The Unauthorized Immigrants Filling Your Plate
Villains or Heroes?
Note to my readers: This is the second of three posts on unauthorized immigration and its impact on agriculture. It may end up being four, because this is a very complex subject. The first post covers the big picture of unauthorized immigration. This post zooms in on the farm and food contributions of these workers. You don’t need to read the first one to understand this one, but I encourage you to read at least the summary of the first post.
Key points of this post:
The current on-farm hired workforce numbers about 1.17 million. The farmworker’s average wage is only 60% of the average nonfarm worker’s wage.
Our food system is among the top three employers of unauthorized immigrants, with and without work authorizations. The construction industry and the hospitality industry are the other two of the top three.
The US has never met its agriculture labor force requirements without importing labor, including during our colonial days. We have imported farm labor via indentured servitude, chattel slavery, the Bracero program, and H-2/H-2A visa programs.
The last two presidential administrations have greatly expanded the H-2A Visa program for seasonal agricultural workers; however, the program is difficult to use and the seasonal restrictions make it unusable for most livestock farmers.
About half of US farmworkers may be unauthorized immigrants—about 600,000 people—including Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Temporary Protected Status (TPS), political asylum applicants, and humanitarian visa applicants. About a quarter of US farmworkers—about 283,000—are undocumented (with no legal status and no work authorizations).
US farms producing food crops including vegetables, fruit, and nuts are employing three unauthorized immigrants for every two US citizens. Only one of those three immigrants has a work authorization.
The US dairy farm workforce may be 70% unauthorized. Losing that workforce could bankrupt over 3500 dairy farms.
Rural communities and farm-supporting industries will suffer from mass deportation, losing two to three off-farm jobs for every unfilled on-farm job.
The entire food-handling and processing chain employs hundreds of thousands of unauthorized workers—including milk-truck drivers, produce packers, meat processors, dairy processing workers, and food distribution workers. Loss of these workers would cause loss of perishable crops that do get harvested.
Loss of unauthorized immigrant farm and food workers would impact all links in our food supply chains. Food systems can adapt only at the speed of the growth of plants, trees, and livestock. Imports cannot fill the gaps instantly without creating shortages somewhere else in the world, so shortages and high prices could last months to years, depending on the product.
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US farmers—with the help of a lot of scientists and engineers—have steadily increased productivity since World War 2, but we can’t automate our way to zero farm labor. Let’s start this dive into the immigration status of US farm workers with the labor line on this productivity plot (Chart 1) from the USDA Economic Research Service:
Total “factor productivity” incorporates all consistently-measurable farm inputs like labor, land, chemicals, equipment, fuel, and input contract services. It’s not corrected for inconsistent and localized things like rainfall and temperatures. The outputs are all farm crops including livestock, food, fiber, and farm-provided output services. You can see the labor line’s been pretty level for decades, even while US farm productivity and output continues to increase. US farmers are producing more and more food for the same inputs, but we still need some people to make it happen. Incidentally, the links to the detailed report behind this plot were broken by some Executive Order or another on January 22, 2025, so I had to dig around quite a bit to find the full report (see references at the end).
My December 2024 post laid out the worsening US agricultural labor shortage as the US population ages. Guess what: cellphones, the internet, and artificial intelligence haven’t figured out how to pick produce or pull lambs. I can tell you from personal experience that draping a cellphone with ovine afterbirth is fatal to the cellphone. A cellphone lost in the back forty during a roundup may have survived longer. Hopefully, the sheep found that one and called the horses to help chase the coyotes away before the battery—or some lambs—died. Those coyotes are not afraid of a cellphone, regardless of the data plan.
Seriously, we are in the realm of diminishing returns on farm automation. Speaking as an engineer as well as a farmer, the large capital investment required to make more labor-saving automation will drive more consolidation of smaller farms into larger ones, because that’s been the trend for decades now. The independent farm model I believe we need for resilient food production must still employ people to grow our food safely. Currently, that’s about 3 full-time workers per farm. Typically, those three are two family members and one hired farm worker.
In 2023, USDA says that US farmers hired 1.17 million workers. Yet Americans demand food that is low cost as well as safe. That has led to laws and policies that have kept farm wages low compared to other industries because that’s the only way US-produced food stays competitive with imports in grocery stores. And surprise: Cornell University’s Farmworker Center says that over half of all US farmworkers are unauthorized immigrants. That’s nearly 600,000 people. Other sources (Center for Immigration Studies) suggest a lower percentage, perhaps only 25% (about 283,000)—but their definition covers only those unauthorized immigrants without work authorizations, e.g. undocumented. (My last post covers these terminology nuances.) You can find some sources saying that a million US farmworkers are undocumented, but I can’t make that math correlate with USDA farm census and labor numbers, so let’s stay with the 600,000 unauthorized and 283,000 of those undocumented for now. That’s roughly 50% unauthorized and 25% undocumented across the US agriculture sector.
That’s still a LOT of people. Here are the horns of a dilemma: Do we import food or import labor to grow our food here?
This dilemma is not as new for our country as it feels. Turns out that America has been importing farm labor for a long, long time. Labor shortages limited the growth of the New World economy from the beginning of European settlement. Our agricultural system began in the 17th century with imported labor. Our colonial ancestors were not turning away people desperate to enter the colonies. Quite the opposite. In the 17th and 18th centuries, 80% of Europeans came to the New World as indentured servants, bound to work years without pay (usually four to seven) for the person who paid their Old Country debts as well as their passage to the New World. Some were children kidnapped and sold into indenture—what today we might call “trafficked” children. Others were convicts or political prisoners. Others were (horrors!) excommunicated religious zealots. Correspondence preserved from the 1770s includes diatribes against the despicable subhuman riff-raff being allowed into the colonies under indenture contracts. After all, these criminals, indigents, and zealots would be turned loose at the end of their contract to ravage civilized society!
Most indentured servants served their contracts in agriculture-related jobs. The field hands worked hard in difficult conditions, but they may have been the lucky ones. Indentured women and girls often got assigned “extra duties” at the farmhouse—and getting pregnant extended a woman’s indenture by two years. Their masters had no incentive to preserve the health of these indentured workers for their lives after the indenture period. Still, indentured servants had some legal rights. Colonial records contain cases of indentured servants winning suits against their masters for exploitation and abuse. If you survived your indenture contract, colonial life offered opportunity. In 1665, more than half of the Virginia’s House of Burgesses were former indentured servants. Hmmmm. I’m rather proud of my ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. Looking at the percentage of people who came here as indentured servants, it seems likely that some (most?) of my ancestors left gaps in their origin stories. The heroic escape stories from Old World oppression may have more carefully-chosen words in them than I realized!
The contract indenture system was eventually replaced by “permanent indenture”— enslavement—of Africans in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Africans did not have any legal rights and couldn’t sue their masters. Rather convenient for the masters, that lack of personhood in the law. The law also enslaved the children born to these Africans, so the slave system was self-propagating even after the US made slave import illegal with 1800 and 1808 federal laws. By 1860, the US Census counted nearly 4 million permanently-enslaved Africans in the US. That was about 12.6% of the US population, down from a high of 18%. Slaves comprised nearly half of the population in some states. Mississippi led with 55% of its 1860 population being enslaved. Most worked in agricultural commodity production including food, tobacco, and fiber (especially cotton after the invention of the cotton gin). With the conclusion of the Civil War, these formerly-enslaved people who stayed in the South remained a critical part of the agricultural workforce for decades. Many became share-croppers. We can’t ignore the connection between the need for cheap labor to denying upward mobility to a large portion of our population.
In the 20th century, the world wars reduced our agricultural workforce to crisis levels. In World War 1, colleges and non-profits formed the Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA) modeled on the United Kingdom’s Land Army. The WLAA sent 20,000 women volunteers out to help farmers who had lost workers to WW1 military service.
Between 1940 and 1945, six million male farmworkers volunteered or were drafted to serve their country. Plenty of young women left their unpaid farm roles to enlist or work in the new factories arming the Allies, too. The women staying on the farms finally became visible to the rest of the country. Those war years saw a 12-fold increase in women officially earning a paycheck for farmwork instead of being unpaid labor alongside husbands and fathers. The US Women’s Land Army became a US government program in 1942, sending 1.5 million women volunteers to help on farms by 1945. Many WLA volunteers held down non-farm jobs but volunteered on farms during weekends and vacations.
But farms were still desperately short of labor in WW2. In 1942, the US and Mexican governments collaborated to backfill the agricultural workforce. This collaboration— emphasis on collaboration—created the Bracero program. This program formally recognized and regulated an ebb-and-flow of seasonal ag workers that had been part of US and Mexican life for generations. We tend to forget that the US Southwest was part of Mexico until 1848, and redrawing the border didn’t change the rhythms of life there overnight. The Bracero program did not end when World War 2 ended, because many farm-boys-turned-soldiers didn’t rush back to the grinding poverty they knew on the farm during the Great Depression. Even dodging bullets did not lessen the attraction of three meals a day and a regular paycheck in the military. Many had developed a taste of the wider world and wanted more of that. At the US government’s urging, newly-built US factories laid women off to hire male combat veterans in their transition to manufacturing consumer goods. The GI Bill opened up opportunities beyond the farm, especially in education. Even the women returning to the farm had educational opportunities that changed their farm and community roles.
Consequently, the Bracero program lasted until 1964. An average of 200,000 Mexican farm workers legally came to work in the US each year. Interestingly, when the program came up for renewal after WW2, the Mexican government expressed concerned about labor shortages in Mexico and tried to get the US to include penalties on US employers for hiring immigrant labor outside the Bracero program. My research reveals another possible motivation for the Mexican government: The Bracero program included mandatory wage garnishments sent to the Mexican government. These remittances were supposedly “banked” in Mexico by the Mexican government, to be paid to the workers on their return to Mexico. Unfortunately, the Braceros seldom got that money on return to Mexico. Money wasn’t everything, however. Mexico did prohibit Texas employers from participating for a time due to abuses of the program there and Texas lynchings of some Bracero employees.
The H-2 visa program for temporary and seasonal agricultural workers replaced the Bracero program in 1964. It limited admission to fewer workers than the Bracero program until the 21st Century. Some attribute the rapid increase in mechanization of American agriculture in the late 1960s to the cancellation of the Bracero program and the slow start of the H-2 program. I think that’s an over-simplification, but it was a factor. The H-2 visa program still exists today. In 1986, it split into H-2A visas serving agricultural needs and H-2B visas addressing other seasonal worker shortages such as staffing golf resorts. The H-2A program has greatly increased in size in recent years. The Trump Administration expanded the number of visas by 41% (from about 218,000 in 2017 to almost 308,000 in 2020). Growth continued in the Biden administration, with 370,000 H-2A visas issued in 2022—another 20% increase (Chart 2):
The H-2A visa program has a lot of restrictions. The program allows part-year “seasonal” visas—up to 10 months out of the year—for three years in a row before visa-holders have to return to their home country for a period and reapply. The program also allows some “temporary” work visas lasting up to one year. This means the employers must continuously train new participants. Employer participation is costly in other ways, too. The employer must get “certified” to participate. Once in, the employer must reimburse any employed worker’s visa application fee ($190), guarantee transportation to and from the worker’s country of origin, guarantee a minimum number of hours, and pay the worker’s food and housing. Neither the employer nor the H-2A employee pays payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare), however. The H-2A employee must pay all applicable income taxes. If the employer follows all the rules, an H-2A worker costs an employer thousands more dollars per employee than hiring a US citizen at the prevailing farm wage. Of course, the program is designed to ensure that it doesn’t take jobs from US citizens and permanent residents. It’s no accident that hiring US citizens and work-authorized permanent residents is easier and cheaper. Unfortunately, the program also makes hiring immigrants without work authorization easier and cheaper.
One specialty which is both seasonal and hard to find US workers willing to do it is tending sheep on remote ranges. This work involves sending a shepherd out with a large flock of sheep and guard dogs to graze during the summer months into remote grasslands. The shepherd lives in a “sheep wagon” (a camper nowadays) wherever the grazing is. It’s a 24/7 on-call job—the guard dogs do the calling when predators come—and you move flock and wagon to fresh grazing every few days. Except for the rancher making rounds to check on you and bring supplies every week, you are on your own for the entire grazing season, usually well outside of cellphone range. Nowadays, you likely have a solar-powered satellite phone and video player for company. Many western sheep ranchers with remote grazing leases have long-running arrangements with South American shepherds who are happy to get two summers a year, one in North America and one in South America. The Department of Labor has a special H-2A waiver—appropriately called the Herder Rule—for this kind of 24/7 work. This is an application where the program seems to work well for both ranchers and shepherds.
The H-2A program does not work for farmers needing highly-skilled employees full-time all year, unfortunately. This is the situation for eastern sheep farmers like my family, who must graze the same pastures all year round. H-2A doesn’t work for my few remaining dairy farmer neighbors either. Unfortunately, the H-2A program was designed by non-farmers, and perhaps by people who don’t actually want to reduce incentives for employing unauthorized immigrants. US farmworker advocates say it depresses farmworker wages. Migrant farmworker advocates say H-2A employers abuse visa holders. Politicians say both employers and visa holders game the system. All parties can point to some specific true abuses. The only thing that’s clear is expanding the H-2A program won’t solve the US farm labor shortage without major changes.
So, our domestic food production depends on unauthorized immigrants that 55% of us want to throw out of the country. We are also complaining about food prices in the grocery store. Even though US food prices are not rising as fast as (on average) US wages, grocery price inflation loomed especially large in the 2024 US election. Somehow, the price of eggs has become a proxy for the Loss of the American Dream, even though housing inflation is the real wage thief (a future post). When we aren’t complaining about food prices, we are complaining about too much of our food being imported, most from countries that do not have the same safety standards as that US does. Meanwhile, agricultural employers are complaining about unfilled jobs. And paying rising wages.
Unauthorized immigrants are helping us serve ourselves dinner by solving these problems, sort of. They take many US farm jobs that might otherwise be unfilled. They have reduced the cost of groceries and slowed the growth in our reliance on food imports. I believe they depress US farm laborers’ wages, but they have kept many farms in business. US citizens are not currently paying enough for US-produced food to cover farmworker wages high enough to compete with off-farm jobs. Here’s a comparison of real, inflation-corrected wages in agriculture with wages everywhere else (Chart 3):
Today, the average US farmworker makes only 60% what the average US nonfarm worker makes. That’s an improvement over 1990 when the average non-farm worker made twice as much as the average farm worker. A high-school drop-out can make more per hour moving boxes at Walmart or Amazon than he can working on a farm. So, there’s actually a third horn on our import-food-or-import-farm-labor dilemma: Pay enough for our food and natural fiber to enable farmers to pay wages competitive with nonfarm employers. Are you willing to pay, say, a 25% premium for US-grown food and fiber? Turns out that many of you are willing to pay more for US-grown food, which is why the fight over restricting the “Product of the USA” label to products actually 100% produced in the USA was so hot (December 2023 post). The good news: Product of the USA on meat and poultry means 100% born, raised, and processed in the USA as of March 11, 2024. It’s too soon to tell if that will raise livestock workers’ wages.
While an immigrant with a work authorization can work her way into those better-paying nonfarm jobs, the undocumented immigrant has few alternatives to farm labor. Undocumented immigrants work on farms at rates below the average farm worker wage—anywhere from 2% to 24% below the prevailing farm wage. Unauthorized immigrants keeping US farms surviving are—indirectly or directly—also keeping the neighborhood rural farm-support businesses alive. The feed and seed supply, the farm equipment dealer, grain elevators, slaughterhouses, commodity brokers, produce-packing houses, food-processing businesses, railroads, truckers, machinery mechanics, and barn builders, to name a few. So why have these immigrants have been cast as villains in the national story lately, not heroes?
My last post explored the legitimate concern US citizens have about having neighbors who were willing to break US law or civil regulations to get into the US. I want to re-emphasize my view: a nation must have control of its borders. However, I caution everyone to remember that nearly a third of unauthorized immigrants have some legal status (DACA, political asylum review in progress, Temporary Protected Status, or a humanitarian visa). Perhaps I should say one-third had some legal status before January 20, 2025, when the interpretation of US immigration law went into flux. In agriculture, a third have government-issued work authorization based on this legal status which is now in question. I am not a fan of deporting people who have been trying to do immigration right.
Remember from a prior newsletter that fresh fruit, nuts, and vegetables are the most labor-intensive food crops? The US Department of Labor conducts an extensive face-to-face survey of these food-crop workers and their employers every year called the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS). Here (Chart 4) are their estimates on the composition of this workforce for the past thirty years based on this annual survey:
The reports on the NAWS survey links on the Department of Labor (DoL) website were disabled late in January, but I found a backdoor link (below) to the 2020 survey if you want to learn a lot about our fresh food crop workforce. This survey estimates that 42.1% of current US crop farm workers are “unauthorized.” Careful reading of the labor survey suggests that DoL’s “Foreign born: unauthorized” category is defined differently from ICE’s unauthorized immigrants (the definition I pounded into your head on the last post). It may include some people with refugee status, working their way to US citizenship, but refugees admitted to the US are far more likely to be in the nonfarm workforce, drawn by higher wages. The “unauthorized” category of the NAWS appears to be all the non-citizens without a valid work authorization—what many people call “undocumented.” So, for example, the NAWS puts a DACA immigrant with a work authorization in “Foreign born: authorized.” Thus, the actual percentage of unauthorized immigrants working on US farms is up to 62.3%. Folks, this means that US farms producing these food crops could be employing three unauthorized immigrants for every two US citizens. Only one of those three immigrants has any documents, e.g., a work authorization.
This NAWS estimate of 42.1% without work authorization is down from nearly 55% in the years 2000-2001. In those years, the percentage of all unauthorized immigrants (with and without work authorization) in this ag sector was around 80%. Turns out that NAWS has been counting some of the same unauthorized workers for many years: The average time that these workers have been in the US is 21 years in 2022. In fact, the most recent report features charts on the “aging” of the unauthorized component of this food crop workforce, not just the authorized portion.
California, Washington, Florida, Texas, and Oregon are the top states for employing unauthorized immigrants. They are also among the top US producers of fresh produce. California tops both lists. These two statistics are correlated. Somewhere around a million unauthorized immigrants are on farms, mostly planting and harvesting produce. So why aren’t their employers in trouble with the law? Aren’t they using E-Verify? A typical scenario for seasonal work: a farmer contracts with a harvesting service, which in turn employs the workers on a short-term contract. The tomatoes, grapes, or squash are on trucks before the farmer or harvesting contractor can learn if any of the social security numbers provided by the workers belong to those workers. Check your own social security statement carefully: you may have been credited with payroll tax payments from work some unauthorized immigrant did. The good news: you will wind up getting the related Social Security benefits, not that undocumented immigrant.
What would the deportation of all unauthorized immigrant farm workers and their colleagues in other food crops look like in your local grocery store? For starters, If 61.3% of food crop workers were gone, 61.3% of fresh US produce would never get into our food distribution and processing system. Some of what did get to the packing facility would rot waiting for the packers that got deported (remember those Haitians in Springfield, Ohio?). How long would it take for grocers to find suppliers outside the US to replace, say, three quarters of US-grown produce? Considering how much imported produce we eat, that’s about three-eighths of all produce in our grocery stores. It would probably take at least a growing season if not a full year to replace it, as other countries’ food export plantings are sized by the prior year’s demand. In the case of a trade war with our largest foreign fresh-produce supplier (Mexico), the produce that replaces the unharvested US produce would be more expensive due to tariffs.
The impact on US poultry and meat deliveries at the farm level would presumably be lower because they are less reliant on labor than produce. However, they are more reliant on labor after they leave the farm. Once your prospective dinner leaves its farm of origin, it winds its way through a slaughterhouse, processing, and packaging. The USDA says that the total US food and beverage workforce is about 1.7 million. Over 500,000 of these are in meat and poultry processing, the largest subgroup. About 200,000 (two-fifths) of those are unauthorized immigrants. I’ve known some immigrants who paid tuition for their engineering degrees working in poultry processing. It was brutal work as well as motivating—in a negative way. One of them said to me, “You get to where you are seriously considering ending your misery by laying yourself down on that conveyor belt with the dead chickens.” I think I would rather pick strawberries, even though the pay is lower. And I am allergic to strawberries too!
In the food and beverage processing world, the two biggest sectors are Meat Processing (26%) and Dairy Processing (13%). These are also the sectors requiring a complex “cold chain” to ensure their product are safe all the way out the door of the grocery store. All of our food chains are fragile, but cold chains are ever so much more so.
The current labor shortage has led to wage increases for those workers in the meat and dairy chain, from leaving the farm to arriving at the grocery store. From 2019 to 2022, wages in dairy and meat processing increased 33.7% (from an average of $14.95/hour to $20.00/hour). Those involved in transporting these highly perishable foods saw a 40% wage increase. Compare this with the overall wage increases: US workers averaged $20.11/hour in 2019 and $21.51/hour in 2022, a 7.4% increase. The good news for the average grocery shopper is that the prices of these products in the grocery store increased by only 4 to 7%, less than the average US hourly wage increased. “Average increases” may not mean much in your particular pocketbook, of course. But if the US government worsened the labor shortage in the food chain, that would likely lead to even greater wage increases.
How much worse would the labor shortage in food processing become? According to the American Immigration Council, immigrants comprise 51.2% of dairy-processing workers, 45.4% of meat-packing workers, 20% of livestock handlers, and 26% of meat transportation workers. Not all of these immigrants are unauthorized; however, some reliable estimates suggest that half are completely undocumented. Recall that the H-2A program can’t be used to fill year-round jobs and is restricted to on-farm work—no off-farm processing. Dairy and meat industry work is year-round.
If dairy farmers lost all their immigrant workers, the American Immigration Council says that retail milk prices would double. Worse, the loss of licensed dairy herds would accelerate—perhaps 3,500 dairy farms would fold immediately due to loss of their labor force. We already lost over 40% of all US dairy herds between 2011 and 2021 alone, on top of large losses through the prior four decades—and labor has always been a major driver of consolidation. Check out this post. Robotic milkers are expensive and do only the final stage of the overall work of producing milk and cream. The National Milk Producers Federation says that the US economy would lose $32 billion overall if just the dairy industry lost its immigrant work force.
But some of these immigrants working on dairy farms are naturalized US citizens. So, how many of these immigrants are unauthorized and deportable? The unauthorized portion of immigrants working on dairy farms may be as high as 70%. Some sources say that’s just the percentage of immigrants without work authorizations (undocumented). If all unauthorized immigrants were all sent home tomorrow, there would be a lot of very uncomfortable cows, some soon-bankrupt farmers, and unhappy grocery shoppers. Based on a 2018 enforcement case, bankruptcy may be the least of these farmers’ problems. Dairy farmer Michael Millenkamp served prison time and paid $250,000 in fines and forfeitures for violating federal law in hiring undocumented workers. A condition of his three years’ probation after prison was speaking at farmer conferences to warn farmers about what can happen if you knowingly employ undocumented immigrants.
But let’s stick with the impact of labor losses on our food supply here. Consider how these labor losses might stack up as the remaining milk production moves into processing. Remember that cold chain: dairies need special trucks and trained drivers making daily visits to farms, 365 days a year. Raw milk is extremely perishable! If unauthorized immigrant milk truck drivers (13% of that workforce) disappeared, there would be more milk dumped, bankrupting more farmers, even if they had robotic milkers and no unauthorized immigrant employees. Or perhaps especially if they had invested in robotic milkers—they have a huge bank payment due every month on that machine!
Moving further along that chain, if a quarter of dairy product-processing workers disappeared, there would be more milk wasted—at least until the processing plants reneged on contracts with farmers to buy milk and put more dairy farms out of business. Some of those plants might soon close as the corporations consolidated processing facilities that they couldn’t staff or keep supplied with a cost-effective level of milk supply. Non-immigrant workers would be laid off, and more farmers would go bankrupt as they lost buyers in their region for the milk they could still produce with a smaller labor force. Remember that word “monopsony” we learned exploring the poultry industry? Limited buyers are a plague in other types of farming. There would be more unhappy grocery shoppers as yogurt and ice cream and butter disappeared from the grocery store or became far more expensive. Or not: our top three international customers for US dairy exports are Mexico ($2.47 Billion/year), Canada ($1.14 billion/year), and China ($584 million/year). A trade war with Mexico, Canada, and China that would stop the US export of over $4 billion in dairy products per year and put them on US grocery store shelves would soften this blow to US consumers, even while many US dairy farms and processors disappear. Is there a strategic plan linking mass deportations with tariffs?
Have you been reading your food ingredient labels lately? If not, ask someone allergic to dairy what foods contain dairy products. You will be surprised. A large percentage of processed foods contain whey or “non-fat dairy solids.” These include processed meats, like deli turkey! The dairy section of the grocery would not be the only place with empty shelves. Oh, oops, those processed-food industries might be a lot more worried about the fact that a quarter of their workers didn’t show up for work this morning than about finding a replacement for the dairy-derived ingredients. Anyone in the meat business will have the same problems as the dairy business with a breakdown of their cold chain as many skilled workers are deported. This would be likely to keep them from being happy about the huge surge in demand for hamburger processing as those bankrupt dairies sent their cows to slaughter. Retired dairy cows don’t get to loll about in green pastures. Early retirement for a dairy cow means becoming hamburger younger. Extra lean—have you ever seen a fat dairy cow? But at least that cow will be eligible for a “Product of the USA” label at the grocery store, if there’s still a US meat-processing plant open.
Rural community suffering would be compounded by the loss of some beef, pork, and poultry farms. Not good news for my area, where Tyson’s closed a broiler chicken plant last year and left its contract poultry farmers with neither birds nor a buyer. The local cattle business is already struggling with loss of low-cost labor where housing costs have sky-rocketed. The farm next to mine has “Black Angus” in its name, a ghost of its history as a cattle farm. All but a few acres were planted with pine trees in the mid-2000s. Zero cows. Zero labor and zero inputs required for twenty to thirty years after planting the trees. That farm’s only contribution to the local economy for two to three decades is property taxes. I’m seeing more and more of these “pine-tations.” Maybe I have stumbled on the reason soft wood has become a popular crop. I wonder if their return on pine tree investment will suffer with a “mass deportation” because construction is also one of the top-three industries employing unauthorized immigrants. Around here, I think more unauthorized immigrants work in construction than on farms.
A slow wave of rural economic destruction would propagate away from failing dairy and livestock operations. Farmers who supply feed for livestock and farmers who supply seed to those farmers would soon feel the pain. Other industries would suffer, including those supplying machinery and fertilizer, chemicals to clean dairies, medicines to treat livestock, building materials and labor for barns, and so on. The National Immigration Forum says that every farmworker in livestock or produce creates two to three off-farm jobs. Those off-farm jobs are split between output (food) processing, input preparation, and farm support.
I wondered if the COVID-19 pandemic food disruptions could give us a clue about the food system disruptions that we might see with mass deportations. About one in ten meat-processing workers got COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic. Rural counties with meat-processing plants had twelve times the rate of COVID infections of rural counties without. People working on farms are outdoors a lot and did not have the same infection rate. So only one link of the meat supply chain was disrupted, not every link. In Virginia, rural counties with meat-processing plants had the highest pandemic death rates, as close working conditions collided with limited healthcare. The meat-processing industry rebounded quickly in 2020 by installing plexiglass shields between workstations and requiring workers to wear masks. Those measures soon reduced the infection rates in their neighborhoods to national rural county averages.
The other thing that limits utility of the pandemic in helping us understand mass deportation impacts is that many grocery-store shortages were caused by major changes in where the demand was located instead of a shortage at the farm. People started cooking at home and buying groceries instead of eating in restaurants. Absent a pandemic, the average US resident spends almost half of his or her food dollar in restaurants. The pandemic caused a supply-chain scramble to shift resources from supplying commercial food services in large volume to grocery stores serving customers shopping for smaller-volume packages. For example, the supply chain for “table eggs” (what we buy at the grocery store) is completely separate from that for “breaker eggs” (what a baking company or restaurant buys in large containers already cracked and pasteurized). Those two types of eggs even come from different farms and are governed by different regulations.
So, you thought the pandemic supply chain disruptions were bad? Domestic food shortages then were mostly due to breaks in single links. Pandemic shortages may not be a good indicator of losing a much larger workforce fraction in many links of our food chain caused by a “mass deportation.” Every link will have breakage!
Don’t assume you can just go eat at a restaurant if the grocery store shelves empty due to a mass deportation—the hospitality industry is also a top-three industry employer of unauthorized immigrants. Restaurants may be curtailing hours or closing due to short staffing—assuming they can get food to cook.
Where do we turn for real-world lessons on the impact of mass deportations of our farm-to-fork supply chains? Could I be overestimating the impact of losing so many farm and food chain workers? Turns out that three states (Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia) made themselves mini-laboratories for immigrant deportation experiments in the past two decades. What happened there? Stay tuned for my next newsletter.
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References and Resources
Unauthorized Immigrant Employment:
The U.S. Industries That Rely Most on Illegal Immigration
The Economic Impact of Undocumented Farmworkers - National Immigration Forum
Indentured servitude in America:
Indentured Servitude in Colonial America | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History
Indentured "White Slaves" in the Colonies (1770, by William Eddis) | Encyclopedia.com
Census Counts of Slaves in the US:
Visual: radicalcartography
1860 United States census - Wikipedia
Woman's Land Army of America:
The Bracero Program: Bracero Program - Wikipedia
Analysis of the Farm Workforce:
USDA ERS: Farm Labor | Economic Research Service
A Look at Agricultural Productivity Growth in the United States, 1948-2017 | Home
Where unauthorized immigrants are employed:
tending_to_americas_food_supply_meat_dairy_industries.pdf
Produce production in the US: U.S. Fruits & Vegetables Market Size & Share Report, 2030
Dairy Exports:
Dairy Data | Economic Research Service
Dairy Products | USDA Foreign Agricultural Service
Legal Agriculture Employment of Foreign Citizens: H2A Visa Program for Seasonal and Temporary Workers:
https://www.farmers.gov/working-with-us/h2a-visa-program
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/86864/AEWR2023.png
H-2A Herder Final Rule | U.S. Department of Labor
Data on Legal Permanent Residents:
Legal Immigration to the United States, 1820-Present | migrationpolicy.org
Reports on immigrant Farm Labor:
Farm Labor | Economic Research Service
Feeding America: How Immigrants Sustain US Agriculture | Baker Institute
Department of Labor National Agricultural Workers Survey:
NAWS data fact sheet fixed.docx
Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2019–2020
National Agricultural Workers Survey | U.S. Department of Labor
Impact of COVID on food supply:
At least 59,000 meat workers caught COVID and 269 died, report says - CBS News
Unscrambling U.S. egg supply chains amid COVID-19 - PMC
Anecdotal stories about dairy farm dependency on unauthorized immigrants:
Devin Nunes's Family Farm Moved to Iowa, Employs Undocumented Workers
Truth Social CEO loses court fight over claims his family hired undocumented workers
“Product of the USA” label victory:
As an elementary student in California's Central Valley starting in the late 1950s, I remember learning in my Social Studies classes about our seasonal farm workers who visited through the "Bracero Program." Back then, it was portrayed as a positive way to provide the needed laborers.
This is an informative, eye-opening and well-researched post. Thank you for providing this perspective on the scale of the immigration participation in our agriculture sector.