How The Farm Industry Is Complicating Trump's Immigration Crackdown

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Jimena Bustillo, and I cover immigration policy.

And today on the show, a contradiction for President Trump.

How to fulfill the largest deportation program in American history without impacting a farming industry that relies on undocumented labor.

To help us sort through that is NPR Chief Economic Correspondent Scott Horsley.

Hi, Scott.

Hi, great to be with y'all.

Yeah, great to have you.

So, Jimena, let's start with why we are having this conversation right now.

The administration has really gone back and forth lately on whether the agriculture industry would be spared from this immigration crackdown.

Can you get us up to speed and talk us through where we are right now?

So, as recently as last week, President Trump took to social media and even spoke with reporters at the White House, saying that he wanted to provide some sort of solution for specifically the agriculture sector.

And at times, he's talked about hospitality, like hotels, for example, to be able to spare their workers or protect their workers or give them access to a workforce so that the supply chains won't crumble if all those workers were to leave or disappear.

Now, this this is not necessarily a new statement.

He has made similar claims of promise of

providing a carve-out for the sector before.

These statements also came a day after the agriculture industry saw probably what has been described to me as some of the biggest sweeps and actions against it.

We saw 70 people get arrested at a meatpacking plant in Nebraska.

Several farms just north of LA saw visits and arrests from immigration officials.

And then a dairy in New Mexico also saw some arrests.

And that really put the industry on high alert.

But DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed today that despite Trump's comments last week, there has been no change in policy and that workplace raids would continue.

So, I mean, how big of a problem is this for farmers?

How much of the agriculture workforce is made up of people without legal status?

Yeah, let's break this workforce down a little bit.

So when it comes to, you know, seasonal work, and that's that's typically what's called like, quote, specialty crops, strawberries, apples, pears,

you know, those workers, about 40% of them are without legal status in the country.

That's an estimate from the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, and it's generally assumed to be an undercount.

Those numbers get higher when you are dealing with things like animals, for example.

So looking at dairies, you know, farmers love to tell me cows need to be milked 365 days a year.

Doesn't matter if it's a holiday or a weekend.

So those employers do not qualify for certain visas that would allow you to bring in workers on a temporary basis.

So they have a much larger proportion of workers without authorization to work in the United States.

So, you know, if these workers were to disappear, I mean, it would be very disruptive to our supply chain.

You know, a lot of people like to talk about COVID and the pandemic times when, you know, there was disruption to the labor force and workers got sick and, you know, we didn't see all the food that we normally saw at the grocery store.

The other thing that comes into play right now, particularly, is President Trump and his administration have revoked certain protections, such as temporary protected status and parole for tens of thousands of people.

That protected status gave people the authority to work in the United States.

And they went to go work at places like meat packing and processing plants, for example.

They no longer have the authority to work in the United States.

And so there's also now a subclass of people that had authorization that now no longer do it and are subject to these actions.

And Jimina said, you know, if this workforce were to disappear, well, we are already seeing a sharp drop in the foreign-born workforce in the United States.

The foreign-born workforce has shrunk by a million people.

Now, that includes both folks who are living in the country illegally and legally, but certainly some of those are probably people who have have been frightened by these workplace enforcement actions and who have gone underground, who are frightened to go to work for fear of being arrested and perhaps separated from their family and deported.

It has been immigrant labor in recent years that has really kept the U.S.

economy growing at a time when our native-born workforce is aging and all but shrinking.

So it's not just farm workers, it's all kinds of industries, whether it's home health care, hospitality, construction.

And so what we're seeing here is the collision between, on the one hand, the president's desire for mass deportation.

This is a candidate who has been railing against immigration since he first rode down the golden escalator a decade ago.

And on the other hand, Trump's promise in the 2024 campaign to lower grocery prices and to lower the cost of housing.

So Scott, if we're talking about such a big portion of the workforce in the agriculture industry, can you talk a little bit about what that would mean for

the broader food system and for the economy as a whole?

Yeah, I think it's just an economic law of nature that if you subtract a whole lot of workers in an industry, you're going to see costs rise for that industry.

You're probably going to see a decline in production.

And that means higher prices at the grocery store.

And this is a president who has said over and over again that he thinks it was frustration, voters' frustration with high grocery prices that put him back in the White House this year.

So, Jimana, President Trump floats this idea of a carve-out for the farming industry.

How is an idea like that, I guess, received by other people in his administration, people who

really do want to deport as many people as possible?

I mean, the reality is that the rest of his cabinet and even members within his administration at the White House are publicly not in line with that sentiment.

You know, President Trump has been the only one to say that there will be some sort of carve-out or policy to protect these workers.

You know, DHS Secretary Christy Noam has been on record the last few weeks saying that they're not sparing any work sites, that there's no sector that is necessarily a safe place.

Borders are out of the White House Tom Homan has said that they're going to increase work site enforcement instead.

And so this is where we're seeing the agriculture industry really get whiplashed between what the president says to the base and then what the administration officials that are carrying out the policy and the plans are instead signaling they're going to do.

All right, well, let's take a quick break.

We'll talk more about this when we get back.

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And we're back.

So, Ximena, President Trump says he wants to find a solution to this issue, but it's a little bit unclear to me what a real solution looks like considering how much a number of these industries rely on immigrant labor with or without legal status.

Is there a realistic solution here?

It's really complicated.

You know, what farmers say that they're lobbying for is either A, access to visas if they don't already get that access.

So thinking about the dairy farmers, they don't get access to visas, they want them.

But then B,

making a visa program that provides some sort of compromise between a pathway to citizenship for workers who are already here, or at least a pathway to legal status.

and also doesn't cost a fortune for farmers.

The current visa structure is very expensive.

It requires farmers to pay

a very high competitive wage, transportation, housing, medical care, all these things for the workers.

Farmers say that it costs just way too much money.

So the alternative to not having workers without legal status is some sort of visa reform system.

And so to Scott's point earlier, the price of food goes up.

We keep talking about these competing factors of wanting more deportation, but also not wanting grocery prices to go up.

Scott, you covered President Trump's first term, and I'm curious how he thinks about which one of these ideas, I guess, is going to win out.

Do you have any sense of that?

I think what we're watching here is a real tug of war in real time, both among people in the administration and maybe for the president's own political sensibility.

He likes to blur the line and paint every undocumented worker in the United States as a rapist, a gang member.

But we did see in the president's social media post last week, he said, our great farmers have been stating that this this policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them.

Well, that's not just the case on farms.

That's true of workplaces around the country.

And I think, you know, employers of all stripes are going to be making that case to the president.

We don't have an objection to your enforcing the law and going after hardened criminals, but don't take our long-time, hard-working immigrant employees.

And if that pressure gets strong enough, I think we have seen the president back down in the past.

I mean, in the first administration, when the hue and cry about family separations got loud enough, the president did back down.

Jimena, staying on the idea of how these employers are responding to this, you've done some reporting that noted that employers in some cases have actually stepped in to protect their workers from immigration enforcement.

Can you tell us about that?

In going into the second presidency, there was at least the understanding that worksite enforcement was going to be a priority for the administration.

And so a lot of employers across the board schooled up on what to do if immigration officials came to their door.

You know, a very classic like know your rights, you know, what to ask for, what notes to take, where officers can and can't come.

And, you know, what we have seen is some of that training be put into place.

And so, you know, people are asking for warrants.

People are, you know, not letting officers into private spaces.

I mean, it doesn't always prevent an arrest.

It doesn't always prevent being served with an audit for your paperwork to see if all your employees have all the legal forms that they need.

But there definitely has been an increase in that training.

Scott, you covered the economy as a whole.

Can you talk about what other industries, I guess, could be impacted as well if workplace enforcement does continue?

Yeah, I mean,

there are certainly some industries that are more reliant on unauthorized workers than others.

We've talked about agriculture, we've talked about construction, certainly home health care is heavily reliant.

The hospitality business, whether that's hotels or restaurants.

But there are not many industries that will not see some ripple effects from this.

And that's going to raise the visibility of this enforcement effort, and it may raise some of the resistance that we've seen in California, for example.

All right, Scott, well, thank you so much for joining us and talking us through all this.

Good to be with you.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Jimena Bustio, and I cover immigration policy.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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