Immigrant Workforce as Industrial Constraint

The plant that could not staff itself

Shahid Khan built a $320 million factory in Detroit that opened in 2018, in his words "the largest investment made in city of Detroit in 30-plus years." It is the newer, better plant: higher-tech, more automated, more productive, paying $22 to $30-plus an hour with fully employer-paid medical. And still: "there weren't enough people to work in even in a factory like this, which is higher tech, more productive...so this was a great example that Hamtramck had a large immigrant population, they really needed work, they were dedicated. So we started recruiting, we started running a bus service to get them here and really get them acclimated."¹

Two details in that account matter more than the headline. First, "even in a factory like this": the shortage was not caused by the work being dirty or dangerous, since this was the good plant. Second, the bus service: the constraint was not purely willingness to work, it was physical access between where potential workers lived and where the plant stood, and solving it was a company expense rather than a public one.

The pattern is not local to one city. Across Khan's company, immigrants make up roughly 30% of the workforce in urban and suburban factories and about 70% at one Texas plant; a plant in Urbana runs substantially on refugees from Morocco and Tunisia, and Detroit floor signage is printed in Arabic, Bengali, and English, a visible map of who is actually on the line. Khan's account of why these workers are reliable is economic rather than sentimental: many support family here and remit money home, so they are highly motivated to advance, and several treat the production line as the first rung of a management ladder rather than a permanent stop.

Two independent industrial policies collide

This connects to Alex Karp's prescription for AI-driven job displacement, which pairs rebuilding domestic manufacturing with restricting immigration to protect the newly retrained labor pool. Khan's plants and this account both run directly against that pairing: the flagship American factory in the flagship American manufacturing city runs substantially on Hamtramck's immigrant population. A capital-and-technology theory of reindustrialization says fund the plants and build them; this account says the plant was funded, built, and better than its predecessor, and still came up short of hands.

A second, independent witness

Two other sources corroborate the constraint from different vantage points, which matters because a single employer arguing he needs immigrant labor has an obvious interest in that conclusion. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, states the corporate policy consequence directly: the Business Roundtable "has always supported a path to citizenship for law-abiding folks," staying with DACA, and more merit-based, proper asylum, adding that "almost all the CEOs support it, they just don't want to go on TV every day and say it, but they say it privately."²

Brian Moynihan supplies a version aggregated across Bank of America's small-business lending book rather than one owner's plants, which sharpens the finding rather than merely repeating it. Asked how the administration has been for small business, he volunteers immigration policy unprompted: "what they do really want is also immigration straight. A lot of them depend on workers that are here and have been here for a long time. It's not that new people coming in...they're really saying their teammates have been with them for 20 years, that have citizenship status, and they want to make sure that those workers feel safe and confident."³ Where Khan's problem is recruiting a new immigrant workforce into new plants, Moynihan's is one step further along and more damaging: the workers are already there, already citizens, already tenured for decades, and an enforcement climate that makes them feel unsafe is a productivity risk to firms that already made the hire, not a hiring-pipeline problem that reform would fix at the margin.

What is unresolved

Khan never frames the shortage as a wage question, and the counterfactual, what wage would have filled the plant locally, goes unexplored. The composition figures are self-reported approximations with no stated methodology, and a workforce concentrated among recent immigrants and refugees is exposed to enforcement and status shocks, a risk the underlying source raises through one worker's own words about her husband's status but does not otherwise examine.