Behind the Restaurant Meal Delivery Industry, there is a Black Market Exploiting Illegal Foreign Labor

If you are having restaurant food “dashed” to your residence, there is a very good chance that the person delivering your meal is part of a black market of non-citizen labor, illegally subcontracted by the actual “independent contractor” of Door Dash, Uber Eats, and the like.

Two years ago, the New York Times published a highly sympathetic article about this industry, focusing on the awful plight of illegal immigrants dumped in Ney York City but not eligible to work, and how sub-contracted food delivery provides a source of income. All the same, the Times did acknowledge the exploitation of this illegal workforce, documenting the financial arrangement under which Venezuelan “migrant” Mayco Milano operated. Specifically, the business model under which Mr. Milano delivers food is:

• An unlicensed moped is rented for $400 per week from a black-market moped broker.

• Login access to an Uber Eats account is rented for $150 per week from “Jessica.”

• Mr. Milano works long hours, 7 days a week, delivering food throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. The commission before tip is about $4 per delivery.

• At $550 per week for the combined rent of the moped and Uber Eats login, divided by the $4 commission per delivery, it takes about 135 food deliveries per week before Mr. Milano breaks even.

• “Jessica” is the one getting paid by Uber Eats. She then pays Mr. Milano and her other subs in cash, after taking her administrative fee for subcontracting her Uber Eats login to them. Not every “Jessica” reliably pays their subs, however, and the subs obviously have no recourse when Jessica pockets their earnings.

A few weeks ago, Pirate Wires published a sobering article by Sagnik Basu that details the extent of the exploitation of people such as Mayco Milano, while also shaming the smug consumers who believe they are the good guys for providing a living to off-the-books food dashers. This article was subsequently re-published by The Free Press, but the Pirate Wires version is not behind a paywall:

“Abolish ICE! (So You Can Get Your $10 Burrito at Midnight); Migrants keep yuppies fed while liberals romanticize the hustle of their tired African burrito messengers, ignoring the exploitation going on behind the scenes” [Pirate Wires – Sagnik Basu – 10/20/2025]

This is one of those “read every word” articles, which I encourage you to do, but here are a few pull quotes:

Walk through Midtown at night and the story writes itself. Gas-powered mopeds idle in clusters outside the Roosevelt Hotel, their headlights cutting through steam from the street vents. Riders sit slumped over paper cups of coffee, helmets at their feet. Upstairs, people in $4,000/month apartments track their Uber Eats orders on their phones: “Your Thai curry is six minutes away.” Everyone in this city knows what’s going on. We just don’t say it out loud.

Outside the Roosevelt Hotel or shelters in Queens, you can buy a complete starter kit: moped, helmet, insulated bag, and Uber Eats login — “todo junto,” all together. Ads circulate through WhatsApp groups and Facebook Marketplace targeting Venezuelan and Guinean migrants. It’s an informal franchise system that works because everyone involved is desperate enough to honor it.

Most riders are paid in cash. There are no 1099s, no payroll records, no worker’s comp when they crash on wet pavement. The city forfeits tax revenue; the companies forfeit liability; the riders forfeit everything.

What we call the “gig economy” is, in practice, a debt-and-fear economy — one that goes unchallenged in hyper-progressive places like NYC precisely because liberals have redefined “compassion” as ignoring the law.

The young professional who tweets “abolish ICE” orders pad thai at 11 p.m. from a rider whose entire existence depends on ICE looking the other way. They think guilt-tipping 35 percent makes them virtuous. But it’s just exploitation offset by sentiment.

If Uber Eats or DoorDash can build billion-dollar machine-learning models to predict delivery times, they can build one to verify who’s actually delivering.

This will come with costs. When you close the pipeline of illegal labor, prices will rise. Fewer $10 burritos at 11 p.m. More delivery fees. More friction. Good. Because that’s the real price of legality. If we want a humane system, it has to be lawful first. You have to enforce the border, punish exploitation, and end the moral outsourcing that lets you feel good while someone else breaks the law for you.

If compassion means preserving a shadow economy of fear, debt, and exhaustion, then it’s not compassion at all. It’s exploitation wrapped in virtue.

Coincidentally, just a few days after publication of the Pirate Wire piece, Culper Research issued a devastating research opinion to investors about Door Dash’s business model, while also advising that Culper was taking a short position in Door Dash stock (meaning they expect the stock price to drop). Per Culper Research’s website, Culper is a watchdog that seeks “to expose companies which have misrepresented their operations, failed to disclose significant risks, misused capital, possess accounting irregularities, or otherwise deceived investors.”

Below this tweet from Culper, I’ll spotlight a few key quotes and findings from their 29-page Research Opinion about Door Dash.

“DoorDash: Unauthorized Dasher ‘Backdooring’ Scheme Props Up Delivery Operations, Undermines Safety, and Unravels as Immigration Enforcement Widens” [Culper Research – 10/23/2025]

We are short DoorDash, Inc. (“DASH”, “the Company”), the largest app-based food delivery company in the U.S. Based on our extensive research, we believe DoorDash has quietly onboarded unauthorized and unvetted contract workers at a scale that is both unprecedented in U.S. corporate history and unique to the Company.

In late 2021, DoorDash quietly dropped delivery courier (“Dasher”) SSN requirements and created an industry-unique “backdoor” to onboard unauthorized workers via individual taxpayer ID numbers (“ITINs”). We estimate unauthorized Dashers have since become responsible for 26% to 57% of Company-wide deliveries.

Regulators are cracking down. An “unprecedented” April 2025 ICE/IRS partnership now puts ITIN holders and their employers in federal crosshairs. DoorDash also appears to be subject to an undisclosed SEC investigation, per a July 2025 Freedom of Information Act request.

DoorDash portrays Dashing as a “side hustle” opportunity for everyday Americans, but we believe the Company’s business has become predicated on this core group of effectively full-time, unauthorized Dashers.

Meanwhile, DoorDash’s own public data implies that in Q4 2022, just 12% of Dashers were responsible for 50% of deliveries.

In May 2025, DoorDash was sued by a former Security Engineer, who alleges that he was fired after finding “hundreds of [Dasher] identities tied to shared residential addresses” that were “linked to a broad spectrum of criminal activity including identity theft, financial fraud, robbery, and tax evasion.”

In sum, we believe DoorDash has been uniquely able to tap into a completely new labor market – millions of individuals arriving in America who are desperate to work, unable to qualify for employment, and will work for less than minimum wage. Only by exploiting this labor pool is DoorDash able to operate profitably.

These are some pretty serious allegations, and if not true, Culper would be making itself liable for defamation. But its research paper is thorough, detailed, and rigorously footnoted as to the data it uses to make its opinions.

Door Dash stock has dropped about 30% since this report came out a month ago.

I have never used Uber Eats, Door Dash, Grub Hub, or any similar businesses, so I have no experiences to relate. I also do not know whether illegal subcontracted labor is foundational to their business model, or if it’s simply a predictable consequence of a vast network of “independent contractors” finding it profitable to franchise their Contractor Agreements to an illegal workforce.

What I do know is that when millions of illegal foreign nationals who may not legally work in this country are dumped into American cities, a black market for their labor will naturally develop. Whether it’s intentional or not, it is disgraceful that illegal, black-market labor is the retail face of publicly traded companies in the year 2025.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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