A small bit of reality seems to have infiltrated President Trump’s draconian deportation plan, as it sunk in for him that removing immigrant labor means some businesses will be dramatically hurt.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote June 12 on his Truth Social platform.
Ironically, he hit key points of the economic argument against mass deportation: America needs valued workers who are established in their communities ― a description of most of the people in the country illegally.
Trump then surprised immigration hardliners, telling Homeland Security to pause “worksite enforcement” on agriculture, restaurant and hotel operation. While it’s unclear that such raids have actually stopped, this is an echo of Trump’s back-and-forth rhetoric on tariffs, which has prompted some in the financial sector to coin the acronym “TACO,” or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Where does food come from?
TACOs aside, let’s think for a moment about your food.
Nearly every bite you take is made possible in some way by immigrant labor. Fruits and vegetables are picked, packed and shipped by a workforce dependent on immigrants. Meat and eggs are produced mostly in massive livestock facilities that depend heavily on immigrant labor. Animals are similarly slaughtered and cut into the pieces we find in our grocery stores.
After that dirty and bloody work is done at the front end of the food industry, our sustenance is unloaded on supermarket docks and stocked on their shelves by workers who include immigrants. Food served in restaurants very often is prepared and served by immigrants, who also clean up.
Wait, there’s more
Food ― agriculture, retail sales and restaurants ― is but one facet of our daily lives touched by immigrant labor.
Drive by a construction site, go to a hotel, notice a landscaping or road crew, call a moving company and you’ll readily see that a great deal of our workforce is made up of immigrants. Home builders, short 370,000 workers nationwide, say mass deportations will push home prices higher and hamstring the industry.
It’s not a secret that some number of these workers are in the country illegally. When I worked as editor-publisher of a small western Colorado news operation roughly halfway between Aspen and Vail, about a third of the workers in the market were immigrants. They were essential for the resorts, restaurants and fancy second homes.
It is not possible in daily life ― nor is it relevant ― to know which of these workers has proper documentation. What is important is that the work gets done.
Most business leaders and politicians know full well that this is essential to our economic wellbeing, because otherwise, we don’t have enough workers.
U.S. immigration policy has, for decades, recognized the need for immigrant labor ― in no small part because the United States historically has prospered by exploiting the least expensive labor we can find, from slavery to Chinese laborers building our railroads to farmworkers living in deplorable conditions that improved only after massive protests in the 1960s.
Our economy depends on exploitation
Ancient history? No.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, meatpacking workers, who make roughly 40% less than they did before union-busting in the 1970s, suffered disproportionately high rates of infection and death.
Our economy depends on worker exploitation. It’s pretty easy to exploit someone who’s desperate and lacks power ― such as people who travel thousands of miles to do difficult jobs in a land that is increasingly hostile to them, and where they don’t know the language.
All of this raises the question: What would happen to our economy if, indeed, we were to deport any meaningful proportion of the estimated 8.3 million workers ― 5.2% of the labor force ― who are not legally authorized to be here?
It would risk a deep recession, with businesses unable to fill jobs and unable to grow. I, for one, am confident that legal residents aren’t going to be clamoring to fill those restaurant, hotel, landscaping, farm, road crew and packing plant jobs. Small businesses that depend on immigrant labor ― and immigrant spending ― would fold.
Right now, the U.S. unemployment rate is 4%. Economists regard that as full employment, a point at which people looking for work is in rough balance with the number of positions available.
What the hourly wage would have to be to coax your average coddled American into a slaughterhouse? Who knows. If employers who depend on immigrant labor raised wages sufficiently to fill their jobs after mass deportation, the resulting price increases would supercharge inflation.
A self-imposed disaster
Mass deportation, setting aside the civil rights and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, also would be a self-imposed economic disaster. Perhaps the economy would crash sufficiently that citizens would grovel for all that hard work.
The solution, of course, is for Congress to find agreement on improving enforcement of immigration laws, adequately funding immigration courts and creating a realistic path to legal residency and, ultimately, citizenship for Trump’s newly discovered “very good, long time workers … (who are) almost impossible to replace.”
That’s what happened in our last meaningful immigration reform. That was in 1986, under Ronald Reagan, when 3 million undocumented immigrants were granted amnesty ― a recognition of their importance to the economy that also was humane.
Randy Essex is a retired journalist who covered and edited business and political news, including at the Free Press, where this column first appeared.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump’s deportation flip-flop reveals America’s dirty economic secret | Opinion
Reporting by Randy Essex / Detroit Free Press
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