Nearly 45% of all agricultural workers in the U.S. today–950,000 of an estimated 2.2 million farmworkers–are “unauthorized” migrants working illegally on American farms and ranches.
All would be deported under the plan former President Donald Trump has been trumpeting since before securing the Republican nomination for president in July.
One state hit devastatingly hard by what candidate Trump calls the“largest deportation effort in history” would be America’s Dairyland, Wisconsin, a “purple state” both he and Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris hope to win in November.
Trump’s deportation plan, however, could push Wisconsin toward Harris because a 2023 University of Wisconsin survey found that “an estimated 70% of the labor on [the state’s] dairy farms” is performed by “more than 10,000 undocumented migrant workers.”
As such, “Wisconsin farmers are heavily dependent on this unauthorized workforce. Without them, the whole dairy industry would collapse overnight.”
Not might, not could, and not may but would–as in “It would collapse.”
Wisconsin isn’t alone. According to the National Milk Producers Federation, “Immigrant labor accounts for 51% of all dairy labor, and dairies that employ immigrant labor produce 79% of the U.S. milk supply.”
That means the Trump deportation plan would have immediate, catastrophic effects on U.S. fluid milk and dairy products markets and imperil dairy farmers that deliver four out of every five gallons of milk 24/7/365.
California agriculture–with an ever-unmet labor need for its massive vegetable-, nut-, and fruit-growing sectors–is home to roughly one-third to one-half of all U.S farmworkers. Equally important, “Approximately 75% of (them) are undocumented,” according to the Center for Farmworker Families.
Deporting hundreds of thousands of seasonal farmworkers would quickly shut down the giant fresh garden and orchard that California, the largest food producing state in the U.S., is to the nation and the world.
A similar number of undocumented workers in California–again, like almost every other state – “work in construction, hospitality, and retail,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “industries that already suffer from severe labor shortages.”
That’s a hard truth Trump and his political allies never talk about: Deporting all, most, or even a small number of these laborers doesn’t mean those now-open jobs will be filled by unemployed Americans as implied by the former president.
“The vast economic research on this question,” Natasha Sarin, a Yale University professor recently told U.S. News, “suggests just the opposite … GDP would actually fall and inflation would rise under Trump’s plan.”
Unlike the deportation plan, there’s ample research to support Sarin’s claim. Just last year a University of Colorado professor, Chloe East, published a “comprehensive study on the impact of deportations. She concluded that deporting 1 million immigrants would result in 88,000 lost jobs.”
The key reason for the job loss is the American labor force isn’t static, it’s dynamic; jobs are deeply interconnected across industries. For example, hiring undocumented workers to do basic construction tasks–like setting concrete forms–often frees a more skilled craftsperson or machine operator to move into higher-paying jobs.
That also means losing the unskilled, lower-paid worker to, say, federally forced deportation, leads to delays, increased costs, and skilled labor having to slide down into the lower-paying, less skilled jobs. In short, it’s a bad bet for everyone–including the overall U.S. economy.
The Congressional Budget Office, reported the Washington Post, calculated the U.S. labor force will likely grow by 5.2 million people and $7 trillion by 2033 “thanks especially to net immigration …”
That’s trillions, with a T, if we spend our time and money figuring out how to keep today’s already here, already trained, already working migrant laborers in the U.S., not billions to send them elsewhere.
Alan Guebert is an agricultural journalist who was raised on an Illinois dairy farm and worked as a writer and senior editor at Professional Farmers of America and Successful Farming magazine and is now a contributing editor to Farm Journal magazine. Guebert and his daughter Mary Grace Foxwell co-wrote “The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey: Memories from the Farm of My Youth” [University of Illinois Press, 2015]. See past columns, supporting documents, and contact information at farmandfoodfile.com
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024
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