The Complicity Contract: How Every American Becomes an Exploiter
"Retribution is seductive like that, promising a clean line between good and evil.
But it’s an illusion.
I know because I felt its pull.
After losing my son, I…
I cradled vengeance like a second grief.
A sacred companion.
I told myself a story about right and wrong.
About punishing the guilty.
Nile smelled my bloodlust and midwifed that story into being.
He soaked up my rage and, like some dark angel, made manifest a wish too horrible to name, leaving another mother to grieve her son.
Another rage to grow unchecked.
Vengeance birthing vengeance.
A wound… that never heals.
I am complicit in this cycle.
My hands are far from clean." -Aggie, The Beast in Me
Imagine a situation where you lived in the world of the Hunger Games or the Long Walk, where we, as a society, pit kids against each other to the death.
It seems rather absurd that something like that could actually happen. But the reality is that those horrifying developments don't just suddenly happen; modern societies build up into them so that by the time they happen, they are normalized, and people are adjusted to them.
Let's make this connection more relevant.
Sometime in the last few years, a friend was grateful for me speaking up about the current American crisis, particularly because of how it's caused so many people in my community to alienate me. He posed the question: if he had lived during the civil rights era, would he have gone along with segregation and excluded black Americans from his business? What about slavery in the South? Would we have become the villains in the story, or would he have stood up against them?
This article is an exploration of this idea: that if we embrace the ideology of an issue, we will move towards its logical end unless we change how we see it.
What may have seemed unfathomable becomes something we embrace wholeheartedly. Often, an ideology on the surface can seem like common sense, but at its logical end, we discover how deeply problematic it is at the core (which often involves blind spots).
Many Americans, particularly those in my political party (Republicans), hold many of these problematic ideologies.
My previous analysis revealed that the punitive path is morally self-destructive and economically irrational. The core question of the immigration debate isn't about policy; it's about integrity. But here’s the brutal truth we need to face: The crisis doesn't stop at philosophical disagreement. The real danger lies in the logical conclusion of the punitive worldview.
By failing to repair a structurally corrupt system, the American citizen—regardless of political flag or affiliation—enters into a Complicity Contract.
This contract begins with passive benefit—you enjoy the profits of exploitation—but its structural logic inevitably demands active participation in moral corrosion, sacrificing integrity and civil liberties in return.
The contract is hard to resist, but the cost is also too high. Let's explore.
1. The Economics of the Hidden Subsidy (The Silent Contract)
If you have enjoyed inexpensive food, quick home repairs, or services at a highly competitive rate, you are likely participating in the Complicity Contract of our immigration system. The low-cost life Americans cherish is a hidden subsidy funded not simply by superior economics, but by the legal vulnerability of the undocumented worker.
The acceptance of this subsidy, in exchange for moral silence, is the primary transaction.
The Cost of Conscience
"It's a really complicated thing to be both a victim and a perpetrator." - Allison Mack
Why would anyone participate in exploitation?
The temptation is the psychological core of the Complicity Contract: rejecting the moral cost is difficult because the immediate, tangible benefit is so strong. This is no different than asking, Why pay for a movie ticket when you can simply watch a pirated version of the movie for free? It mirrors the insidious draw of cheap goods produced by historical slave labor.
The American economy is addicted to labor pools that cannot demand fair wages. You, the citizen, are simultaneously the aggrieved victim of chaos and the primary beneficiary of this moral imbalance:
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In Agriculture, Undocumented workers account for up to 70% of crop labor in some sectors. This dependence artificially suppresses the cost of food, transferring the cost of conscience directly to the consumer's grocery bill.
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In Construction: With 20-30% of the workforce undocumented, cheap labor keeps housing prices lower.
The Complicity Contract is sealed when the consumer accepts the lower price, and the worker pays the difference with their unprotected labor and perpetual fear.
If you accept the subsidy, you are an active participant in the Systemic Addiction (which is all of us) that helps fuel the entire broken system.
2. The Psychology of Active Exploitation (The Moral Leverage)
Our broken immigration system is designed to decentralize corruption. It grants the individual citizen the power to weaponize state force for personal gain, revealing the raw moral failure enabled by Legalistic Absolutism.
The Temptation of Leverage
When the state creates vast legal vulnerability, it creates the perfect condition for individual moral failure.
The law stops being a tool for order and becomes a one-sided tool for the powerful.
The power imbalance created by the lack of migrant documentation is the ultimate leverage. The citizen is tempted to become its enforcer of the power imbalance for their personal profit.
The Ultimate Betrayal
The most grotesque examples prove this exploitation is fully decentralized. Large businesses are typically constrained by long-term labor needs and reputation, forcing them to balance ethics and profit. However, individuals remodeling their homes can maximize the short-term, zero-sum game: we are now seeing documented cases of individuals hiring immigrant contractors to do necessary work on their homes and then, upon completion of the job, calling ICE to detain the workers to avoid paying wages.
This cynical, short-term theft often evolves into a long-term problem: many people who start by exploiting workers for a home project then adopt this low-cost model as the foundation for starting a new business.
As Carolyn Hinds observes about this moral degeneration: "It's an evil and predatory way to exploit others." This act transforms the citizen from a passive consumer into an active exploiter, weaponizing the U.S. government's enforcement arm as a personalized debt collector.
This is the final, cynical violation of the "Rule of Law," using the law not for order, but for outright theft. The worker is first leveraged and exploited for their contribution, and then they are summarily ejected, losing their participatory ownership in the economy they helped build. If you accept the "free" labor and then call the cops, you have betrayed the ethical foundation of civil society.
3. The Logical Conclusion (The Informant Society)
"But you made sure he’d never forgive himself. And rather than ask yourself what that means or how that feels, you need to find someone to blame. It’s what you do. Always. You’d rather invent a murder than look in the g-d--mn mirror." - Shelley, the Beast In Me
Where does Legalistic Absolutism lead? It leads to a society of collaborators. The machine built to police the border inevitably turns inward to police the citizen. The defense of the nation becomes the destruction of civil liberties.
The Training Ground
We must remember that the expansion of state power was not born of pure malice, but out of a popular, post-9/11 demand for absolute security. In the name of protecting sovereignty and preventing future harm, the public passively accepted an expanded surveillance state and the erosion of due process. This act of giving up personal freedom for perceived safety laid the foundation for everything that followed.
The act of calling the ICE tip line on a contractor or a neighbor—reporting a vulnerable person for a civil violation—normalizes denunciation. This creates a culture of collaborators essential for authoritarian control.
As Heidi N. Moore warns, drawing historical parallels: "This is exactly how the persecution of Jews in Europe happened, by the way: Denouncements by resentful neighbors who called the authorities to take people away to concentration camps... A society run on collaborators and informants leads only in one direction: Fascism." I would also add that German citizens profited from plundering their Jewish neighbors' assets in this process.
The mechanism perfected against the undocumented worker (the informant tip line) is a social technology of control, preparing the citizenry to accept its application against dissent. As Daniel Boguslaw reflects on the current state, "Imagine that now happening to anyone opposing the current administration."
The Final Enemy
This transition isn't just theory. The expansion of surveillance powers, evidenced by the leaked FBI memo, proves that the enemy is no longer just the person who crossed the border.
The memo reveals that the FBI has been directed to compile a list of American "extremists" and establish a bounty fund for tipsters who report them. The system built to police the civil status of the immigrant is now being repurposed to police the political beliefs of the citizen.
The Rule-Obsessed Citizen's anxiety leads not to a secure nation, but to a state where the unassimilated person is defined by their thought, not their geography. The Legalistic Absolutism ideology, unchecked by conscience or prudence, leads inevitably to a totalitarian state where the final enemy is the citizen who refuses to comply with the ruling ideology.
"We are, all of us, drawn to monsters. We flirt with death to prove we're truly alive. And if we can't stop, then that small fire we lit might just burn the whole house down with us still inside" - Aggie, The Beast In Me
Conclusion: Reclaiming Integrity
The Complicity Contract is a moral trap. It offers the citizen cheap goods and the comfort of externalizing blame, but it demands their moral integrity and, eventually, their freedom as payment. The only escape from this contract is not to retreat into isolation, but to demand the Restorative Justice framework—the toughest, most practical choice:
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Reject the Subsidy: Acknowledge the debt and accept that a moral economy requires fair wages and predictable prices. End the demand for the hidden, cheap-labor subsidy.
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Demand Accountability: Shift the burden of enforcement away from the citizen and local police, focusing ruinous penalties entirely on the corporate executives who engineer the exploitation.
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Restore Agency: Grant Contractual Rectification to the long-term, contributing worker, converting an economic liability into a full, tax-paying member of the community.
The ultimate patriotic duty is not to defend the lie that corrupts us all, but to reclaim our moral destiny as an Immigration Nation—a nation that thrives because of its deeper, richer flavor. This is the only system where the pursuit of order is guided by the ethical mandate of justice.
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