I Clean Homes & Drive for DoorDash. Migrants Are Taking Our Jobs | Opinion

As a working-class American who drives for DoorDash, I was paying attention to the Democratic National Convention to see if they had some ideas for how to make my life easier. Everything is so hard right now. With grocery prices what they are, the cost of rent and gas, we struggle every month to cover all of our bills—and that’s with taking on extra work cleaning homes and babysitting. I was especially eager to hear about immigration, which has had an impact on the industries I work in in a big way. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of policy that I heard that would help.
It’s disappointing that the party that says it’s for the people has so little to offer us.
Working-class Americans have been a gold mine for America. We have been and are what keeps America running and alive. Everyone seemed to understand this during the COVID-19 pandemic, that we were essential workers. We worked through the crisis while upper-class Americans sat at home safe and sound. We kept America going—and we are still doing it.
But what did we get as thanks? A wide open border and an influx of immigrants who came here illegally who have streamed into our industries, lowering our wages and increasing competition for the industries we labor in which are already at the bottom of the wage spectrum.
I have seen undocumented immigrants using fraudulent credentials, AI generated credentials, and just stolen identities to get employment. As far as I can tell, America has no policy or procedure to identify fraudulent credentials.
How is that possible? How can people come and take work from struggling Americans like that, and no one does anything about it?
How is E-Verify not part of every employer’s onboarding process?
One thing we DoorDashers and Uber Eats and other Uber drivers have been noticing is undocumented immigrants on delivery apps. DoorDash requires your name, social security number, birthday, and driver’s license photo uploaded on the app so they can run a background check on drivers, given that we deliver to parks, schools, and people’s homes. But we’ve all seen accounts being approved with fraudulent credentials, AI generated ones, and stolen identities.
We’re not the only ones to notice. We hear it all the time from the businesses we pick up from. And I recently spoke to a police officer doing a shift on school grounds who told me about two incidents with illegal DoorDash drivers using someone else’s account.
This is not just added competition to those of us already struggling to make ends meet. It’s dangerous to anyone ordering from a delivery service and having it brought to their home or job.
But it’s also having a very real impact on my income, which has significantly shrank over the last year. I used to be able to make $100 a day working 8 or 10 hours. Now it’s down to $60. It sure feels like the additional competition is why I’m getting so many fewer orders.
It’s not just the delivery apps where it’s happening. I have my own cleaning business, which is also becoming much harder to keep afloat, because I charge a little more than an undocumented immigrant charges for the same service. Customers would rather allow an undocumented immigrant to take the job and pay $25 less so they can keep that $25 in their pocket, while I charge that extra 25 because I pay my taxes at the end of the year. I’ve lost several clients for this reason, and I have friends facing the same problem.
I unfortunately didn’t grow up with the option to go to college and get a degree. I didn’t have skilled trades training available to me for free. I work as hard as I can in the industries open to me. And yet for some reason, our government has decided that people like me don’t matter, that our jobs aren’t “real jobs” and that it’s OK to flood the market with a glut of illegal labor, driving down our wages and opportunities even further.
This is my reality.
You can look down on me and think I’m beneath you. I don’t care. I do what I have to do to take care of my family as I see fit. I will not feel bad or apologize for this.
But I will not just sit by and give up. I will continue to fight for my children, my family, and our working class.
Ruby Nicole Day is a 41-year old married mother. She homeschools her son and drives for DoorDash. She lives in South Lebanon, Ohio.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.