Business
Undocumented Workers, Fearing Deportation, Are Staying Home
The railroad tracks that slice through downtown Freehold, N.J., used to be lined by dozens of men, waiting for work. Each morning, the men — day laborers, almost all from Latin America and undocumented — would be scooped up by local contractors in pickup trucks for jobs painting, landscaping, removing debris.
In recent weeks, the tracks have been desolate. On a gray February morning, a laborer named Mario, who came from Mexico two decades ago, said it was the quietest he could remember.
“Because of the president, we have a fear,” said Mario, 55, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that only his first name would be used because he is undocumented. His two sons are also in the United States illegally; one works in paving, the other in home construction. “We are in difficult times,” he said.
This scene has been playing out on the streets of Freehold, on the farms of California’s Central Valley, in nursing homes in Arizona, in Georgia poultry plants and in Chicago restaurants.
President Trump has broadcast plans for a “mass deportation,” and the opening weeks of his second term have brought immigration enforcement operations in cities across the United States, providing a daily drumbeat of arrests that, while so far relatively limited, are quickly noted in group chats among migrants.
Fear has gripped America’s undocumented workers. Many are staying home.
The impact is being felt not only in immigrant homes and communities, but also in the industries that rely on immigrants as a source of willing and inexpensive labor, including residential construction, agriculture, senior care and hospitality. American consumers will soon feel the pain.
“Businesses across industries know what comes next when their work force disappears — restaurants, coffee shops and grocery stores struggling to stay open, food prices soaring, and everyday Americans demanding action,” said Rebecca Shi, chief executive of the American Business Immigration Coalition.
An estimated 20 percent of the U.S. labor force is foreign born, and millions of immigrant workers lack legal immigration status.
Hundreds of thousands more have been shielded from deportation and have work permits under a program called temporary protected status, offered to nationals of countries in upheaval, which has enabled corporate giants like Amazon and large commercial builders to hire them. But Mr. Trump has already announced that he will phase out the program, starting with Venezuelan and Haitian beneficiaries.
Refugees from around the globe, who have settled in the United States after fleeing persecution, have supplied a steady pipeline of low-skilled labor for poultry plants, warehouses and manufacturing. But that pipeline could dry up since Mr. Trump shut down the U.S. refugee program. Last month, a federal judge restored it temporarily while a lawsuit is pending, but the program remains at a standstill and no refugees are arriving.
The White House did not respond to questions about the strategy of deportations and how the Trump administration envisions filling the gaps left behind by the immigrant work force.
Leaders of industries that are the most exposed warn that the impact will be widespread, with far-reaching consequences for consumers and employers.
Kezia Scales, vice president at PHI, a national research and advocacy organization focused on long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities, said her industry was already facing a “recruitment crisis.”
“If immigrants are prevented from entering this work force or are forced to leave the country by restrictive immigration policies and rhetoric,” she said, “we will face systems collapse and catastrophic consequences for millions of people who rely on these workers.”
Warning of Higher Costs
In construction, up to 19 percent of all workers are undocumented, according to independent estimates — and the share is higher in many states. Their contribution is even more pronounced in residential construction, where industry leaders have warned of an acute labor shortage.
“Any removals of construction workers is going to exacerbate that problem,” said Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Inevitably, it will slow the work, which leads to cost increases, because of the production delays.” This would have a profound impact on the construction industry and everybody involved, from developers to private homeowners, Mr. Theodore said.
In commercial construction, a tightening labor market would raise costs because of upward pressure on wages, said Zack Fritz, an economist with Associated Builders and Contractors, a national construction trade association.
The group’s chief executive, Michael D. Bellaman, said he welcomed many aspects of what he deemed Mr. Trump’s “deregulation, pro-growth agenda.” But he and others in the industry also called for an overhaul of the immigration system, including by expanding work visas.
Commercial building relies on many workers with temporary protected status, Mr. Bellaman said; some have been in the industry for decades.
The mayor of Houston, John Whitmire, said people who think his city and the country can thrive without the labor of undocumented immigrants “don’t live in the real world.”
“You know who’s paving our roads and building our houses,” said Mr. Whitmire, a Democrat.
Challenges in Elder Care
The senior care industry faces a similar challenge: growing demand for workers, and not enough native-born Americans to do the work. Those jobs have increasingly been filled by immigrants with varying legal statuses.
Adam Lampert has spent 15 years in the industry in Texas, mainly managing care for the parents of baby boomers. The business is thriving — and a silver tsunami is on the horizon, he warns: The number of adults 65 or older in the United States totaled 60 million in 2022, and is projected to exceed 80 million by 2050.
“Baby boomers are yet to wash through the system, and they will be a full new generation we will have to address,” said Mr. Lampert, the chief executive of Manchester Care Homes and Cambridge Caregivers, based in Dallas.
Some 80 percent of his caregivers are foreign born. “We don’t go out looking for people who are immigrants,” he said. “We go out hiring people who answer the call — and they are all immigrants.”
Everyone he hires has permission to lawfully work in the United States, he said, but if the mass deportations promised by Mr. Trump materialize, recruitment will become tougher in an industry already struggling with it.
There are five million people working directly with clients in what is considered the formal senior care industry, made up of those who can legally hold jobs in the United States.
In New York, two-thirds of those working in homes are foreign-born, as are nearly half in California and Maryland. Countless others take part in the vast gray market, potentially worth billions of dollars, employed by families who hire in-home aides, many of them undocumented, by word of mouth or online.
The caregivers in private homes support seniors with essential activities of daily life, helping them eat, dress, bathe and use the toilet. They escort them to doctors’ appointments and manage their medications. It is low-skill, low-pay work, but requires a certain temperament, physical strength and patience.
If tens of thousands of undocumented caregivers were deported, there would be more competition for fewer caregivers, experts say. The cost of in-home care would climb.
Often green card holders and U.S. citizens have undocumented family members, and these mixed-status families have been under strain as immigration crackdowns have intensified.
Molly Johnson, general manager of FirstLight Home Care, a licensed agency in California, has rapidly expanded her roster of caregivers to meet galloping demand since starting the business five years ago. All her workers have passed background checks, she said, and are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.
But recently, one of the standout caregivers, a native-born American, suddenly quit because her mother was detained by immigration agents. The person she cared for was distraught.
“Unfortunately, we are going to be seeing more of this trickle-down effect,” Ms. Johnson said. “If it’s not our caregiver, it’s their loved one impacted by enforcement actions.”
A Test for Growers
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the immigrant men and women employed at Deardorff Family Farms in Oxnard, Calif. — and across the country, in vast fields and food processing plants — were anointed “essential workers” by the government.
Like other growers, Tom Deardorff, who runs the vegetable farm, printed cards for his workers to show law enforcement officers, in case they were stopped on their way to the fields, declaring that the Department of Homeland Security considered them “critical to the food supply chain.” Their immigration status was not of concern.
“These people have come into our country to do this work,” said Mr. Deardorff, a fourth-generation grower. “We owe them not just ‘thank you.’ We owe them the common decency and dignity to not be threatened by government draconian penalties.”
Now, with Mr. Trump in the White House, many immigrants who harvest strawberries, vegetables and citrus in this agriculture-rich stretch of Southern California face possible detention and deportation.
The U.S. farming sector has suffered a labor shortage for decades. Immigrants, mainly from Mexico and Central America, have filled the void: Farmers say they cannot find American-born laborers to do the strenuous work. More than 40 percent of the nation’s crop workers are immigrants without legal status, according to estimates by the Department of Agriculture, yet many have lived in the United States for decades.
“The argument that some have made, from time immemorial, is that people will do these jobs if all the immigrants leave,” said Janice Fine, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. “But there is no guarantee that employers will raise wages or improve working conditions.”
She said there had been a “misunderstanding of the labor market.” The reason American citizens aren’t in the agriculture sector — or elder care, or residential construction — isn’t solely about money, she said. These jobs, she said, “are low-wage, low-status, high-exploitation unless workers organize unions.”
A three-day crackdown in California’s Central Valley in January, before Mr. Trump took office, showed the potential effects of large-scale enforcement in farming areas. Absenteeism soared after Border Patrol agents conducted sweeps in Bakersfield. They stopped and arrested people at a Home Depot, at gas stations and along a heavily trafficked route to farms, according to the Nisei Farmers League, a grower association.
Some 30 to 40 percent of workers failed to report to the fields in the days that followed, according to the league, which represents about 500 growers and packers.
Gregory K. Bovino, a Border Patrol chief in Southern California, called the operation an “overwhelming success” that resulted in the arrests of 78 people in the country illegally, including some with “serious criminal histories.” Farmworker advocates said many others without criminal records had been rounded up, too.
Bracing for More Raids
Migrants and advocacy organizations are bracing for more raids.
In Princeton, N.J., one rainy February evening, around a dozen day laborers gathered for a meeting with Resistencia en Acción, a New Jersey group focused on immigrant workers, part of a sprawling organization called the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
The workers had different immigration statuses — some had temporary protected status or other forms of protection; others were undocumented. They worked as drivers and pavers, in restaurants and in mechanic shops. One man, who worked in a window factory, said he was terrified that federal agents would come to his workplace, where dozens of other Latin American immigrants toiled. Others said they had been working fewer hours in recent weeks, out of fear.
One man, who said he worked chopping fish, fruits and vegetables for a small grocery store, wondered aloud: “What white person is going to do these jobs?”
The sale of Warner Bros. — whether in pieces to Netflix or in its entirety to Paramount — is stirring mounting worries among Hollywood union leaders about the possible fallout for their members.
Unions representing writers, directors, actors and crew workers have voiced growing concerns that further consolidation in the media industry will reduce competition, potentially causing studios to pay less for content, and make it more difficult for people to find work.
“We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends,” said Michele Mulroney, president of the Writers Guild of America West. “There are lots of promises made that one plus one is going to equal three. But it’s very hard to envision how two behemoths, for example, Warner Bros. and Netflix … can keep up the level of output they currently have.”
Last week, Netflix announced it agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and TV studio, Burbank lot, HBO and HBO Max for $27.75 a share, or $72 billion. It also agreed to take on more than $10 billion of Warner Bros.’ debt. But Paramount, whose previous offers were rebuffed by Warner Bros., has appealed directly to shareholders with an alternative bid to buy all of the company for about $78 billion.
Paramount said it will have more than $6 billion in cuts over three years, while also saying the combined companies will release at least 30 movies a year. Netflix said it expects its deal will have $2 billion to $3 billion in cost cuts.
Those cuts are expected to trigger thousands of layoffs across Hollywood, which has already been squeezed by the flight of production overseas and a contraction in the once booming TV business.
Mulroney said that employment for WGA writers in episodic television is down as much as 40% when comparing the 2023-2024 writing season to 2022-2023.
Executives from both companies have said their deals would benefit creative talent and consumers.
But Hollywood union leaders are skeptical.
“We can hear the generalizations all day long, but it doesn’t really mean anything unless it’s on paper, and we just don’t know if these companies are even prepared to make promises in writing,” said Lindsay Dougherty, Teamsters at-large vice president and principal officer for Local 399, which represents drivers, location managers and casting directors.
Dougherty said the Teamsters have been engaged with both Netflix and Paramount, seeking commitments to keep filming in Los Angeles.
“We have a lot of members that are struggling to find work, or haven’t really worked in the last year or so,” Dougherty said.
Mulroney said her union has concerns about both bids, either by Netflix or Paramount.
“We don’t think the merger is inevitable,” Mulroney said. “We think there’s an opportunity to push back here.”
If Netflix were to buy Warner Bros.’ TV and film businesses, Mulroney said that could further undermine the theatrical business.
“It’s hard to imagine them fully embracing theatrical exhibition,” Mulroney said. “The exhibition business has been struggling to get back on its feet ever since the pandemic, so a move like this could really be existential.”
But the Writers Guild also has issues with Paramount’s bid, Mulroney said, noting that it would put Paramount-owned CBS News and CNN under the same parent company.
“We have censorship concerns,” Mulroney said. “We saw issues around [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Kimmel. We’re concerned about what the news would look like under single ownership here.”
That question was made more salient this week after President Trump, who has for years harshly criticized CNN’s hosts and news coverage, said he believes CNN should be sold.
The worries come as some unions’ major studio contracts, including the DGA, WGA and performers guild SAG-AFTRA, are set to expire next year. Two years ago, writers and actors went on a prolonged strike to push for more AI protections and better wages and benefits.
The Directors Guild of America and performers union SAG-AFTRA have voiced similar objections to the pending media consolidation.
“A deal that is in the interest of SAG-AFTRA members and all other workers in the entertainment industry must result in more creation and more production, not less,” the union said.
SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the union has been in discussions with both Paramount and Netflix.
“It is as yet unclear what path forward is going to best protect the legacy that Warner Brothers presents, and that’s something that we’re very actively investigating right now,” he said.
It’s not clear, however, how much influence the unions will have in the outcome.
“They just don’t have a seat at the ultimate decision making table,” said David Smith, a professor of economics at the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School. “I expect their primary involvement could be through creating more awareness of potential challenges with a merger and potentially more regulatory scrutiny … I think that’s what they’re attempting to do.”
Businessman Brian Kahn has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud in a case that brought down a hedge fund, helped lead to the bankruptcy of a retailer and damaged West Los Angeles investment bank B. Riley Financial.
Kahn, 52, admitted in a Trenton, N.J., federal court Wednesday to hiding trading losses that brought down Prophecy Asset Management in 2020. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged the losses exceeded $400 million.
An investor lawsuit has accused Kahn of funneling some of the fund’s money to Franchise Group, a Delaware retail holding company assembled by the investor that owned Vitamin Shoppe, Pet Supplies Plus and other chains.
B. Riley provided $600 million through debt it raised to finance a $2.8-billion management buyout led by Kahn in 2023. It also took a 31% stake in the company and lent Kahn’s investment fund $201 million, largely secured with shares of Franchise Group.
Kahn had done deals with B. Riley co-founder Bryant Riley before partnering with the L.A. businessman on Franchise Group.
However, the buyout didn’t work out amid fallout from the hedge fund scandal and slowing sales at the retailers. Franchise Group filed for bankruptcy in November 2024. A slimmed-down version of the company emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
B. Riley has disclosed in regulatory filings that the firm and Riley have received SEC subpoenas regarding its dealings with Kahn, Franchise group and other matters.
Riley, 58, the firm’s chairman and co-chief executive, has denied knowledge of wrongdoing, and an outside law firm reached the same conclusion.
The failed deal led to huge losses at the financial services firm that pummeled B. Riley’s stock, which had approached $90 in 2021. Shares were trading Friday at $3.98.
The company has marked down its Franchise Group investment, and has spent the last year or so paring debt through refinancing, selling off parts of its business and other steps, including closing offices.
The company announced last month it is changing its name to BRC Group Holdings in January. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At Wednesday’s plea hearing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kelly Lyons said that Kahn conspired to “defraud dozens of investors who had invested approximately $360 million” through “lies, deception, misleading statements and material omissions.”
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp released Kahn on a $100,000 bond and set an April 2 sentencing date. He faces up to five years in prison. Kahn, his lawyer and Lyons declined to comment after the hearing.
Kahn is the third Prophecy official charged over the hedge fund’s collapse. Two other executives, John Hughes and Jeffrey Spotts, have also been charged.
Hughes pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Spotts pleaded not guilty and faces trial next year. The two men and Kahn also have been sued by the SEC over the Prophecy collapse.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
Chatty bots are sharing their hot takes through hundreds of thousands of AI-generated podcasts. And the invasion has just begun.
Though their banter can be a bit banal, the AI podcasters’ confidence and research are now arguably better than most people’s.
“We’ve just begun to cross the threshold of voice AI being pretty much indistinguishable from human,” said Alan Cowen, chief executive of Hume AI, a startup specializing in voice technology. “We’re seeing creators use it in all kinds of ways.”
AI can make podcasts sound better and cost less, industry insiders say, but the growing swarm of new competitors entering an already crowded market is disrupting the industry.
Some podcasters are pushing back, requesting restrictions. Others are already cloning their voices and handing over their podcasts to AI bots.
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett’s cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called “The Newsworthy,” let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out.
She fed her script into a text-to-speech model and selected a female AI voice from ElevenLabs to speak for her.
“I still recorded the show with my very hoarse voice, but then put the AI voice over that, telling the audience from the very beginning, I’m sick,” Mandy said.
Mandy had previously used ElevenLabs for its voice isolation feature, which uses AI to remove ambient noise from interviews.
Her chatbot host elicited mixed responses from listeners. Some asked if she was OK. One fan said she should never do it again. Most weren’t sure what to think.
“A lot of people were like, ‘That was weird,’” Mandy said.
In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content.
Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company.
Jason Saldanha of PRX, a podcast network that represents human creators such as Ezra Klein, said the tsunami of AI podcasts won’t attract premium ad rates.
“Adding more podcasts in a tyranny of choice environment is not great,” he said. “I’m not interested in devaluing premium.”
Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality.
Hume AI, which is based in New York but has a big research team in California, raised $50 million last year and has tens of thousands of creators using its software to generate audiobooks, podcasts, films, voice-overs for videos and dialogue generation in video games.
“We focus our platform on being able to edit content so that you can take in postproduction an existing podcast and regenerate a sentence in the same voice, with the same prosody or emotional intonation using instant cloning,” said company CEO Cowen.
Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content.
Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, accounting for 1% of all podcasts published on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright.
The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects.
Instead of a studio searching for a specific “hit” podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening.
“That means most of the stuff that we make, we have really an unlimited amount of experimentation and creative freedom for what we want to do,” Wright said.
One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue. “I am indeed AI-powered — which means I’ve got receipts older than your grandmother’s jewelry box, and a memory sharper than a stiletto heel on marble. No forgetting, no forgiving, and definitely no filter,” the AI discloses itself at the start of the podcast.
“We’ve kind of molded her more towards what the audience wants,” said Katie Brown, chief content officer at Inception Point, who helps design the personalities of the AI podcasters.
Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiast Nigel Thistledown.
The technology also makes it easy to get podcasts up quickly. Inception has found some success with flash biographies posted promptly in connection to people in the news. It uses AI software to spot a trending personality and create two episodes, complete with promo art and a trailer.
When Charlie Kirk was shot, its AI immediately created two shows called “Charlie Kirk Death” and “Charlie Kirk Manhunt” as a part of the biography series.
“We were able to create all of that content, each with different angles, pulling from different news sources, and we were able to get that content up within an hour,” Wright said.
Speed is key when it comes to breaking news, so its AI podcasts reached the top of some charts.
“Our content was coming up, really dominating the list of what people were searching for,” she said.
Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.
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