but, apparently that is just fine and ok with dt and
his cult supporters - for in their thinking, they truly
think that Americans will step in to do the back
breaking hard manual labor for the wages that were
being paid to the immigrants....THAT I would like to
see for sure! Send dt jr, eric, ivanka, tiffany and
especially barron out there to pick lettuce,
strawberries or apples for 16 hours a day. What will
happen is the same thing that happened in the PNW
during an apple harvest in the 20122/2012 time frame,
but is still ongoing. Apples weren't picked and just
rotted on the trees because no American was applying
for those jobs - contrary to the cult thinking.
"As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump
campaigns for a second term in the White House, the
former president has repeatedly promised to enact the
largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in U.S.
history. It’s a bold threat that legal experts say
should be taken seriously, despite the significant
technical and logistical challenges posed by deporting
11 million people from the U.S.
Even if only somewhat successful, Trump’s hard-line
approach to immigration — with its laser focus on
removing immigrants who live in the U.S. without
permanent legal status — has the potential to uproot
countless communities and families by conducting
sweeping raids and placing people in detention centers.
Mass deportation would also, according to economists,
labor groups, and immigration advocates, threaten the
economy and disrupt the U.S. food supply chain, which
is reliant on many forms of migrant labor.
The ramifications of a mass deportation operation would
be “huge” given “immigrant participation in our labor
force,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer of
workers, environment, and climate at the Migrant
Clinicians Network, a nonprofit that advocates for
health justice. Immigration is one of the reasons
behind growth in the labor force, said Liebman. “And
then you look at food, and farms.”
The possibility of deportation-related disruption comes
at a time when the U.S. food system is already being
battered by climate change. Extreme weather and climate
disasters are disrupting supply chains, while longer-
term warming trends are affecting agricultural
productivity. Although inflation is currently cooling,
higher food costs remain an issue for consumers across
the country — and economists have found that even a
forecast of extreme weather can cause grocery store
prices to rise.
Mass deportation could create more chaos, because the
role of immigrants in the American food system is
difficult to overstate. Every year, hundreds of
thousands of people, the vast majority of them coming
from Mexico, legally obtain H-2A visas that allow them
to enter the U.S. as seasonal agricultural workers and
then return home when the harvest is done. But people
living in the U.S. without legal status also play a
crucial role in the nation’s economy: During the
pandemic, it was estimated that 5 million essential
workers were undocumented. And the Center for American
Progress found that nearly 1.7 million undocumented
workers labor in some part of the U.S. food supply
chain.
A stunning half of those immigrants work in
restaurants, where during the height of the COVID-19
pandemic, they labored in enclosed, often cramped
environments at a time when poor ventilation could be
deadly. Hundreds of thousands also work in farming and
agriculture — where they might work in the field or
sorting produce — as well as food production, in jobs
like machine operation and butchery.
The agricultural sector is just one of several
industries in recent years that has experienced a labor
shortage, which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has
classified a “crisis.” This ongoing shortage makes the
Trump campaign’s proposal to force a mass exodus of
people without legal status an inherently bad policy,
said Liebman. “Part of me is like, ‘Oh, button your
seatbelts, people, because who’s washing dishes in the
restaurant, who’s freaking processing that chicken?’
Like, hello?”
The health and safety risks undocumented immigrants
have undertaken to keep Americans fed — both in times
of crises and during all other times — have been met
with few legal and workplace protections. A bill to
give undocumented essential workers a legal pathway to
citizenship, introduced by Senator Alex Padilla, a
Democrat from California, died in committee in 2023.
Padilla told Grist he will continue working to “expand
protections for these essential workers, including
fighting for a legal pathway to citizenship.”
“Agricultural workers endure long hours of physically
demanding work, showing up through extreme weather and
even a global pandemic to keep our country fed,” he
added. “They deserve to live with dignity.”
If this workforce were to be unceremoniously deported,
without regard for their economic contributions to U.S.
society or consideration of whether they actually pose
a threat to their communities, it would be disastrous,
according to Padilla.
“Donald Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations as
a part of Project 2025 are not only cruel but would
also decimate our nation’s food supply and economy,”
said Padilla, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s
roadmap for a Trump presidency. (The Trump campaign did
not respond to a request for comment.)
Farmers, who in the U.S. rely on many forms of migrant
labor (including undocumented workers and H-2A
temporary visa holders), have said that a crackdown on
undocumented immigrants would essentially bring
business to a grinding halt. In response to federal and
state proposals to require employers to verify the
legal status of their workers, the American Farm Bureau
Federation has said, “Enforcement-only immigration
reform would cripple agricultural production in
America.” The Farm Bureau, an advocacy group for
farmers, declined to comment on Trump’s mass
deportation proposal, but a questionnaire the group
gave to both presidential candidates states, “Farm work
is challenging, often seasonal and transitory, and with
fewer and fewer Americans growing up on the farm, it’s
increasingly difficult to find American workers
attracted to these kinds of jobs.”
Small farmers agree. A first-generation Mexican-
American immigrant who works in Illinois as an urban
farmer, David Toledo says that the consequences of mass
deportation for the country’s food system would be hard
to imagine, especially since he believes that “many
Americans don’t want to take the jobs” that many
undocumented workers currently fill for very low pay.
“We need people who want to work in fields and in
farmlands. [Farmworkers] are waking up way before the
sun because of rising temperatures, and living in
horrible conditions,” said Toledo. He added that the
U.S. should remember “that we are a welcoming community
and society. We have to be, because we are going to see
a lot more people shifting [here] from countries all
over the world because of climate change.”
Stephen Miller, the advisor who shaped Trump’s hard-
line immigration policy, has touted mass deportations
as a labor market intervention that will boost wages
for American-born workers. But analysts point out that
previous programs aimed at restricting the flow of
immigrant workers have failed to raise wages for
native-born citizens. For example, when the U.S. in
1965 ended the Bracero Program, which allowed half a
million Mexican-American seasonal workers to labor in
the U.S., wages for domestic farmworkers did not
increase, according to analysis from the Centre for
Economic Policy Research. Additionally, a recent
analysis found that a Bush- and Obama-era deportation
program known as Secure Communities — which removed
nearly half a million undocumented immigrants from the
U.S. — resulted in both fewer jobs and lower wages from
domestic workers. One reason is that when undocumented
immigrants were deported, many middle managers who
worked with them also lost their jobs.
Such a shock to the agricultural labor force could
result in higher food prices, too. If farmers lose a
large portion of their workforce due to mass
deportation, they may not have enough people to
harvest, grade, and sort crops before they spoil. That
sort of reduction in the supply of food could drive up
prices at the grocery store.
Many experts note that even attempting to deport
millions of immigrants would disrupt the nation’s
economy as a whole. “It will not benefit our economy to
lose millions of workers,” said Debu Gandhi, senior
director of immigration policy at the Center for
American Progress, a liberal think tank. “There is no
economic rationale for it.”
For instance, mass deportation would deprive
governments of essential tax revenue. A report from the
American Immigration Council found that a majority of
undocumented immigrants — or three-fourths —
participated in the workforce in 2022. This tracks with
other analysts’ understandings of the undocumented
workforce. “Undocumented immigrants, when they get to
the United States of America, they have an intention to
work, to make money and contribute not only to their
families, but also to the federal, state, and local
government,” said Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst
at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. A
recent report co-authored by Guzman found that
undocumented immigrants paid a whopping $96.7 billion
in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.
Moreover, advocacy groups worry about the impact mass
deportation would have on families. “What does this
look like on the ground?” said Liebman, who wondered
who would be tasked with enforcing mass deportation,
and whether it would require local law enforcement
agencies to carry out raids in their own neighborhoods
and communities. She noted that the bulk of migrant
families across the country are “mixed status” —
meaning that some members of a household have
documentation while others don’t. “Are we going to go
into people’s houses and rip families apart?”
Immigration is the purview of the federal government,
and for decades, elected leaders across the political
spectrum have failed to pass policies to fix America’s
strained immigration system. “It has been very hard to
find solutions on immigration reform,” said Gandhi.
“And we do have bipartisan solutions on the table. But
we just have not been able to get them through.”
In the absence of other policy solutions — such as
addressing the root causes of migration to the U.S.
from other countries, including climate change — all-
or-nothing imperatives to “close the border” have
become popular among conservatives. In fact, a Scripps
News/Ipsos poll released last month found that a
majority of American voters surveyed support mass
deporting immigrants without legal status.
Experts have debated the feasibility of Trump’s promise
to enact mass deportations — pointing out that
deportations during Trump’s first term were lower than
under his predecessor, Barack Obama. (The Biden
administration has also enacted considerably more
enforcement actions against immigrants than were
carried out during the Trump administration.) Although
the specific details on how the proposal would be
carried out and enforced have yet to be clarified by
Trump’s campaign, Paul Chavez, litigation program
director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a
nonprofit law firm, is highly skeptical about the
likelihood of such a move holding up in federal court.
“I can’t imagine any sort of mass deportation program
that doesn’t result in racial profiling of both
immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants,” said
Chavez. Any form of racial profiling that came out of
such an enforcement process would be in violation of
the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution, which effectively prohibits a
state from adopting policies that target any person in
its jurisdiction based on race, color, or national
origin. A mass deportation operation would lead to
people being profiled across the country and treated in
“a discriminatory fashion based on national origin,”
said Chavez — triggering all sorts of lawsuits.
“My sense is that it would be impractical and then
impossible to implement in a way that doesn’t
inevitably violate the Constitution,” said Chavez.
But whether or not courts upheld mass deportation, the
threat of raids would send a strong message to workers,
according to Antonio De Loera-Brust, an organizer with
United Farm Workers, a labor union for farmworkers that
represents laborers regardless of their immigration
status. He posited that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric
is purposefully designed to have a chilling effect on
U.S. residents without legal status. “The point is not
to remove millions, it’s to scare them,” said De Loera-
Brust. "
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