Some Already Tried This at Home
Mass Deportation or Attrition through Enforcement?
Note to my readers: This is my third post on unauthorized immigration in agriculture. The first post covers the big picture of unauthorized immigration. The second post zooms in on the farm and food contributions of these workers. You don’t need to read the first two posts to understand this one, but I encourage you to read at least the summaries of the first two.
This post examines what happened to farmers when three states decided to reduce their undocumented immigrant population. It also covers the origin of these laws, as that’s important to understand what’s happening today across the US. I went beyond the anecdotes—of which there are many!—and dug into data over the decades including these laws. So this post is accompanied by three additional posts that dive into the laws and the conditions in Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama.
People are speculating about what will happen to the US farm economy if all unauthorized immigrant farm workers are deported. But we don’t need to speculate. Three states conducted experiments in removing undocumented workers and their families beginning in 2007: Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia. We now have over a decade of data on what happens to farm real gross domestic product (RGDP) after you scare off the majority of your farm workers. No mystery, no speculation. This post is a summary of these state experiments in removing undocumented immigrants, their motivating philosophy, and the implications for the national experiment unfolding as you read this. I have published a detailed analysis for each of these states—Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama—into the laws and their impact on farmers there for those who want to dig deeper into this particular manure pile.
First, a quick terminology review: undocumented immigrants are a subset of unauthorized immigrants. Unauthorized immigrants are non-citizens who don’t have permanent residency status (aka “green cards”). They often have documentation including social security numbers, work authorizations, temporary protected status (TPS), pending asylum cases, and even pending residency. Undocumented immigrants are the subset of unauthorized immigrants who don’t have any documentation—for example, no work authorization and no social security numbers. The state laws analyzed here target only the completely undocumented portion of the unauthorized immigrant population, so I use the term undocumented immigrant most frequently in this and the state-specific posts. At the beginning of this year, about 30% of the unauthorized immigrant population was documented; however, the Trump Administration has been systematically stripping the documentation away from many unauthorized immigrants by revoking TPS and ignoring asylum laws.
So why was 2007 a pivotal year in immigration enforcement? Remember from my February post (Chart 4) that more people were crossing US borders illegally in 2006 than at the peak of the early 2020’s surge! Unauthorized immigration in 2006 was—both by numbers and percentage of our population—a BIGGER problem than it is in 2025. Unlike the 2024 failure of bipartisan immigration reform which failed in the US Senate, the 2006 reform attempt actually passed the US Senate. The US House defeated it by simply refusing to bring the bill to a vote. Senator John McCain (a co-sponsor of the bill) predicted a surge of state-level anti-immigrant activism after the failure of President Bush’s and the Senate’s bipartisan 2006 attempt at federal immigration reform.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is the mastermind of this state and local anti-immigration activist legislation. He has led a 20-plus year campaign to make being an unauthorized and completely undocumented immigrant a state-level crime. He was looking for an opening to pounce in 2006. Mr. Kobach was only a law school professor when he started this campaign. He has been counsel for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group which campaigned hard and successfully against the failed 2006 bipartisan immigration reform. FAIR has some problematic ties to white supremacy groups and somewhat more acceptable involvement in the US English language movement of the 1980s (which has made a comeback with President Trump’s Executive Order 14224, 3/1/2025).
Attorney General Kobach ascribes to a philosophy called attrition through enforcement which crystalized around 2006. He may be the original architect of this policy—his resume suggests that he’s one very smart guy. Harvard, Oxford, and Yale degrees smart. Attrition through enforcement is promoted as a cost-effective alternative to mass deportation. It’s closer to what the Trump Administration is doing than the much-advertised mass deportation. Why? Because no one actually wants to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to deport people who are working hard and paying taxes and obeying all the laws other than visa laws. That’s not my opinion: Americans tell pollsters this all the time.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) appears to be the source of the term attrition through enforcement. According to its own website, CIS is “an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization. It’s the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States” that is “low immigration but pro-immigrant.” Mr. Kobach does not hold a formal position in CIS, but a search of their website with name gets over a thousand hits. He’s the featured guest on a recent CIS podcast, too.
The CIS has been around since 1985, formed just before unauthorized immigration hit its all-time high in 1986. The founder of FAIR—Dr. John Tantor, a Michigan opthamologist—also founded CIS. He was also involved in founding a third anti-immigration organization called NumbersUSA in the 1990s. Apparently, CIS formed in opposition to President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, which they considered a motivator for future unauthorized immigration. Well, common sense suggests that forgiving certain behavior would encourage more of the forgiven behavior. The data doesn’t confirm that here, however. I can’t explain why unauthorized immigration decreased after the 1986 amnesty, except to note that the following administrations were quite aggressive at deporting people (Who Will Be Deported? - by Kristin Farry, Chart 5). FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA were the major forces behind the 2006 immigration reform failure, branding it as “an amnesty bill.”
CIS says that securing the border and deporting unauthorized immigrants using due process under US law is not going to eliminate our unauthorized immigrant problem. This is especially true if the deportation effort prioritizes immigrants who have committed crimes under our current laws—probably because these immigrants are less likely to commit crimes as US citizens are. CIS’ webpage states: “The data collected by the Center during the past quarter-century has led many of our researchers to conclude that current, high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security, and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker. These data may support criticism of US immigration policies, but they do not justify ill feelings toward our immigrant community.” Unfortunately, someone has felt it necessary to create ill feelings toward “our immigrant community” in the past few years to gain the mandate for complete elimination of our immigrant community.
The elements of the attrition through enforcement strategy include: “mandatory workplace verification of immigration status; measures to curb misuse of Social Security and IRS identification numbers; partnerships with state and local law enforcement officials; expanded entry-exit recording under US-VISIT [a biometrics identity-confirmation system]; increased non-criminal removals; and state and local laws to discourage illegal settlement.”
Remember that being an unauthorized immigrant without any documentation is not a federal crime. It’s a federal civil offense. Attrition through enforcement consists of first making everything an unauthorized immigrant has to do to survive here a crime instead of just a civil offense. This includes working for anyone without work authorization. Federal law imposes civil and criminal penalties on employers for employing workers without work authorization (aka “undocumented”); however, federal law does not outlaw an undocumented immigrant from seeking work or working. Attrition through enforcement (1) criminalizes working without work authorization and (2) criminalizes any actions by anyone in a community that might help undocumented workers get to work or survive. After you criminalize just being an undocumented immigrant, you rev up enforcement of the new crimes, with great fanfare. And incidentally, now every undocumented immigrant has a criminal record and can be “prioritized” for deportation. If an immigrant has a pending asylum application, a state or local criminal conviction under these new laws can jeopardize that—only “serious” crimes are supposed to be disqualifying, but there’s some gray area on what this is.
Creating state laws and local ordinances like this deputizes state and local law enforcement—without any federal help or reimbursement—to make the daily lives of undocumented immigrants impossible. The goal is to get immigrants to leave (“self-deport”) rather than get arrested for just surviving. This, CIS argues, is much cheaper on a per-immigrant basis than arresting each immigrant and giving them the due process prescribed by current US federal law.
So how did this work for farmers in the states that have tried this?
Arizona stepped up to be the first state test case, passing Kobach-authored immigration laws in 2007 and 2010. The 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (HB-2779) became effective January 1st, 2008. Arizona’s 2010 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB-1070) and its amendment to address concerns about racial profiling (HB-2162) was the next Arizona experiment in attrition through enforcement. They went into effect July 1st, 2010. While much of Arizona’s 2010 law was overturned by SCOTUS in 2012, Arizona agriculture never recovered to its pre-2008 level. For 2009-2023, Arizona farm RGDP averaged nearly 14% lower than it averaged for 1997-2007.
Despite being far removed from the southern US border, Georgia joined passed an immigration law in April 2011. Georgia’s law (HB 87, Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011) was closely based on Arizona’s SB-1070. Our friend Kris Kobach also helped Georgia legislators write it, modifying SB-1070 language being challenged in court.
The average farm RGDP for the 12 years prior to the 2011 law was about $222 million dollars greater per year than the average 12 years since. Georgia’s farm RGDP has averaged 7.7% lower for 2012-2023 than for 1997-2010. If we include the first (transition) year of the law—2011—in the post-HB 87 average, Georgia’s farm RGDP loss is 9.4%.
Alabama began its anti-immigration experiment in June 2011 with HB 56, considered the harshest anti-immigrant bill ever. Mr. Kobach said he finished is while sitting in his Kansas turkey blind during a hunting trip. This 2011 bill—Alabama Act 2011-535, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act)—was the harshest of the three. It made all the things a person must to do to live somewhere (get a driver’s license, rent a home, connect utilities to a home) a state crime.
Alabama farm RGDP has been 12.24% lower for (2012- 2023) than for 1997-2010. If we include the first (transition) year of the law—2011—in the post-2011-535 average, Alabama’s farm RGDP loss is 15.5%.
Fast Forward to 2025
The US state average for farm RGDP—which includes farm RGDP for Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama—for 2012-2023 was 67.4% higher than it was for 1997-2010. In contrast to this growing US farm real GDP, all three states we’re examining show significant drops (7.7% to 15.5%) and eventual stagnation in their farm RGDP after these laws. Their farm economies never recovered to the levels prior to these laws. Take a look at Chart 1 comparing the average farm RGDP of these three states with the US state average:
I haven’t yet studied the food processing industry in those three states during this period, but the Obama administration’s deportation success can give us a clue of what we might find. President Obama’s Secure Communities program demonstrated that removing 500,000 non-criminal unauthorized immigrants from the labor pool eliminates employment for about 44,000 US-born workers. How does unemployment propagate out from removing farm workers? Undocumented immigrant farmworkers (usually unintentionally hired) enable their farmer-employers to purchase more seed, fertilizer, equipment, and barns. These workers need homes and clothes and food and education. Their colleagues in food processing keep meatpacking, dairy-processing, bakeries, and beverage facilities churning out value-added products. These plants employ sales, marketing, accounting, and organizing staff. They need buildings and equipment. Unauthorized immigrants often staff restaurant kitchens that keep US-born waiters and restaurant hosts employed. And of course, all of us living in the US benefit from inexpensive, safe domestically-grown food. Many US citizens have been net winners due to a cheap labor pool that doesn’t complain about working conditions or wages.
These “wins” do NOT make unauthorized-undocumented immigration an ethical or economically-sustainable solution to our farm labor scarcity. Some US citizens have been losers in this long-running dodge of federal laws by employers and immigrants without work authorizations. The undocumented workforce loads community infrastructure. Both immigrants and citizens need housing, in short supply in rural communities. Housing costs in the US have risen much faster than food costs. High-cost housing in a rural economy where most jobs are low wage means your grown children won’t stay to raise your grandchildren near you—hence the empty elementary and middle school classrooms and increased gentrification in rural communities like mine. Long-term residents are lining up at local food pantries as housing costs eat up funds once spent on groceries.
If an unscrupulous employer dumps an injured undocumented farm worker in the emergency room of a struggling rural hospital, everyone in that community pays, either in higher bills for their own medical care or in higher taxes. Unauthorized immigrants may be less likely to commit crimes than US citizens, but if they bring young families, their children may need extra public education resources like English as a Second Language (ESL). Public schools are the biggest budget item in most rural communities. Empty classrooms are cheaper than full classrooms.
In my opinion, the biggest problem unauthorized (documented and undocumented) immigrants create is housing—both cost and availability. Ironically, home construction in Virginia relies heavily on unauthorized immigrant labor. In my area, unauthorized immigrants are more likely to be building or repairing houses than feeding chickens or picking produce. My neighbors in the building trades complain that unauthorized immigrants reduce their income by undercutting their rates. That’s the “economic hardship” mentioned in the Alabama law. Sometimes undocumented immigrants get the work done for less by short-cutting building codes, not pulling permits, and dodging inspections. Yet, anyone who has called a plumber or electrician lately has also complained of long waiting times. Which industry’s disruption from mass will have the greatest impact on US citizens?
In my experience, problems don’t get solved until all the stakeholders have a vested interest in solving them. Or at least, until the stakeholders stop profiting from the problem’s existence. Employers have used undocumented immigrants as a short-term solution to the problem of our changing US demographics. Undocumented immigrants are not only cheaper to employ but employing them intentionally requires a lot less paperwork than employing US citizens or immigrants with work permits. At least, there is less paperwork until you get caught. But are you seeing any videos of ICE agents arresting employers? On paper, federal penalties for employers of undocumented immigrants are more severe than federal penalties for being an undocumented worker. Yet, President Trump has pardoned some high-profile employers convicted for intentionally hiring undocumented workers. What is the message that employers are taking away from this? Lax enforcement of federal employer sanctions motivated the first Arizona law (HB-2779 in 2007), which revoked state business licenses of those hiring undocumented workers.
The US appetite for undocumented immigrants’ labor has also allowed foreign governments to fail to keep their citizens safe, free, and prosperous. Those governments in effect export large numbers of workers and their political foes to the US, thus creating a huge revenue stream called “remittances.” Immigrants in the US sent over $200 billion to relatives abroad in 2023 alone. The One Big Beautiful Bill—now US Public Law No: 119-21— taxes those remittances. Income already subject to taxes will be taxed again when sent abroad. I wonder if this double-taxation will become a counterincentive to deporting the immigrants generating those remittances.
Our friend Kris Kobach and CIS say that their advocacy of attrition through enforcement is actually a campaign for “a living wage” for everyone. Mr. Kobach has personally made millions off of anti-immigrant laws. First, he charged legislatures fees for drafting them via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservation collaboration organization with large corporate sponsors including the major players in the private prison industry. Mr. Kobach’s efforts went beyond state governments. He convinced nearly a hundred localities to pass these laws. Then, he got legal fees for defending these localities and states—mostly unsuccessfully—in court. Hazelton, PA, ended up paying $1.4M in legal fees of those challenging the anti-immigrant ordinance, on top of the years of legal fees it paid trying to defend the ordinance. Farmers Branch, TX, spent over $6M defending its ordinance prohibiting rentals to undocumented immigrants—and that ordinance never actually went into effect. Some localities even went bankrupt in court fights over unconstitutional anti-immigrant ordinances. Finally, Mr. Kobach rode the anti-immigrant sentiments whipped up by blaming immigrants for all our problems all the way to Attorney General of Kansas. Anti-immigrant legislation appears to be quite profitable for a select few people. Yet wage increases for most US citizens continue to lag cost of living increases.
This week, we saw platoons of armed and armored immigration enforcement troops—including National Guard members—throwing tear gas and smoke bombs and shooting supposedly non-lethal bullets at farms. ICE arrested over 300 farmworkers at two California-licensed cannabis nurseries. One panicked farm worker climbed up onto the roof of a greenhouse and then fell 30 feet. He later died of his injuries. US citizens were among the farm workers arrested. You likely care more about your food than cannabis, but this theater is coming for your food supply. Consider this show of force along with the new immigration enforcement funds in the OBBB (Public Law No: 119-21). The Trump Administration is apparently scaling attrition through enforcement up to a national level. This large ICE budget increase—$75B over four years for deportation alone—is not enough to find, detain, process, and deport every undocumented immigrant according to US immigration law. Remember from one of my prior posts that it might take about $216B to deport all unauthorized immigrants in compliance Title 8 laws? But not to worry, the administration is not complying Title 8 and provide due process to immigrants.
The displays of force and suspension of due process are intended to encourage self-deportation. Remember the Biden administration’s CDP One app enhancement to facilitate political asylum claims? The Trump administration not only cancelled that and all the claims made through it—it released a revamped version called CBP Home to facilitate (and track) self-deportations. Scaring someone out of the country is a lot cheaper than deporting them per Title 8, even if you buy them a plane ticket and pay them $1000 each. Can this work? Put yourself in the immigrant’s shoes: If you hiked thousands of miles to escape a country where armed masked men shoved people into unmarked vans without warrants and locked up people whose only crime was trying to survive into prisons without due process—well, it might not take many displays of that by the US government to scare you into self-deporting. Too bad you don’t have a safe place to self-deport to.
Given the results of state experiments with attrition through enforcement, and the massive scaling-up we are witnessing across our nation, I suspect that concerns about our food supply will soon dilute our gratitude for our newly-secured US borders. That Big Beautiful Border Wall will not fill our grocery stores. It also won’t filter contaminants or infectious agents out of the food we will have to import. If all we get from “secure borders” is a labor shortage that requires us to import all our food, we may actually end up less secure—foreign governments could decide any day to stop exporting food to us because they are upset about, say, tariffs or some other foreign policy choice.
Some worries about our food supply have gotten to the top. President Trump hinted in June that perhaps his administration might trust farmers not to hire murderers and asked ICE to stop raiding farms (and the hospitality industry, where he has large investments). “In the case of good reputable farmers, they can take responsibility for the people that they hire and let them have responsibility because we can’t put the farms out of business and at the same time we don’t want to hurt people that aren’t criminals,” he said at a June press conference. He also hinted about a path toward legalizing the “good” undocumented workers.
That pause lasted only a few days. Since then, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has been busy reassuring us that there will be NO amnesty or grace period for undocumented farm workers. She also promised that there would be NO interruption in our domestic food supply. Rollins said that Trump “has always been of the mindset that at the end of the day, the promise to America to ensure that we have a 100 percent American workforce stands, but we must be strategic [in] how we are implementing the mass deportation so as not to compromise our food supply.”
Ms. Rollins proposes automation and the new Medicaid work requirement as solutions to the farm labor shortage. I have been both a farmer and an automation engineer and I am skeptical of both proposals. Automation usually changes the work, rather than eliminating all work required. Machinery costs a lot, driving more consolidation and industrialization of food production. We also import a lot of our farm machinery. The administration’s reduction in research and development investments will slow automation advances. The Medicaid work requirement? It doesn’t kick in until December 2026, nearly a year and a half and two harvest cycles from now. So, when Rollins says “be more strategic in implementing mass deportation” of farm workers, does she mean that the administration will delay immigration enforcement on farms until after December 2026? Or wait until we have much better farm automation? Perhaps that’s why this week’s deportation theater targeted a cannabis farm instead of, say, another vegetable farm or dairy farm.
Most of the country did not suffer from the 2007-2011 Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama attempts to eliminate their undocumented immigrant workforce. Our grocery stores could still easily stock our favorite veggies from neighboring US states where those displaced farm workers moved to continue working. The current nationwide effort to remove all unauthorized immigrants (not just the undocumented ones) will impact all US citizens in the form of higher prices and shortages for domestic foods.
Simultaneously, the trade war will make imported food more expensive (but that’s a future post). Perhaps the food prices and shortages will painful enough to remind us that unauthorized immigrants are NOT the cause of all our problems. Remember President Reagan’s Farewell Address? Attitudes have changed a lot in a few decades, haven’t they? Many of us are descendants of imported farm workers. Maybe we will soon remember immigrants can be part of the solution to many current problems—housing and childcare and eldercare shortages as well as growing food—within a reformed immigration system. I suspect that immigration reform will not succeed until we figure out how to shift the costs of immigration from away from the low-income people who have been bearing the brunt of these costs to those who have benefited the most from cheap immigrant labor. In other words, reclaim the American Dream for everyone.
But this post is already running long, so I will tackle reform details in some future posts. In the meantime, keep an eye on the Dignity Act of 2025, the latest immigration reform legislation to be introduced in the US House of Representatives.
References
From the Center for Immigration Studies: Attrition Through Enforcement
Failed 2007 Attempt at Federal Immigration Reform: Immigration Bill Dies in Senate
FAIR: Federation for American Immigration Reform - Wikipedia
Effects of Secure Communities Deportation (2008-2013): The Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement | Journal of Labor Economics: Vol 41, No 4
Brookings Institution: The labor market impact of deportations
The 2018-2019 dip in Farm Real GDP:
Chart: U.S. Farmers Lost Billions to Trump-Era Retaliatory Tariffs | Statista
Detailed State Analysis:
Someone Grew That post on Arizona immigration laws
Someone Grew That post on Georgia immigration laws
Someone Grew That post on Alabama immigration laws
Trump: Farmers To Take Responsibility Rooting Out Murderers
Rollins (USDA Secretary): Medicaid recipients, automation can replace deported farmworkers
Executive Order on Secure Borders: President Trump is Securing Our Homeland – The White House
The Cost of Attrition through Enforcement Laws:
Article: Hazleton Immigration Ordinance That Began.. | migrationpolicy.org
The High Costs of Immigration Enforcement - Center for American Progress
Prince William County, Virginia: BrgksSurveyPrWillm.indd
Latest Immigration Reform Legislation in the US House:
Summary: The Dignity Act of 2025: Bill Summary - National Immigration Forum
Dignity Act Text: the_dignity_act_of_2025_section_by_section.pdf
Thanks for posting this timely article, Kristin. I'm cautiously optimistic that we will *eventually* enact some beneficial immigration reform. But the current administration doesn't seem to be headed in this direction, so we may not see this happening for a few more years.