Grocery prices are high. Trump’s mass deportations could make matters worse

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Grocery prices are high. Trump's mass deportations could make things worse
By Matt Egan and Maya Blackstone, CNN
6 minute read
Published 6:00 AM EST, Mon November 18, 2024
Migrant workers pick celery at a farm in Yuma, Arizona.
Migrant workers pick celery at a farm in Yuma, Arizona. Nick Oza/The Republic/USA Today Network/Imagn Images
New York
CNN —
Americans are tired of high prices at supermarkets, and most of them are banking on President-elect Donald Trump to solve this. But one of the key campaign promises by Trump may achieve precisely the opposite-cutting the checkout line.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to "bring down prices" from the supermarket and overall across the economy. Deep-rooted frustration with the cost of living helped deliver Trump a landslide victory this fall.

Soon, Trump's ability to fix America's affordability crisis will crash head-on into perhaps the more vaunted promise of the campaign trail: Mass deportations.

Trump has vowed not just to speed up the deportations of undocumented migrants but to fight the biggest, largest domestic deportation program in American history. He talks of expelling millions of people.

Beyond the moral, legal, and logistical questions raised by this campaign promise, mass deportations would threaten to starve key industries of badly needed workers. And perhaps no industry relies on undocumented workers more than the food and agriculture industries.
That's why agriculture executives, farm industry officials and economists tell CNN that if Trump keeps his deportation promises, groceries will get more expensive — perhaps much more expensive.

'If you take away those workers, you're not going to have production. There's only one way prices are going to go. They're going to go dramatically higher,'' said Chuck Conner, president and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives and a former US Department of Agriculture deputy secretary.
 
The logic is straightforward: Less food, higher prices, fewer workers.
 "It would be devastating,
Consider this: In 2018-2020, only 36% of crop farmworkers were US citizens and 23% were authorized immigrants. The rest — 41% — had no legal work authorization, the USDA reported.

"When cows don't get milked, when apples don't get picked, when fruits and vegetables are not harvested, your supply is going to fall," said Conner.

According to the early months of 2022, the federal government estimated that approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants stay in the United States.

By 2021, around 300,000 undocumented workers were engaged in farming and agriculture. These consist of almost 200,000 in crop production and 66,000 for animal production, based on a 2021 Center for American Progress analysis.

"It would be devastating to the ag economy," said Fred Leitz, who owns a family farm in Michigan that grows blueberries, apples, tomatoes and cucumbers. "There would be nobody to pick the crops. And you're not going to plant anything you can't harvest and sell. It's just basic economics."

(Leitz said his farm relies on visas to hire temporary foreign workers but does not employ unauthorized immigrants).

Worker shortages and cost rise
Another 206,000 undocumented immigrants work in food manufacturing-from animal slaughtering and seafood processing to fruit and vegetable preservation, according to a report. Altogether, an estimated 1.7 million undocumented people are working along the food's supply chain.

"There's no question that mass deportation of immigrants will disrupt the agriculture and food processing industries, resulting in severe labor shortages, higher costs and thus higher prices for a wide variety of groceries," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told CNN. "The only question is how high prices will go."

Construction workers build a structure along Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024.

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Food prices could also be pushed higher by another element of the Trump agenda: Massive tariffs
The United States imports a huge amount of food from overseas, from exotic fruits and seafood to nuts and coffee, and those items could be in the crosshairs of Trump's proposed 20% across-the-board tariffs on imports.

Of course, this depends on the extent to which the tariffs go and the scale of people being deported.

It is possible that Trump actually water down his campaign commitments to not reflate inflation. It is also possible that Trump's millions of deportation attempts get tied up in court or snarled by logistical issues.

Foods that would most inevitably experience price spikes are food items that at some point in their production require manual labor to make it to the grocery store — meaning, particularly anything that is commonly hand picked: fruits like apples and strawberries, as well as vegetables like tomatoes and lettuce.

In the same vein, food items that are involved with an animal interaction will likely experience increased costs for consumers: meat products and dairy items.

Rick Naerebout, chief executive officer of the Idaho Dairymen's Association, said that about 90 percent of all on-farm jobs in the dairy industry are being filled by foreign workers. He could not say how many of them were illegal immigrants, but he said the United States did not have a permanent visa program for farm workers.

We're incredibly dependent on foreign-born labor, and that's the realities of our industry for decades now," said Naerebout. "The impact to you in the supermarket would be a huge increase in milk, cheese, yogurt."

Would demand for food fall?

The Trump transition team did not return a request for comment on how mass deportations would affect food prices.

Trump has often argued that inflation warnings about his economic agenda are overblown, pointing to the fact that inflation was under control during his first term. And he's right. The inflation rate never topped 3% under Trump- a far cry from the four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022 for the Biden administration.

Scott Bessent, a hedge fund executive and leading Wall Street supporter of Trump has also dismissed the inflation fears.

"The idea that he would recreate an affordability crisis is absurd," Bessent recently told Axios. Trump "regards himself as the mayor of 330 million Americans, and he wants them to do great, and have a great four years."

A worker stocks produce at a grocery store in San Francisco.
A grocery store worker restocks produce at a San Francisco location. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Mass deportation advocates have sometimes suggested that taking millions of people out of the country could ease the affordability crisis by reducing demand.
"It just makes no sense," said Zeke Hernandez, an economics professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

It's predicated on a basic misunderstanding of how supply and demand work-and what immigrants do in this economy," said Hernandez, author of "The Truth About Immigration."
A lost share of workers would far outstrip any relieve to demand for food that could be gained by deportations, said Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Denver.

"The overwhelming effect of a mass deportation effort would be an increase in the price of food because there's just fewer workers available," said East, who also is a non-resident fellow at The Hamilton Project within the Brookings Institution.
 
'We don't have enough workers'
Of course, some may wonder why farmers can't just hire more US citizens to do the work of those deported.

But those in the agriculture industry insist that's just not possible.

"There are no domestic workers that want those jobs," said Letiz, the Michigan farmer. "It's seasonal. It's outside. It's hot. It's cold."

Naerebout, the Idaho dairy farm executive, agreed that these are jobs that domestic workers "aren't pursuing and really don't have a desire to fill."

Donald Trump highlighted rising costs during his campaign to return to the White House.
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"It's a demanding job. Physical in nature. It's dirty at times," he said. "And when you're sitting with unemployment rates as low as what we have, your domestic workforce kind of gets the pick of the jobs they want to take."

Economics professor Robert Lynch of Washington College in Maryland analyzed past episodes of mass deportations and found that neither jobs nor wages increased for native-born workers afterward.
Facts reveal that native-born workers sometimes lost their jobs because the economy suffered losses due to loss of complementary workers that strengthened productivity.
If anything, farmers say they need more immigrant workers — not fewer.

That is not the case with the current system. Not now. There are no green cards for farm workers. There are temporary farm visas — they call those H-2A. But there's no legal way to have year-round foreign workers.

Naerebout wants the incoming Trump administration to give the industry's existing workforce legal status and access to visa programs to get more immigrant workers.

That's the piece that a lot of people don't understand: We don't have enough workers to fill all the jobs we have," Naerebout said. "We need foreign-born workers.".