| Abstrakt: |
Based on interviews and fieldwork in a migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, this article examines the phenomenon of 'identity masking' and its implications for workers' labor conditions. It shows that labor supervisors often take advantage of unauthorized migrants' and minors' legal ineligibility for employment by making their employment contingent upon working a set of loaned identity documents. In doing so, employers render these groups 'ghost workers'-that is, they simultaneously obscure their presence from the state and federal governments while benefitting from the wage deductions associated with such prohibited workers' labor. By calling attention to on-the-ground practices of document circulation, this article thus critiques the charges of 'identity theft' often levied against unauthorized migrants during worksite raids. Yet the common practice of 'identity masking' not only directly benefits supervisors as individuals, but also makes injured 'ghost workers' disappear. As employers wield the threat of implicating such workers in 'identity theft' to suppress their workers' compensation claims, this article illustrates the implications of the trend towards 'governing immigration through crime' (Dowling and Inda 2013) on the migrant labor force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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