--- title: "If Trump Actually Goes Through With His Deportations, Grocery Prices Will Spike Brutally" description: "American farms are incredibly dependent on immigrant labor that can't be replaced. Mass deportations would cause food production to plummet." date: "2024-11-21" modified: "2024-11-21" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-deportations-food-prices" categories: - "Future Society" tags: - "agriculture" - "donald trump" - "food" - "the digest" --- # If Trump Actually Goes Through With His Deportations, Grocery Prices Will Spike Brutally ![American farms are incredibly dependent on immigrant labor that can't be replaced. Mass deportations would cause food production to plummet.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* ## Mean Grocer President-elect Donald Trump successfully campaigned on lowering prices, especially at the supermarket. But this could be impossible to achieve if he wants to deliver on his other big promise: the [mass deportation of millions of immigrants](). As farmers and economists warn, carrying out this brutal policy would almost certainly cause food prices to skyrocket, [*CNN* reports](). The ugly truth of the matter is that the US agricultural industry is heavily dependent on labor performed by undocumented immigrants, who are vulnerable to exploitation. Major moral questions aside, from a purely economic point of view, the consequences of the scale of deportation that Trump has promised are clear. With a shortfall of labor, less food will be produced. And that means higher grocery prices. "There's no question that mass deportation of immigrants will disrupt the agriculture and food processing industries, resulting in severe labor shortages, higher costs and thus higher prices for a wide variety of groceries," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told *CNN*. "The only question is how high prices will go." ## Job Hunting According to [statistics]() from the US Department of Agriculture, between 2018 and 2020, 41 percent of all crop farmworkers in the country were immigrants without work authorization. Only 36 percent were US citizens, with the remainder being authorized immigrants. In this line of work, domestic workers are outnumbered by foreign-born ones roughly two-to-one. Overall, as of 2021, around 300,000 undocumented immigrants worked in the agriculture industry. At that scale, replacing the shortfall in labor is a pipe dream. It's not just the sheer volume that's a problem; it's that people born here aren't exactly lining up to do some of the most grueling work imaginable. Just ask the people who run the farms. "There are no domestic workers that want those jobs," Fred Leitz, who owns a family farm in Michigan, told *CNN*. "It's seasonal. It's outside. It's hot. It's cold." "It's a demanding job. It's dirty at times. Physical in nature," echoed Rick Naerobout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen's Association. "And when you're sitting with unemployment rates as low as what we have, your domestic workforce kind of gets the pick of the jobs they want to take." ## Food for Thought According to Naerebout, as much as 90 percent of the dairy industry is made up of immigrants — so those (raw) milk products that [right-wing grifters are obsessed with pushing]() would probably be the first to suffer. "The impact to you in the supermarket would be a significant \[price\] increase in milk, cheese, yogurt," Naerbout told *CNN*. That being said, it could be the case that Trump's deportations won't go as far as he says they will. Another big promise, his proposed global tariffs plus a ludicrous [60 percent tariff on Chinese goods](), don't seem to be taken seriously by [an optimistic Wall Street](), which would directly suffer under such a policy. In any event, there will be many political obstacles to achieving those goals. But if the agriculture industry's alarm is any indication, even a softened version of Trump's vision could have dire consequences for the economy. **More on Trump:** *[Trump Reportedly Planning to Let Self-Driving Cars Loose]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()