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.

Most of those men on mopeds are recent arrivals from Venezuela, Ecuador, or West Africa. Many crossed the southern border and landed here by bus. They aren’t legally allowed to work, but they are — because the city’s appetite demands it. Their labor is the hidden metabolism of New York.

We pretend not to see what’s really going on here. We invent myths to make it bearable.

The first myth is Mamadou — the super-rider of TikTok lore, the lightning-fast courier who seems to deliver to everyone at once. New Yorkers post videos of orders “by Mamadou” and write songs about him, calling him “the hardest-working man in New York City.”

As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Mamadou” isn’t one man at all, but dozens of West African couriers who share the same first name. Turning them into a meme lets New Yorkers feel virtuous compassion and solidarity without confronting the exploitation they can’t see (more on that later).

The second myth is the individual tragedy — the sympathetic figure we meet in profiles and quickly forget. The New York Times followed one, Mayco Milano, a Venezuelan father who pays $400 a week to rent an unlicensed moped and another $150 to borrow a stranger’s Uber Eats login. After 12-hour days, seven days a week, he clears barely $300. When police seize his bike — as they have more than 7,000 times to various delivery drivers this year, according to Fox 5 NY — he loses his livelihood overnight but still owes the broker.

This is not just a New York phenomenon, and Milano’s story is not an exception. It’s the business model.

The Shadow Economy We Choose Not to See

Bike rentals on the black market
Most migrant riders don’t own their vehicles. They lease them from small-time brokers for $300 to $500 a week, cash. Many bikes lack registration or insurance. The New York Post found that one broker can control dozens, collecting envelopes of cash every Friday. When the NYPD conducts sweeps, the owners simply replace confiscated bikes and raise the rent.

Account rentals and identity sharing
The apps don’t hire migrants directly. They require a Social Security number and a verified bank account. So a parallel market emerged: someone with legal status opens an account, verifies their ID, then rents out their login. The Post reports that migrants pay between $100 and $200 every two weeks — sometimes $500 a month — to deliver under someone else’s name. When customers tip through the app, the money lands in the legal account holder’s bank. Migrants get paid later, minus a “service fee” (if the intermediary doesn’t disappear).

Ethnic and digital broker networks
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.

Debt and coercion
Many owe smugglers thousands for the trip north. One Venezuelan interviewed by the Times said he borrowed $1,500 and now owes $3,000 with interest. Another told Fox 5 NY he sends a portion of every week’s earnings back home to keep his family safe from the lender. Each confiscated bike deepens that debt.

Cash economy, no paper trail
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.

Trapped by policy
Under U.S. law, asylum applicants can’t apply for a work permit until 150 days after filing, and they must wait 180 days before the permit can be issued. The gap ensures months of illegal labor.

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 Comfort of Liberal Myths

The average New York progressive doesn’t like ICE raids. They think deportation is cruel and that anyone who works hard deserves safety. But that moral reflex — that instinct to equate work with worth — is exactly what sustains this exploitative system.

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. That young professional is enabling the system that put this man in $6,000 debt to his smuggler.

Enter: Zohran Mamdani

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a darling of New York’s progressive left and current frontrunner in the Mayor’s race, has proposed expanding taxpayer-funded legal aid for undocumented immigrants by more than 100 percent, from $80 million to $165 million a year. His plan would fund 200 new immigration lawyers, block any city cooperation with ICE, and “protect immigrant data from federal access.”

It’s the kind of proposal that sounds humane — who doesn’t want families to stay together? — but it cements the same moral paradox. A city that criminalizes police confiscation of illegal mopeds while subsidizing lawyers to fight deportation is not compassionate; it’s codependent. It doesn’t fix exploitation — it formalizes it, turning the underground delivery economy into an officially sanctioned one.

Progressives like Mamdani love to say “no human is illegal.” Fine. But what happens when compassion means keeping a man trapped in indentured servitude so you can have tuna rolls delivered to your door on a Wednesday night?

The “protection” liberals champion leaves migrants neither free nor legal — they can’t be deported, can’t be regularized, and can’t refuse the next $4 delivery. Every Uber lobbyist knows this. Yet they all perform the same moral theater, protecting “hardworking people” while letting them bear the cost of the country’s indecision.

The Solution

Yes, many of these workers should be deported. That’s the law. It sounds cruel because they’re visible and hardworking. They’re literally serving you food, and sending them home feels like punching down. But laws don’t lose meaning just because the violator is desperate.

That doesn’t mean you round them up in midnight raids while the rest of us eat our $72 sushi in heated $4,000/month apartments; it means you dismantle the perverse incentive structure. Cities need to start enforcing the law, beginning not with the migrants (they’re the victims here), but with the companies and brokers who profit from and incentivize illegal labor. 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.

Until that happens, the real cruelty is the status quo.

Those who decry “late capitalism” have built an underclass to serve it. See this once and you’ll see it everywhere: it’s “let them pick our blueberries” liberalism. Voters who parade their “abolish ICE” signs at the No Kings! rally rely on ICE’s absence to keep their burritos (and blueberries) cheap. And cities that claim to stand for equality have created one of the most visible, unregulated hierarchies in modern America: the deliverers and the delivered to.

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.

—Sagnik Basu