Mired in Migrant Quicksand

Only days after heeding desperate pleas from business owners and the Agriculture Secretary to exempt farm workers and restaurant and hotel employees from arrests by ICE agents, the Trump administration, through the Department of Homeland Security, reversed its position and re-authorized those arrests, as always on the grounds that the owners were shielding violent felons. The overriding reason for the campaign, in theory of course, is that with the migrants gone, the jobs they took will be filled by “real Americans,” thus boosting both employment and the economy in general.

Only two things wrong with that. Virtually none of those swept up in raids, disproportionately done at workplaces, are either violent or felons; and the reason migrants are hired for those jobs is that “real Americans” don’t want them. The hours are too long, the work too hard, and pay too skimpy. During the last election, when the Springfield, Ohio, cats-and-dogs idiocy was front page news, the white, conservative members of Springfield’s city government both defended the targeted Haitian migrants, all of whom were here legally, and told anyone who would listen—which excluded the Trump campaign—that the Haitians had been a godsend because no one locally was willing to take those jobs at a wage Springfield business owners could afford.

But Springfield does not even qualify as the tip of iceberg. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of those in the country illegally, the vast majority Hispanic, perform jobs that are crucial to maintaining a sound economy with controlled inflation. Their relationship with the country that wants to deport them is not parasitic, as Trump’s minions contend, but rather symbiotic.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, “President Trump’s aggressive deportation push has slammed into an economic reality: Key industries in the U.S. rely heavily on workers living in the U.S. illegally, many of them for decades. That presents a major challenge for the administration unfolding in real time, with business leaders urging a softer approach while anti-immigration hard-liners demand more deportations.”

Without those workers, farmers and business owners insist, they will be forced to raise prices to account for (much) higher wages or, if they cannot find legal residents to fill the jobs, cut back on production and sometimes be forced to close altogether. Nowhere are the stakes higher than with the food chain. It was only months ago that Trump was blaming Joe Biden for the high cost of chicken, eggs, and Cheerios, an argument that swept him into the White House. He promised to lower prices on “day one,” which—no surprise—has not happened, but nor has the nation seen prices go up, largely because producers can still pay ridiculously low wages to workers who not only don’t complain, but are eager to fill the jobs. If that ends, chicken, eggs, and even Cheerios are going to cost a whole lot more.

But it is not simply cost saving that draws employers to migrants.

“I don’t want anybody to think that people are hiring undocumented people to save money,” said Joe Caliendo, a project manager at a major Florida construction company. “They hire them because nobody else will do the work they do or work as hard as they do.” And what are the supposed slave wages that native-born workers turn down? Between $20 and $50 per hour.

Caliendo is justifiably frustrated. ICE recently raided a site where workers were pouring concrete for a student housing complex at Florida State University. The agents, all masked, climbed over fences and dragged off more than half the workers, not all of whom were illegal. If the concrete hardened before the pouring was completed it would have cost the company millions to redo it. They did manage to finish the foundation but the next day only 20 of the 175 workers on the crew showed up. As a result, the company faces fines of tens of thousands of dollars a day if they cannot finish the housing structure in time for the fall semester.

The company may find that difficult since the construction industry is faced with “a major labor shortage,” as many as a half-million workers. As anyone who has worked construction will attest, the work is hard but the pay is excellent. These are the jobs that Trump’s “real Americans” will not fill.

And that points up the biggest problem Trump now faces. Without a firm, consistent policy—something that has eluded him in every phase of his presidency—both employers and employees cannot make reasonable decisions on what to do next. Employers cannot commit to contracts to deliver goods or complete projects without some ability to predict hiring, nor can they set prices for their services without a sense of their own costs.

And they cannot plan if migrants decide the risk of showing up for work is too great, with arrest and expulsion from the United States possible at any moment. Until now, many migrants would take that risk because they were desperate for the wages and the likelihood of being caught was relatively low. Under previous administrations, including Trump’s first term, enforcement was lax, raids infrequent, and most targets were individuals, either because of criminal involvement or simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

But the chilling effect of swarms of federal agents descending on workplaces, public areas, and even schools alters the calculus. That even those here legally did not return to the Florida State construction site is only one example of the upshot of Trump’s now-you-raid-them-now-you-don’t Make America White Again immigration policy. If that is predictive in any serious way of how migrants who work for farmers will react, there is a serious crisis ahead. Unlike manufactured goods where delays may be inconvenient but not fatal, food must be processed from planting to harvesting to shipping under constant time pressure.

Trump has brought this potential catastrophe on himself, a statement also true of tariffs and almost all of his other slapdash policy initiatives, by underestimating the overall impact, here by promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants without fully understanding the underlying issues involved.

Now he is stuck and the more he flails about, the more stuck he is likely to get.