President Donald Trump has big, phenomenal plans to make America great again. One pillar of that plan, Trump claimed on the campaign trail, is to bring back jobs. Another is to punish U.S. companies that move their manufacturing outside the country (especially to that wretched place just south of us), and reward those that do their work stateside. And finally, there’s Trump’s promised immigration crackdown, which became a brutal reality earlier this week, when the Department of Homeland Security issued two memos outlining its plans to hire thousands of new Border Patrol and ICE agents, broaden the definition of the term “removable alien,” and generally laying the groundwork for what President Trump recently called a “military operation.” (D.H.S. emphatically denies this is the case.) What will be some of the great, “America first” consequences of these measures? Let us count the ways!
According to a study cited by Bloomberg, as much as 70 percent of the U.S. farm workforce doesn’t have valid immigration papers. Once they’re gone, it’ll be pretty tough to find documented Americans willing to do their jobs. (As Bank of America’s Ethan Harris wisely intuits, “There’s no way to get people out of the city and into the country to pick crops on short notice without a very dramatic increase in wages.”) Wages would likely increase by 40 percent, which the embattled farm industry, whose profits are expected to fall for the fourth year in a row, will struggle to afford without passing on huge price increases to consumers.
If deportations aren’t “accompanied by increases in workers available through legal guest-worker programs”—and there’s no suggestion from the administration that they will be—you’ll see “operations just shut down,” Norwich Meadows Farm’s Zaid Kurdieh told Bloomberg.
And then there’s the best consequence, which Team Trump clearly thought through:
An immigration policy focused on closing the border would shift as much as 61 percent of U.S. fruit production to other countries and send jobs to nearby nations such as Mexico, in part because wage costs would make U.S. foods less competitive, according to a 2014 study commissioned by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest U.S. farmer group.
MAGA!
