More on #51
How Trump’s deportation plan could actually increase migrant labor
The new administration will be forced to provide more visas to keep food flowing to stores
The U.S. food system is propped up by low-wage immigrant workers from farm to table. From California’s strawberry fields to Florida’s orange orchards,
at least 70 percent of the agricultural workers who harvest our crops were born outside the U.S. In our meatpacking plants, nearly half of the people who slaughter, cut and package beef, pork and poultry were born elsewhere. And
over a quarter of the truck drivers who shuttle cows to slaughterhouses and steaks to supermarkets are foreign-born, too.
While many of these workers are undocumented —
about 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, for instance — research suggests that a majority of them are legal immigrants. In 2020, the total number of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, a designation for immigrants from countries with unsafe conditions to reside and work legally in the United States, was just over 406,000. At that time,
more than 76,000 of those immigrants — nearly 19 percent — were employed in the food industry. But the Trump administration has promised to crack down on documented and undocumented immigrants alike. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan is considering
creating a “hotline” so residents can
report undocumented people. The new administration is expected to
try to end TPS protections and has flirted with
stripping naturalized citizens of their status. The food industry’s immigrant workforce is massive, and the administration has put it squarely in its crosshairs.
If the Trump administration follows through on its most ambitious mass deportation plans, who exactly will replace these essential workers? According to several high-ranking members of Trump’s incoming administration, Americans will. In an interview with
The New York Times last year, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller
claimed that the jobs held by deported workers would be filled by U.S. citizens, “who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.” Vice President JD Vance has made
similar arguments.
The opposite is likely to happen.
Labor organizers, public interest attorneys and labor economists we have interviewed believe that rather than improving the quality of food industry jobs to attract more American-born workers, employers will continue hiring low-wage immigrants. And the real development that we expect? The Trump administration will provide food industry employers with low-wage immigrant workers by expanding the existing H-2 visa program. While this would be a boon for employers, this expanded H-2 workforce would likely be more vulnerable to abuse than many of the undocumented workers, asylum recipients and other immigrants it would be replacing. And potentially, this change would also come at American workers’ expense.
The H-2 programs, which were implemented in their current form during the ....
The U.S. food system is propped up by low-wage immigrant workers from farm to table. From California’s strawberry fields to Florida’s orange orchards, at least 70 percent of the agricultural workers…
thefern.org
www.foxnews.com
