Summary:
- Trump’s proposed deportation policy poses significant risks to North Carolina’s farm sector
- Large-scale deportations of undocumented workers would significantly increase consumer prices
- Bipartisan failure to comprehensively address immigration has come at a cost
Many North Carolinians are facing serious challenges under today’s rising cost of living. Having only just begun to stabilize from the inflation cycle of 2022-2023, new Trump tariffs are threatening to push consumer prices even higher and kick of a second round of spiraling costs. The increased costs of goods, services, and labor are now forcing many small businesses to choose between increasing their prices or cutting their workforce.
Unfortunately, concern for the cost of living has been subsumed in the current political moment by a hefty appetite for anti-immigrant posturing – and it seems the latter is winning.
On the campaign trail, candidate Trump promised a large-scale campaign of deportation of all undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Now in the White House, Donald Trump’s immigration policy seems headed in the same direction. This approach has some support: in a Feb 5-7 CBS News Poll, 44% of United States adults said that they thought President Trump was focusing the “right amount” on “deporting immigrants who are in the United States illegally.”
But large-scale deportations would also be devastating for North Carolina’s $111 billion agricultural industry, and would be guaranteed to hike the cost of every person’s grocery store bill. Many North Carolinians are unaware of the direct effects Trump’s deportation policy will have on the agriculture industry as a whole. They may be about to find out.
Ag in the North Carolina economy
16% of the entire North Carolina workforce works in or around agriculture, totaling almost 750,000 of the state’s 4.6 million employees. These jobs include food and livestock, natural fiber, forestry, and much more. Agriculture alone comprises roughly 15.6% of North Carolina’s income.
Farmworkers are essential contributors to the state’s agricultural industry, with at least 80,000 migrant or seasonal farmworkers employed in North Carolina, and sometimes far more during harvesting seasons. A demographic study from the Farmworker Unit Legal Aid of North Carolina reported that 53% of the state’s farmworkers are undocumented. This roughly resembles the findings of the USDA’s Economic Research Service.
In short, North Carolina agriculture, like virtually all of America’s agricultural sector, is heavily reliant on immigrants, many of whom are undocumented.
The impact of executive orders
Many Presidential executive orders on immigration have been issued by the Trump Administration that will impact the agricultural industry in North Carolina. It’s important to note that executive orders are not definitive, and many will likely not withstand legal challenges. (Indeed, several have been blocked by courts of law already.) In fact, the executive order outlined below is currently under legal challenge. See New York City Bar’s Report.
The Trump White House’s executive order, “Executive Order Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” prioritizes immigration enforcement against all undocumented immigrants. This is an escalation of the Biden Administration’s enforcement policy, which prioritized action only against those undocumented immigrants who committed violent crimes. The order expands “expedited removal” (eg. deportation) of immigrants to the country of origin. Finally, the order severely limits the use of “humanitarian parole, Temporary Protected Status, employment authorization, and public benefits to existing statutory requirements.”
As another recent Carolina Forward article points out, “it doesn’t take an economics degree to predict what would happen to the cost of food and meat in North Carolina (and the nation at large) if 50% of agricultural workers were suddenly deported. The total prospective economic harm is literally incalculable.”
In other words, Americans would pay the costs of a more severe deportation policy by a sharp rise in their cost of living, particularly for food. Instead of winding up in grocery stores, crops would be left to rot in the fields for lack of workers to harvest them, forcing food prices upward. Indeed, this is exactly what previously happened in Georgia and California following stricter immigration enforcement.
Federal Solutions?
The last substantial immigration reform legislation passed by Congress was in 1986 under President Ronald Reagan. Given that Republicans today hold control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they have the same ability to pass immigration legislation as they did during Trump’s first administration. They did not pursue a change to immigration policy then, however, and time will tell if they do so this time.
According to a 2014 Farm Bureau study, even a modest approach to immigration reform (per the study, “strengthened border security, strict enforcement of existing laws, and aggressive use of deportation”) would lead to a 5-6% increase in food prices for everyday Americans, a figure which has likely increased in the intervening 11 years. A Republican-led immigration overhaul is likely to be much more drastic than the previous bipartisan immigration reform attempts that Congress has made.
Kicking the can down the road
A bipartisan, decades-long failure to squarely and comprehensively address immigration policy has brought America to a delicate choice: it can pursue a draconian policy of large-scale deportations of undocumented workers, or it can have a functioning agricultural industry. But it cannot logically have both.
One solution to the impasse could be a stricter crackdown on immigration border policy, but legal solutions for undocumented immigrants already in America’s workforce, like a pathway to citizenship and expansion of H-2A worker visas. Only some such compromise would seem to satisfy legitimate concerns for border security and the quite real needs of the American economy, and its farm sector in particular, for labor. It would also save hard-pressed Americans from ballooning increases to their cost of living.
A bipartisan, common-sense approach to immigration policy is not hard to work out in theory – but in practice, America’s political class seems paralyzed by the issue. The increase in political polarization has withered the ability for both political parties to compromise over difficult issues. This raises the risk of a massive over-correction in one direction or the other, with potentially jarring effects for our political system.
