When Silvana arrived in New York with her husband and daughter after a nearly two-month journey from Ecuador through the jungle, she immediately started looking for a job.

At first, the 33-year-old, who was a baker back home, tried applying at restaurants and bakeries. But without a work permit or social security number, she had no luck.

“It’s a beautiful country with many opportunities,” said Silvana, who has been in New York City for a year and a half. “But there should be more opportunities for migrants without papers.”

Silvana now sells plates of rice and soup out of a white cooler outside the shelter where she lives, earning $60 for four hours of work each day. 

Silvana is one of more than 182,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, part of a historic surge in immigration to the US under President Joe Biden — an issue that has become a priority for voters in an election year.

Caught in the middle are business owners suffering from post-pandemic labour shortages and the migrants themselves, who are desperate to find work. Those who have applied for asylum must wait at least 150 days before applying for a work permit, according to federal laws.

That is after their asylum applications have been filed, a process that can take some people six months to a year, said Nuala O’Doherty-Naranjo, a lawyer at the Jackson Heights Immigration Center, whose clients are primarily fleeing gang violence in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru.

The limbo of work and legal status has pushed many migrants to informal jobs in the city’s underground economy. Popular gigs include construction work, landscaping, moving, food delivery, home cleaning and selling candy, said leaders at New York-based charities that work with migrants. Workers are paid in cash or with prepaid debit cards.

“All of them are working under the table,” said O’Doherty-Naranjo. “Everyone has got to eat so they all have to do something. I mean, do you have six months of cash not to work?”

Jesús, a 40-year-old man from Venezuela, told the Financial Times that he would wait outside a Home Depot store from 5am to 3pm for odd jobs in painting and remodelling, work that could add up to $600 or $700 a week if he worked every day.

Border security and immigration have become some of the most controversial issues in US politics. For months, Republicans held up plans for military aid to Ukraine and Israel over border policies while red states such as Texas bussed migrants to urban Democratic strongholds such as New York and Los Angeles.

According to Gallup in February, a majority of polled Americans said large numbers of immigrants entering the US illegally were a “critical threat” to the country, a record high since at least 2004.

As of March, an estimated 64,000 migrants were living in city-funded shelters but still needing to earn money for food and other necessities. Many also want to work to send money to family members in their home countries.

When asked about his plan for the future, Jesús replied: “To get what my mom and son need. That’s my future.”

Sceptics of New York’s “sanctuary city” immigration policy say the migrants’ underground labour market deprives the city of income tax revenue and took away job opportunities from native-born workers.

But economic research has shown that waves of immigration have had little impact on the wages of native-born workers.

Undocumented immigrants make up a crucial part of New York state’s economy, accounting for roughly 10 per cent of the workforce in construction, hospitality and healthcare, according to a 2023 report by the state’s Regional Economic Development Council. Undocumented immigrants in New York also contribute a significant amount in taxes — $3bn according to 2021 data estimates by the American Immigration Council.

More broadly, hundreds of business owners around the US in hospitality, construction and agriculture are petitioning federal officials to expedite work permits for migrants, saying they are eager to hire more workers.

“Simply put, there are too many jobs without enough workers to fill them,” more than 100 business groups, trade associations and chambers of commerce said in a letter last November. While several members of Congress have put forth proposals to reduce the wait time for work authorisation, none have passed.

Since the pandemic, the number of job openings in the US has jumped while the civilian labour participation rate — the percentage of the population working or actively looking for work — has only recently started to approach pre-pandemic levels. According to official figures for March, there were 8.5mn job openings in the US but only 6.4mn unemployed workers.

The current labour shortage is due to a variety of reasons, according to an analysis by the US Chamber of Commerce, including early retirement triggered by the pandemic, lack of access to childcare and an ageing workforce — a trend set to continue with younger generations having fewer children. At the same time, the population of foreign-born individuals has been increasing, though it is still far smaller than those born in the US.

New York’s hospitality industry “absolutely still needs labour,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, a trade group for the city’s restaurants and bars.

Owners regularly have to turn away migrants who walk into their restaurants asking for jobs because they lack work permits despite not being able to enough find bussers, dishwashers and line cooks to hire, Rigie added.

“There are as many restaurant jobs available for native-born workers as they want, and we are still struggling to hire,” Rigie said.

For now, New York City asylum seekers in legal limbo must scrape by through odd jobs as undocumented workers and wait for their paperwork to go through.

“Sometimes one has to find a way to sell whatever’s around — caramels, whatever’s around — to work,” said Eddie José, who came to New York from Venezuela four months ago.

Speaking to the FT at a bike rack near the midtown Manhattan shelter where he lives, the 26-year-old and half a dozen other young men were waiting to be assigned food orders to deliver on Grubhub or Uber Eats, smartphones in hand.

The apps require a social security number and annual background checks to work as a courier, but Eddie José said friends helped him find an account to use while he waited for his work permit.

An Uber spokesperson said in a statement that the company did not allow account sharing and periodically verified couriers’ identities in real time by requiring couriers to take selfies in the app.

Grubhub did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

“I would work in anything — I just want to work,” said Eddie José, who worked in construction and other jobs in Venezuela, where his four children still live. “I just want to help my family.”