“The only question is how high prices will go.”
Mean Grocer
President-elect Donald Trump successfully campaigned on lowering prices, especially at the supermarket. But this could be impossible to achieve if he wants to deliver on his other big promise: the mass deportation of millions of immigrants.
As farmers and economists warn, carrying out this brutal policy would almost certainly cause food prices to skyrocket, CNN reports.
The ugly truth of the matter is that the US agricultural industry is heavily dependent on labor performed by undocumented immigrants, who are vulnerable to exploitation.
Major moral questions aside, from a purely economic point of view, the consequences of the scale of deportation that Trump has promised are clear. With a shortfall of labor, less food will be produced. And that means higher grocery prices.
“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.”
Job Hunting
According to statistics from the US Department of Agriculture, between 2018 and 2020, 41 percent of all crop farmworkers in the country were immigrants without work authorization. Only 36 percent were US citizens, with the remainder being authorized immigrants. In this line of work, domestic workers are outnumbered by foreign-born ones roughly two-to-one.
Overall, as of 2021, around 300,000 undocumented immigrants worked in the agriculture industry. At that scale, replacing the shortfall in labor is a pipe dream. It’s not just the sheer volume that’s a problem; it’s that people born here aren’t exactly lining up to do some of the most grueling work imaginable. Just ask the people who run the farms.
“There are no domestic workers that want those jobs,” Fred Leitz, who owns a family farm in Michigan, told CNN. “It’s seasonal. It’s outside. It’s hot. It’s cold.”
“It’s a demanding job. It’s dirty at times. Physical in nature,” echoed Rick Naerobout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. “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.”
Food for Thought
According to Naerebout, as much as 90 percent of the dairy industry is made up of immigrants — so those (raw) milk products that right-wing grifters are obsessed with pushing would probably be the first to suffer.
“The impact to you in the supermarket would be a significant [price] increase in milk, cheese, yogurt,” Naerbout told CNN.
That being said, it could be the case that Trump’s deportations won’t go as far as he says they will. Another big promise, his proposed global tariffs plus a ludicrous 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods, don’t seem to be taken seriously by an optimistic Wall Street, which would directly suffer under such a policy.
In any event, there will be many political obstacles to achieving those goals. But if the agriculture industry’s alarm is any indication, even a softened version of Trump’s vision could have dire consequences for the economy.
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