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A farmhand connects milking equipment to the udders of dairy cows in a building in Baltic. (Makenzie Huber, South Dakota searchlight)
If President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his promise to deport millions of immigrants, it could upend the economies of states where agriculture and other food-related industries are crucial — and where there are major labor shortages.
Immigrants are doing well about two-thirds of agricultural workers in the agricultural sector, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and roughly two in five of them are not legally authorized to work in the United States.
Agricultural industries such as meatpacking, dairy farms, and poultry and livestock farms also rely heavily on immigrants.
“We have five to six employees who do the work that no one else does. Without them, we wouldn’t survive,” said Bruce Lampman, owner of Lampman Dairy Farm in Bruneau, Idaho. His farm, which has been in the family for thirty years, has 350 cows that produce about 26,000 pounds of milk per day.
“My company and every farm in the U.S. will go bankrupt if they try to get rid of everyone who does the work,” Lampman said, adding that his employees worry about what’s to come.
Anita Alves Pena, an economics professor at Colorado State University who studies immigration, noted that many agricultural employers already can’t find enough workers. Without farm subsidies or other protections to offset the loss of migrant workers, the damage to state economies could be significant, she said.
“Farmers across the country, producers in many different parts, often talk about labor shortages – and that even includes the current status quo of a fairly high percentage of unauthorized individuals in the workforce,” Pena said. “A policy like this, if not accompanied by something else, would make that worse.”
Employers struggle to hire enough agricultural workers because such workers generally receive low wages for heavy work.
In addition to hiring immigrant workers who are in the country illegally, agricultural employers rely on the federal H-2A visa program. H-2A visas are usually intended for seasonal work, which is common about six to ten months. However, they can be extended up to max three years before an employee has to return to his home country.
Employers must pay H-2A workers a state-specific minimum wage and provide free transportation and housing. Still, employer applications for H-2A visas have soared over the past 18 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a trend reflective the shortage of U.S.-born workers willing to do the work. The number of H-2A positions has increased from just over 48,000 in 2005 to over 378,000 in 2023.
But year-round agricultural employers, such as poultry, dairy and livestock producers, cannot use the seasonal visa to fill gaps. according to the USDA.
My company and every farm in the US will be paralyzed if they try to get rid of everyone who does the work.
– Bruce Lampman, owner of Lampman Dairy Farm in Bruneau, Idaho
Farmers also employ foreigners who have “temporary protected status” under a 1990 law that allows immigrants to stay if the U.S. determines their home country is unsafe due to violence or other reasons. There are approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. who are covered or eligible for the program from countries such as El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon and Ukraine. Many have been here for decades and Trump has threatened to end the program.
Immigration advocates want H-2A workers to be able to gain permanent legal status, and agricultural trade groups are pushing for an expansion of the H-2A program to include year-round operations.
The National Milk Producers Federation says it is too early to say how it will handle the mass deportations under the Trump administration. But the group states it “strongly supports efforts to implement agricultural labor reforms that provide permanent legal status for current workers and their families and give dairy farmers access to a workable guest worker program.”
Immigrants represent 51% of the labor on dairy farms in several states, and farms that employ immigrants produce nearly 80% of the nation’s milk production, according to the organization.
“Foreign workers are important to the success of America’s dairy industry, and we will work closely with members of Congress and federal officials to demonstrate the importance of foreign workers to the dairy industry and farming communities,” wrote Jaime Castaneda, executive vice president of the group. policy development and strategy, written in an email.
Adam Croissant, the former vice president of research and development at yogurt company Chobani, which has manufacturing plants in Idaho and New York, said he has seen a lot of misinformation about immigrants’ contributions to the workforce.
“The dairy industry as a whole understands that the dairy industry without migrant workers does not exist. It’s that simple,” says Croissant.
Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, criticized U.S. immigration policies and said the poultry industry “wants a stable, legal and permanent workforce.”
“The chicken industry has been hit hard by our country’s immigration policies, or more emphatically, by the lack thereof. … The system is broken and Washington has done nothing to fix it,” Super wrote in an email.
But major changes to the H-2A visa program are unlikely to happen before deportations begin. In an interview During NBC News’ “Meet the Press” this weekend, Trump reiterated his pledge to begin deporting some immigrants almost immediately.
He said he plans to start with convicted criminals, but then would move on to other immigrants. “We start with the criminals, and we have to do it. And then we’ll start with the others and see how it goes.”
Some farmers are still hoping that Trump’s actions will not match his rhetoric. But “hoping is not a great business plan,” said Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. “Our ability to feed ourselves as a country is completely compromised when you see the mass deportations.”
If the deportations do happen, farm workers will disappear faster than they can be replaced, experts say.
“The H-2A program will not immediately expand to fill the gap. So that’s going to be a problem,” said Jeffrey Dorfman, a professor of agricultural economics at North Carolina State University who served as Georgia’s state economist from 2019 to 2023.
In Georgia, agriculture is one $83.6 billion industry which provides more than 323,000 jobs. It is one of the five states most dependent on the federal H-2A visa program, depending on the workforce to be filled about 60% of agricultural jobs.
Dorfman argued that even the fear of deportation will have an impact on the workforce.
“When farmworkers hear about ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids on a nearby farm, many of them disappear. Even the legal ones often disappear for a few days. So if everyone just gets scared and deports themselves and just goes home, I think that would be the worst disruption,” Dorfman said, adding that even more jobs would need to be filled if the government revokes Temporary Protected Status.
Antonio De Loera-Brust, communications director for farmworkers union United Farm Workers, said the country’s focus should be on protecting workers regardless of their legal status.
“They deserve much better than just not being deported,” he said. “They deserve better wages, they deserve labor rights, they deserve citizenship.”
And while economists and the agricultural sector have said mass deportations could raise supermarket prices, De Loera-Brust called that particular argument a sign of “moral weakness.”
“As if the worst thing about hundreds of thousands of people being separated from their families would be that consumers would have to pay more for a bag of strawberries or a bag of carrots,” says De Loera-Brust. “There is a moral divide there.”
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