The Same Machine: How Division Fuels Exploitation and How Solidarity Can Break It

Fast Strawberries | When strawberries are harvested, the pickers are paid by the box, so they run with their filled boxes to ensure they can pick as many as possible and earn enough money during harvest season. Be thankful for those who get food to our tables. Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Where Will the Labor Come From?

This week, I spent time with some amazing Jewish thought leaders, all of whom were either BiPoc, Sephardic, or Mizrahi Jews. After learning all day, soaking in visionary strategy and the wisdom of the community, like most gatherings, the most powerful learning often happens in between, in the hallways, during meals, or late at night at the hotel bar, in the moments when we let ourselves think out loud.

Every night, a few of us met up. One night, we took over a gay club and danced. Another night, a few of us sat around in the hotel restaurant, cocktails in hand, gathered around a table. Among the things we discussed was the movie Sinners—without spoilers, of course, for those who hadn’t seen it. The conversations also revolved around this current administration, Israel, Gaza, Jewish values, and our responsibility to care for others. At some point during that night, I posed a question that’s been weighing on me:

If we deport massive numbers of immigrants, where will the labor come from?

Here’s where my thinking went—and where it continues to go.

I’ve said before that the purpose of antisemitism in a society is to create division. It’s a wedge used by those in power to distract and destabilize. Racism, though? Racism is about capitalism. It works by devaluing certain lives so deeply that their exploitation becomes normalized—even expected.

This country, the United States, has always relied on kidnapped, coerced, underpaid, or unpaid labor to survive since the beginning; it is in the DNA of this country. From slavery to sharecropping, from immigrant labor to the prison industrial complex, the American economy is built on the backs of those it deems disposable.

After the U.S. abolished legal slavery, the system didn’t dismantle itself—it evolved. Southern states passed Black Codes, including vagrancy laws that made being unemployed or unhoused a crime. Black people were arrested, imprisoned, and then leased out to private companies. Fast-forward to today, and we still have prisons full of disproportionately Black and Brown people working for pennies or nothing.

At the same time, our economy has depended on immigrants, sometimes undocumented, to do work that is underpaid. This work is essential to our economy, and it's often invisible.

So I ask again: If we deport massive numbers of immigrants, where will the labor come from?

Are we going to raise wages and improve working conditions to attract workers? Not likely.

Are we going to outsource more labor overseas? Maybe, but that doesn’t solve the problem of domestic service, agriculture, construction, and care work.

Or—and this is the part that haunts me—will we just expand the prison system even further, criminalizing more people, locking up more human beings, and using them to fill the void?

Is that the dark underbelly of it all? I say that because in the United States, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except as punishment for a crime. And when you look at history, you see that every time we eliminate one source of coerced labor, the system finds a way to recreate it.

So what’s the ultimate goal?

I don’t think it’s just about labor. I think it’s about control. It’s about keeping certain groups desperate and others divided. It’s about preserving a structure that rewards the powerful and punishes the vulnerable. It’s about making sure we never build the solidarity necessary to challenge the system itself.

But we could. And maybe that’s what they fear most.

Because the truth is, antisemitism and racism are tools of the same machine, designed to keep us isolated, suspicious, and divided. When we buy into those divisions, we lose the chance to fight back together. But when Jews, immigrants, Black folks, brown folks, queer folks, and all marginalized people recognize how our struggles are linked, we become powerful. That’s the kind of solidarity the system fears most.

So I’m going to keep asking the question. And I hope you’ll ask it with me. Because when we ask hard questions together, we begin to see the outlines of a different world—a world rooted not in exploitation, but in dignity and fairness.