If Trump Were To Deport Millions, There Would Be Food Shortages Immediately
William James
Deporting America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants would deal a significant financial blow to the agriculture and food industries, according to Slate.
The report comes a week after Trump asserted the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency would start deporting millions of illegal immigrants as early as last week.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in,” the president Tweeted on Monday, a day ahead of the official start of his reelection campaign in Orlando.
Completing Trump’s immigration enforcement take would take ICE two and a half decades if the current deportation rates remain steady, according to the Washington Post.
Removing immigrants may prove an incredibly expensive endeavor, but the burnt of the measure's economic impact may come from the reduction of immigrant labor. According to bipartisan research group New American Economy, immigrant-owned firms employ more than 8 million Americans and add $1 trillion to the economy. Close to 750,000 of these businesspeople are undocumented, according to Slate.
Undocumented immigrants also constitute the backbone of some of the country's most important industries. They represent 20 percent of America’s cooks, 24 percent of its maids, and 22 percent of its construction workers.
The proposed deportation plan would also pose an important challenge to agriculture, a sector that is at the heart of Trump’s constituency. “Iowa dominates the U.S. pork industry [but] at the labor level—the people who actually perform the work—I would guess at least 80 percent of them are immigrants,” said, Iowa State University professor Dermot Hayes.
