Illegal Labor Crackdowns Are a Victory for American Workers

In the telling of NBC News, the recent federal immigration raid on Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, Nebraska was a tragedy. Seventy-six illegal aliens arrested. Families disrupted. Fear in the air. Tears and outrage from local officials. But strip away the lachrymose rhetoric and examine the facts through a lens less distorted by ideology, and the picture that emerges is not one of tragedy, but of long-overdue justice and an economic realignment that favors law, fairness, and opportunity for American citizens and legal workers.

Begin with a simple premise: a nation that does not enforce its immigration laws ceases to be a nation in any meaningful sense. Borders are not metaphysical suggestions, they are legal demarcations that define the limits of sovereignty, culture, and law. When businesses like Glenn Valley Foods operate for years by hiring illegal labor, they are not simply bending rules. They are subverting the rule of law, exploiting vulnerable people, and undercutting American workers who obey the law, pay taxes, and seek employment in good faith.

Chad Hartmann, CEO of Glenn Valley Foods, admitted to NBC that he knowingly relied on illegal labor for fifteen years. That is a confession to a crime, not a lamentable business model. Under federal law, 8 U.S.C. §1324a(a), it is illegal to knowingly hire, recruit, or refer for a fee any individual not authorized to work in the US. Nebraska state law mirrors this federal provision. Hartmann, by his own admission, has been in serial violation of this law. Yet, tellingly, while dozens of workers were arrested and detained, Hartmann remains untouched by law enforcement, comfortable enough to speak freely about his crimes on national television. This is not justice, it is selective enforcement that privileges the wealthy and connected.

Much has been made of the supposed suffering inflicted by these raids, but consider the real human cost of illegal labor practices. When employers like Hartmann flood their shops with undocumented workers, they suppress wages, circumvent workplace protections, and disenfranchise the very citizens they are obligated to prioritize. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of May 2025, over 100 million Americans of working age are not participating in the labor force. While some may be willingly retired, in school, a significant portion are "discouraged workers" who have simply given up looking for work because they perceive no opportunity. Legal residents willing to work have been sidelined by a system that rewards evasion and punishes compliance.

Yet the Glenn Valley raid produced a telling counter-narrative. Contrary to the media’s predictions of economic paralysis, the aftermath was marked not by collapse, but by competition. According to Hartmann himself, every seat in the company’s waiting area was filled with job applicants just two days after the raid. Dozens of hopefuls, many of them Spanish-speaking and legally authorized to work, were applying, interviewing, and beginning training. So much for the myth that Americans and legal immigrants won’t do these jobs. The only thing they needed was a fair chance, unblocked by a mass of illegal competition.

The exploitation of illegal labor is a moral and legal wrong, but it is also an economic distortion. It creates a parallel economy in which rules do not apply, wages are depressed, and the most vulnerable are trafficked, mistreated, and held in precarious, shadowy conditions. The open-borders chorus in the media would have you believe that enforcement of immigration laws is inherently cruel. But true cruelty lies in ignoring the plight of lawful workers and tolerating a system that grinds the poor into cheap labor while shielding employers from accountability.

Consider the deeper implications of tolerating such lawlessness. When illegal labor is tacitly permitted, it becomes a subsidy for unscrupulous employers, a black-market wage control that harms the lawful poor. The Congressional Budget Office has noted that the presence of unauthorized workers reduces the wages of low-skilled US-born workers, particularly Black and Hispanic Americans. A study from the Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal immigration reduces the wages of native-born workers without a high school diploma by as much as 10 percent. These are not abstractions. These are lost opportunities, foreclosed dreams, and vacant paychecks.

And while the media weeps for the arrested, they remain mute on the basic injustice that these illegal workers were also victims, not just of the system, but of their employers. Many had criminal records or outstanding warrants. Some were living under false identities. These are not conditions of freedom, but of coercion, risk, and dependency. Returning home to their country of origin is not a punishment, it is a chance to start anew, lawfully and without exploitation. The nation owes them honesty, not the hollow pity of journalists looking for easy narratives.

Of course, none of this is to deny the human drama at play. But sympathy must not become policy. The question is not whether we feel sorry for those caught in a dragnet. The question is what kind of country we wish to be. A republic governed by law, or a feudal system governed by sentiment and selective enforcement? A place where citizenship matters, or a zone of economic piracy in which only the rich win?

The answer lies in the results. Glenn Valley Foods did not collapse. It did not fold or shutter. It began hiring legal workers who, apparently, were eager to do the work. It took a federal raid to get there, but the proof is in the hiring line.

The solution to this chronic abuse is not compassion but enforcement. If there is to be a shift, it must include prosecution of employers who break the law. Until CEOs like Hartmann are hauled into court, the incentives will remain lopsided. Workers will keep crossing borders illegally. Exploiters will keep writing paychecks under the table. And Americans who want to work will be told, politely, that their country has no room for them.

This must end. And it can. The law is on the books. The workforce is in waiting. All that is missing is the will to act.

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