Doubtless D.T. has started lots of controversy with respect to… just about everything. I am not championing or gainsaying anyone or any of his statements, but simply want to share an interesting theory related to The Donald’s idea – which has been the parent of a good amount of outrage – to collect and “return all criminal aliens.”
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Quartz, a news outlet for business people in the new global economy, argues that not only will this mass deportation be detrimental to immigrant families and communities, but it will generate a food shortage.
Approximately half of US farmworkers are unauthorized immigrants. The Farm Bureau, a non-governmental umbrella organization that supports farmers nationwide, declares that “at least 50-70 percent of farm laborers in the country today are unauthorized.”
The replacement of immigrant workers would be rather difficult as it’s been observed that US citizens are unwilling to do the work. Farmers across the US have experienced trouble trying to hire farmers: “We just don’t have the labor and it’s gonna get worse,” a Georgia farmer told The Daily (summer 2011) after letting a third of his produce die in the field as he didn’t have the workers to harvest.
Photo courtesy of pasofarmservices.wordpress.com
In 2012, intensified federal anti-immigration efforts gave rise to similar reports of labor defect from New York to California.
Beneath Trump’s immigration plan, however, matters would get much worse. The abrupt evaporation of half of America’s hired crop workers would have cataclysmic effects “on the $835 billion agriculture sector, of which about $177 billion—or about 1% of the US’s GDP—comes from farms.”
As said by Quartz, food shortages would cause food deficit, imports would surge and raise prices.
“If agriculture were to lose access to all undocumented workers, agricultural output would fall by $30 to $60 billion,” the Farm Bureau anticipates. “The immediate loss of this large a share of the general work force would cause economic chaos,” the organization discovered in a 2014 report on labor.