Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
Sociology
Advisor
Carolina Bank Muñoz
Committee Members
Charles Post
Ruth Milkman
Shirley Lung
Subject Categories
Food Studies | Inequality and Stratification | Labor Economics | Political Economy | Politics and Social Change | Sociology
Keywords
labor rights, Taylorism, immigrant workers, immigration regimes, racialization, capitalist state, undocumented immigrants.
Abstract
In this study I analyze the way two qualitatively different companies in New York City’s restaurant sector implemented repressive immigration regimes to drive conditions below legal standards and engage in superexploitation. The immigration regime concept (Bank Muñoz, 2008) refers to a power dynamic in workplaces where immigration policy functions as a hidden labor policy, limiting workers’ rights, their social and political standing, and their labor market options. Under immigration regimes specific kinds of work and people are racialized as “immigrant” or “illegal” so that management can impose harsher conditions. Management actively manipulates these dynamics to divide and control workers. Building on the idea that immigration regimes are a response to the dynamics of capitalist competition, I hypothesized that different levels of capital-intensity, which shape companies’ competitive models, would lead them to adopt qualitatively different regimes. I found that Saigon Grill - an independently owned low capital-intensity Asian fusion restaurant - created an immigration regime I call Vulgar Criminalization based on the straightforward racialization of specific populations of new immigrants as “illegal.” Under Vulgar Criminalization Saigon Grill flagrantly violated labor laws and deployed arbitrary, punitive and illegal managerial techniques. In contrast, Domino’s Pizza New York (DPNY) – a high-tech, capital-intensive franchise of the fast-food multinational Domino's Pizza, Inc. (DP) -- developed a different sort of immigration regime. Under what I term Taylorist Idealization, DPNY outwardly racialized immigrant workers as ideal employees who were better suited than the U.S.-born for its Taylorized and scientifically managed labor process which was intense and dehumanizing. Under Taylorist Idealization DPNY attempted to skirt the letter of the law and to camouflage and sanitize systematic wage theft imposed on undocumented immigrants. In both settings workers overcame deterrents imposed by immigration law and class relations and organized. They exercised civil rights and invoked legal protections, but their right to organize was undermined by immigration law which demarcated them as part of a politically coerced underclass of undocumented labor. Their struggles exposed the normally hidden anatomy and inner workings; the vulnerabilities, defenses and weapons; and the common systemic roots of these contrasting immigration regimes.
Recommended Citation
Antush, John C., "The Undocumented Underclass: How New York City Restaurants Maintain Superexploitation" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6218
Included in
Food Studies Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Labor Economics Commons, Political Economy Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons
