Trump’s Immigration Policy Would Make Food Inflation Even Worse

Even though food inflation has cooled substantially, a recent Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found that 80% of likely voters in swing states liked Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ plan to ban price gouging, including 78% of independents and 70% of Republicans. (Never mind that her plan isn’t going to change today’s supermarket prices; it’s narrowly targeting prices during emergencies like a hurricane or a pandemic.) Republican nominee Donald Trump has talked about food prices in terms of tariffs—putting them on imports to bring costs down, a dubious strategy since tariffs usually make products more expensive, not less.

If you look closely, the real food policy the former president has proposed is embedded in his plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Setting aside the ethics of rounding people up and shipping them elsewhere like cargo, this plan almost certainly will lead to higher food costs. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Almost 1.7 million undocumented immigrants work in the food supply chain, according to a 2021 report from the Center for American Progress. The report listed almost 300,000 working in farming and agriculture; 206,000 in food production such as slaughterhouses and commercial bakeries; 154,000 in grocery and convenience stores; and 833,000 in restaurants.

Getting firm numbers on a population that’s forced to live under the radar is difficult, but the picture is clear. Undocumented immigrants often do the kind of dirty work many Americans don’t want to: They pick fruits and vegetables during heat waves while being exposed to toxic pesticides; they catch, load and hang live chickens, then cut up and package their carcasses, frequently getting injured in the process; to tend to the cows whose milk goes toward sating our unrelenting appetite for cheese, they drudge through “a slippery goo of dirt, dung and urine,” as the New York Times Magazine recently described it; and they’ve inhaled “aerosolized brain matter” to deliver cheap pork products, as detailed by Ted Genoways in The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. Shall I go on?

To be clear, undocumented workers don’t just do grunt work. Restaurants also often employ undocumented immigrants in all the jobs that keep them running—as managers, waiters, waitresses and line cooks. And there are also about 50,000 undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs in restaurants and food service, about 10% of the industry total, according to Nan Wu, research director at the American Immigration Council. They’re the restaurant owners, caterers, contractors and food truck operators—businesses that many of us frequent all the time.

Whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican or neither, unless you grow all your own food, chances are something you’ve eaten today came to you by way of an undocumented immigrant, often doing a job you’d never do yourself.

So what happens if overnight, or over the course of a few terrible weeks, months or years, all these people are forced to stop doing all these jobs? Will American citizens take their place? Unlikely. In 2011 new anti-immigration laws scared off much of Georgia’s Latino migrant workforce, and farmers found themselves with 11,000 job openings, as the Daily, a short-lived news app owned by News Corp., reported that year. One farmer told the publication he had to let a third of his produce die in the field because he didn’t have the help to harvest it. “We just don’t have the labor and it’s gonna get worse.” Similar stories came out of New York, Washington state and California the next year as immigration laws tightened. In Iowa it’s already beginning to happen, according to recent reporting from Investigate Midwest, which found undocumented immigrants are considering leaving the state over harsh immigration laws recently enacted.

Today labor shortages remain one of the biggest challenges for farmers, ranchers and restaurant owners, which is why the main groups representing them want immigration reform, not mass deportation. “Enforcement-only immigration would cripple agriculture production in America,” according to the website of the American Farm Bureau Federation, referring to tactics like arrests, detentions and removals of everyone in violation of current laws. “That is why a holistic solution by Congress is clearly needed to ensure a legal workforce without destabilizing our food supply chain,” says the organization’s spokesperson. The National Restaurant Association sounded a similar note. “With thousands of jobs open each month, we need to find a way to bring more people into the workforce,” says Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs.“We support comprehensive immigration reform—including expanded work visa programs and improving legal pathways for immigration while safely securing the border.”

The restaurant industry’s current labor challenges are in part attributable to restrictive immigration policies, as Misty Chally, the executive director of Critical Labor Coalition, wrote recently in the trade publication Modern Restaurant Management. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City pointed to that worker shortage as a driving force behind the rising prices we’re all so busy complaining about. “When you lose workers, your ability to meet demand is going to go down,” says Debu Gandhi of the Center for American Progress. “Supply will go down; it will lead to higher prices.”

Big corporate farms would be in a much better position after mass deportations compared to their smaller counterparts because they can absorb more of the increased labor costs, says Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which operates in the Midwest and parts of the South. Small family farms—which make up 88% of all US farms—will get hit hard, potentially being forced to close. “If you deport all those workers, there will be an outcry from small family farms,” says Velasquez.

Whoever wins next week will have to figure out how to keep food prices under control, even as climate change and geopolitics continue to drive up costs. But if there’s one lever available to US politicians to bring those costs down, it’s making a bigger labor pool. A lot of people want to work in this country, many of whom are already here and many more hoping to come, and the food industry is just one that desperately needs them. When real, pragmatic and humane immigration reform is elusive, we all pay for it.