The bottom line

The complex relationships unfolding as people flow across borders in the 20th and 21st centuries hold infinite possibilities for research. In this work, we consider one aspect of our contemporary global economy—US immigration policy and its relationship to accounting disclosure. We review the processes of social discourse and accounting myth making in general, and provide a context of immigration policies in the US. Our concern, that the accounting profession presents a particular reality, focuses on how it obscures significant relationships between immigrant employment and financial reports and thus our observed muddled meaning to profit—“the bottom line”. Conventional accounting rhetoric suggests that the bottom line represents appropriate business transactions, successful performance, and a basic “stewardship contract” fulfilled, and recent debates regarding “earnings management” lament the affront of these obligations. Yet, this conventional view obscures complex social relationships, one being the use of immigrant labor in achieving these results, and we provide evidence of some of those most deleterious effects.