In 1942, the U.S. government launched the Bracero Program, a temporary labor agreement that brought over four million Mexican workers into American fields and factories. They harvested the food that filled ration kits for soldiers and kept wartime industries humming. Most returned home with little more than calloused hands and dreams half-fulfilled. Decades later, their descendants remain tangled in a system that still invites labor but denies belonging.
That contradiction, welcoming the work while rejecting the worker, never faded. It has only grown more sophisticated, more punitive, and more invisible. Today, it is found in the kitchen worker paid below minimum wage, because he fears ICE more than hunger. It’s in the mother who remains in an abusive marriage because her legal status is held hostage by her spouse. And it’s in the thousands of families who carry the weight of American prosperity on their backs while walking a legal tightrope with no net.
This is the world that Hillary Walsh sees every day. As an immigration lawyer and founder of New Frontier Immigration Law, she has spent the past six years challenging the quiet cruelty of this system, one survivor, one family, one courtroom at a time.
A Country Built But Not Owned
America was not merely shaped by immigrants. It was built by them, often with broken hands and uncertain futures. Every industry, from agriculture to aerospace, relies on the labor of people who do not yet have the legal permission to belong.
Undocumented immigrants contribute over $11 billion in taxes annually. They are overrepresented in frontline sectors such as caregivers, janitors, and kitchen workers, jobs considered essential during the COVID-19 pandemic and invisible thereafter. And yet, they remain among the most vulnerable to exploitation, deportation, and silence.
“We serve people who keep this country running but are told they don’t exist,” says Walsh. “The myth is that immigrants are here to take. The truth is they’ve been giving all along.”
The Price of Silence
If America were to strip itself of its immigrant population, the consequences would not be confined to economic charts. Hospitals would see fewer nurses. Classrooms would lose their bilingual aides. Construction sites would slow, farms would fail, and family-owned restaurants would shutter. But what’s more alarming, more morally bankrupt, is what that absence would say about the country’s values.
It would be a country that rewards fear over courage, compliance over compassion. A country that forgets its own origin story, one of arrival and reinvention. In losing immigrants, America would not just lose labor. It would lose memory.
At New Frontier, where Walsh and her team have served over 4,000 clients, the stories tell the truth better than any statistic. There’s Carla, who endured years of domestic violence because her husband controlled her immigration status. There’s Roberto and Ana, parents who walked on eggshells in their own home, threatened by their U.S.-born child to be reported to ICE. These aren’t exceptions. They are the rule.
Each VAWA application filed, each T visa granted, is a footnote in a broader saga: people surviving systems designed not to protect them but to erase them.
America’s Selective Amnesia
The current immigration debate is not really about the law. It is about identity, about who gets to be considered American and who is permanently cast as foreign, regardless of how long they’ve lived here, what taxes they’ve paid, or whom they’ve raised.
Legislation continues to shift in ways that emphasize punishment over integration. Daily arrest quotas are now under discussion in some states. Detention facilities are expanding. Even international student enrollment has dropped significantly, threatening the $40 billion industry that higher education has become.
Still, most immigrants press forward, not because they are naive, but because they believe in America more than America believes in itself.
“Our clients don’t postpone their dreams because of tariffs or politics,” Walsh says. “They live as if their freedom is urgent. Because it is.”
Dignity Is Not a Favor
It’s tempting, especially in policy circles, to frame immigration in terms of what’s deserved. But dignity is not a favor. It is not earned by years of labor or quantified by tax contributions. It is inherent. And yet, the American immigration system too often treats it as conditional.
This is why trauma-informed care in legal practice matters. This is why Walsh built her firm not just around court filings but around healing. The survivors who walk through her doors are not simply cases to be won; they are lives to be restored.
Her TED Talk, Captives Among Us, pulls back the curtain on how U.S. immigration law perpetuates abuse, especially within households where legal status becomes a weapon. It is a harrowing watch, not because the stories are rare, but because they are common and ignored.
A Future Reimagined
So, what does an America without immigrants look like?
It looks like fewer hands in our harvests. It looks like emptier classrooms. It looks like stalled innovation, silenced stories, and the erosion of the very values we claim to defend.
But more tragically, it looks like a nation that has turned its back on its own reflection.
Walsh doesn’t want pity for her clients. She wants the truth. She wants this country to see who undocumented immigrants really are: parents, workers, survivors, and believers. People who have risked everything not to break the law, but to live free under it.
“I want to change how America sees undocumented people,” she says. “Not as foreigners. But as neighbors.”
In the end, the real question isn’t what happens if we lose immigrants. It’s what happens if we keep pretending we never needed them in the first place.
