and fifty billion dollars to chase workers. Zero dollars to prosecute the people hiring them.
Read that again. Sit with it.
This is not a failure of policy. This is policy working exactly as designed.
🎭 What Trump did
What Trump did — and this is the part that the educated Republican establishment understands and finds genuinely alarming — is break the performance contract. The performance required a certain discipline. You could crack down on workers. You could run the enforcement theater. You could give the base the imagery of control — the raids, the wall, the numbers.
But you could not actually disrupt the supply chain, because the supply chain was the point.
The moment you started actually removing workers at scale, the economy told you immediately what it thought of that idea. Georgia lost $140 million in crops when they passed their enforcement bill. Alabama’s construction sector collapsed within a year of HB 56. The federal government’s own economic modeling showed that removing 8.3 million workers would reduce GDP by 7.4% below baseline.
In June 2025, ICE was ordered to pause all worksite enforcement on agriculture and hospitality after farmers called their congresspeople. The food supply was at risk. The order was reversed publicly within days — because the performance had to continue — but the raids quietly stopped. The workers were right where the system needed them to be.
The farm pause was the system telling on itself. Loudly. In writing. On the record.
And still — still — the $150 billion enforcement bill had no E-Verify. Because the people writing that bill understood, even if their voters didn’t, that the supply chain had to be protected.
The performance is for the audience. The architecture is for the owners.
This is what 144 years of the same play looks like when you lay it out in sequence. Different faces on the posters. Same theater. Same function. Same result.
The Irish built the cities. The Chinese built the railroad. The Mexicans feed the country. The undocumented pay into a retirement system they’ll never collect from. And in every generation, someone stands up and calls them the problem.
They were never the problem.
They were the supply chain.
🏛️ The Actual American Genius
People love to say slavery wasn’t unique. And they’re right. Exploitation is as old as civilization. Every empire that ever existed was built on the backs of people who did not choose to build it. The Romans had slaves. The Ottomans had slaves. The Egyptians had slaves. The Mongols had conscripted labor. If you go looking for an empire built on equality and shared prosperity, you will be looking for a very long time.
So what actually made America different?
Two things. Just two. And when you understand them, the entire American story — the rise, the prosperity, the current unraveling — clicks into focus.
The first is the permanently subordinated underclass that shifts. This is the supply chain we’ve been tracing across 400 years. What makes it uniquely American is not that it exists — every empire has had one — but that it rotates. The Irish become white. The Italians become white. The group at the bottom changes with each generation, which means the resentment never consolidates, the coalition never forms, the rebellion never quite materializes. You’re always fighting the people next to you instead of the system above you. Pure, functional genius from a systems design perspective. Brutal. Effective. Durable.
The second thing is the Declaration of Independence.
And this is where America did something no other empire in recorded history had the audacity or the foresight to do. Every other empire that built itself on subjugated labor told those people, explicitly or implicitly, the same thing: this is your place. Forever. There is no path. There is no promise. You are what you are and your children will be what you are.
And you know what happens when you tell people that long enough? Eventually they believe they have nothing to lose. And people with nothing to lose are the most dangerous political force in human history. You see it again and again and again. It might take a hundred years. It might take two hundred. But eventually, the subjugated get fed up. And then they don’t just want freedom. They want everything. They want the house and the land and the head of the person who kept them from it. History is littered with empires that forgot this.
The American founders — whatever else you want to say about them, and there is plenty to say — understood this problem. And they solved it with a document.
What the Declaration of Independence did, in practical political terms, was create a release valve. It said — in writing, publicly, to the world — that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that the promise of this country belongs to everyone within its borders. It didn’t deliver on that promise. Not even close. Not for centuries. But it wrote the check. And writing the check changed everything, because now the people being subjugated had something to hold you to. They had your words. They had your signature. They had the document you told the world defined you, and they could point to it and say: you said this. You promised this. Pay up.
That is a fundamentally different political arrangement than anything that came before it.
Because what it created was not freedom — not immediately, not for everyone — but hope with a legal basis. And hope with a legal basis is extraordinarily powerful. It means the person picking your crops isn’t just enduring. They’re waiting. They’re watching. They’re paying attention to every word you say, every law you pass, every promise you make and break, and they are keeping a running account. Those Black people you thought were ignorant — they were listening. Those immigrants who didn’t speak English — they were watching. They were watching other people access the promise. They were watching the Irish become citizens. They were watching the Italians become white. They were thinking: our turn is coming. And they were right.
Think of it like exercise. The permanently subordinated class — by necessity, by survival, by the simple requirement of having to understand a system designed to exclude them in order to navigate it — is always working out. Always exercising the intellectual and political muscles that atrophy in people who never have to use them. Rich people get fat because they don’t have to move. Dominant classes get intellectually lazy because the system rewards them regardless. But the people at the bottom? They cannot afford to stop paying attention. And paying attention, over generations, produces a particular kind of sharpness. A particular kind of clarity. A particular kind of understanding about how the world actually works versus how it presents itself.
And so here is the irony at the center of the whole American project. The exploitation created the opposition that held the exploiters to their own stated values. The Declaration written to justify a revolution against a king became the document that Black Americans, immigrant Americans, every subjugated group in American history used to demand what was promised. It took until the election of the first Black president for white America to collectively realize: the debt has come due. The check has been presented for payment. And a significant portion of white America looked at that check and said — we don’t want to pay it.
That is what you are watching right now. Not a policy disagreement. Not an immigration crisis. A debt collection.
And here is the stupid part — the part that history will record with the kind of disbelief usually reserved for cautionary tales. The choice being made right now is not between sharing prosperity and keeping it. The American project, whatever its sins, created a pie genuinely large enough to share. The question was never whether there would be enough. The question was whether the people who got there first would honor the terms of the arrangement that made the pie possible.
And a significant number of them have decided they would rather have the whole pie to themselves — a much smaller pie, because the supply chain that baked it is being dismantled — than share a larger one. They have decided they would rather have everything in a contracting economy than something substantial in a growing one.
History has an answer for people who make this choice. It is not a comfortable answer. Every empire that tried to hold everything — that reneged on the arrangements that made it stable, that turned inward, that decided the mythology was more important than the mechanism — eventually discovered that the people they depended on had been paying attention all along.
And they were tired of waiting.
This is arguably one of the most catastrophically stupid decisions a dominant group has made in recorded history. Not because it’s immoral — though it is. But because it’s unnecessary. You had it. You had the whole thing. You had the prosperity and the stability and the system that was producing the first trillionaires in human history. And you set it on fire because someone told you the people helping you build it were the reason it wasn’t bigger.
The lie, told long enough, swallowed the people who told it.
And now we are all living in the wreckage of that particular moment of collective stupidity.
What you get in the series:
When an argument begins and ends with a sarcastic question, that already tells me there isn't much of a counterargument underneath it. A country addicted to racial and economic supremacy, at odds with itself because immigration exposes the conflict.
Part 2 — The Opening Question 🔍
Would you trust someone inferior with your children, your home, your food, your nation? No. So explain to me why you did.
Part 3 — The Origin Document 📜
Slavery is not a metaphor for immigration. It is immigration policy. The first imported labor force. No wages, no citizenship, no path to permanence. And what happened when the paperwork changed but the system didn’t.
Part 4 — The Pattern 📊 ← You are here
144 years. Chinese, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Central American. The same play. Different cast. The Bracero Program as America’s confession. The 11 employers prosecuted per year versus 125,000 workers. The numbers that make the argument for you.
Part 5 — The Current Theater 🎭
The farm raid pause that revealed everything. The $150 billion enforcement bill with zero E-Verify. The private prison stocks up 42% on election night. The border deal killed to preserve the crisis.
Part 6 — The Exhaustion 🕯️
We built this together. All of us. By every measure of history, data, and common sense. And they are putting it up for sale — for a smaller, more violent, less stable version of itself. You don’t need a crystal ball. You just need eyes. And a mind not addled by the intellectually numbing effect of believing your own mythology. This is why Black people are so tired. Not from the hatred. From the obviousness of it.
References
Lee, E. (2003). At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. University of North Carolina Press.
Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish Became White. Routledge.
Guglielmo, T.A. (2003). White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945. Oxford University Press.
Ngai, M. (2004). Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press.
Whitman, J.Q. (2017). Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press.
American Farm Bureau Federation. (2023). Farm Labor and Immigration Reform. https://www.fb.org/issues/immigration-reform/farm-labor/
American Immigration Council. (2023). The Costs of Immigration Enforcement and Border Security.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. (2023). Undocumented Immigrants’ State and Local Tax Contributions. https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes/
Congressional Budget Office. (2024). Economic Effects of Immigration Enforcement.
https://www.cbo.gov
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH
Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
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