Hiring to Displace: How Employers Use Legal Status to Reshape Workplace Power

Legal status is not just context, and its relevance is not confined to ethnic niches. It functions as a managerial instrument of workplace governance within large and complex organizations. I develop the concept of orchestrated racialized displacement to specify how organizations transform legal status vulnerability into managerial control under a race-neutral compliance veneer. Based on a multiyear ethnography of Southern manufacturing, nearly 300 interviews, and archival research, I trace four interlocking levers: (1) staffing agency partnerships, (2) selective verification, (3) performance metrics that reward speed and compliance, and (4) job redesign. Together, these practices are deployed to recruit and retain Latino immigrant workers without federal work authorization and establish a credible threat regime that reallocates tasks, shifts, and promotions; discipline U.S.-born workers; and narrow mobility ladders, with disproportionate effects on Black workers. By linking shopfloor routines to organizational partnerships and local labor markets, the analysis clarifies why standard accounts (network effects, “race-neutral” HR, or shifts in demand) are incomplete. The framework identifies the organizational levers, rather than just the outcomes, through which firms remake internal labor markets. It also formalizes a meso-level account connecting managerial practice to durable segmentation.