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Americans are fed up with high grocery store bills and they’re hoping President-elect Donald Trump will bring relief. Yet one of Trump’s central campaign promises could exacerbate sticker shock at the checkout.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to “bring down prices” at supermarkets and across the economy. Deep-seated frustration with the cost of living helped deliver Trump a resounding victory this fall.
Soon, Trump’s ability to fix America’s affordability crisis will collide head-on with another, perhaps more prominent, campaign trail promise: Mass deportations.
Trump has pledged to not just accelerate the deportation of undocumented migrants, but to wage the largest domestic deportation program in American history. He has talked about expelling millions of people.
Beyond the moral, legal and logistical questions raised by this campaign promise, mass deportations threaten to starve key industries of badly needed workers. And perhaps no industry relies on undocumented workers more than the food and agriculture industries.
That’s why agriculture executives, farm industry officials and economists tell that if Trump keeps his deportation promises, groceries will get more expensive perhaps much more expensive.
“If you take away those workers, you’re not going to have production. There’s only one way prices are going to go. They’re going to go dramatically higher,” said Chuck Conner, president and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives and a former US Department of Agriculture deputy secretary.
The logic is simple: Fewer workers mean less food and higher prices.
Consider that in 2018-2020, just 36% of crop farmworkers were US citizens and 23% were authorized immigrants. The rest 41% held no work authorization, according to the USDA.
“When cows don’t get milked, when apples don’t get picked, when fruits and vegetables are not harvested, your supply is going to fall,” said Conner.
The federal government has estimated that about 11 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States as of early 2022.
Nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants work in the farming and agriculture industry as of 2021, including almost 200,000 in crop production and 66,000 for animal production, according to a 2021 analysis by the Center for American Progress.
“It would be devastating to the ag economy,” said Fred Leitz, who owns a family farm in Michigan that grows blueberries, apples, tomatoes and cucumbers. “There would be nobody to pick the crops. And you’re not going to plant anything you can’t harvest and sell. It’s just basic economics.”
(Leitz said his farm relies on visas to hire temporary foreign workers but does not employ unauthorized immigrants).
Worker shortages and price hikes
An additional roughly 206,000 undocumented immigrants work in food production doing everything from animal slaughtering and seafood processing to fruit and vegetable preservation, according to that report. Altogether, an estimated 1.7 million undocumented people work across the food supply chain.
“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 . “The only question is how high prices will go.”
Zandi noted that food prices could also be pushed higher by another element of the Trump agenda: Massive tariffs.
The United States imports a significant amount of food from overseas, from tropical fruits and seafood to nuts and coffee, and those items could be subject to Trump’s proposed 20% across-the-board tariffs on imports.
Of course, the impact on prices will depend on how high tariffs go and how many workers are deported.
It’s possible that Trump dials back his campaign promises to avoid reigniting inflation. It’s also possible that Trump’s efforts to deport millions of workers gets held up in court or snarled by logistical issues.
Food items that generally require manual labor at some point along the way to the grocery store would be most exposed to price spikes especially anything that is often hand picked: fruits like apples and strawberries, and vegetables including tomatoes and lettuce.
Likewise, food items that involve interacting with an animal would see a surge in costs for consumers: meat products and dairy items.
In Idaho, about 90% of the on-farm jobs in the dairy industry are filled by foreign workers, according to Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. He indicated that it’s hard to say how many of those workers are undocumented, but he noted the United States has no permanent visa program for farm workers.
“We’re exceptionally dependent on foreign-born labor, and that’s been the realities of our industry for decades now,” said Naerebout. “The impact to you in the supermarket would be a significant [price] increase in milk, cheese, yogurt.”
Would demand for food drop?
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about how mass deportations would impact food prices.
Trump has frequently argued that inflation warnings about his economic agenda are overblown, noting that inflation was under control during his first term. And he has a point: The inflation rate never exceeded 3% under Trump compared with the four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022 during the Biden administration.
Scott Bessent, a hedge fund executive and leading supporter of Trump on Wall Street has also rejected the inflation concerns.
“The idea that he would recreate an affordability crisis is absurd,” Bessent recently told Axios. Trump “regards himself as the mayor of 330 million Americans, and he wants them to do great, and have a great four years.”
Proponents of mass deportations have argued at times that expelling millions of people could help the affordability crisis by curbing demand.
Yet Zeke Hernandez, an economics professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, dismisses that argument because of how reliant the US economy is on the supply of immigrant workers.
“It’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how supply and demand work and what immigrants do in this economy,” said Hernandez, author of “The Truth About Immigration.”
Any easing in demand for food from deportations would be overshadowed by the loss of workers, noted Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Denver.
“The overwhelming effect of a mass deportation effort would be an increase in the price of food because there’s just fewer workers available,” said East, who is also a non-resident fellow at The Hamilton Project within the Brookings Institution.
Of course, some may wonder why farmers can’t just hire more US citizens to do the work of those deported.
But those in the agriculture industry insist that’s just not possible.
“There are no domestic workers that want those jobs,” said Letiz, the Michigan farmer. “It’s seasonal. It’s outside. It’s hot. It’s cold.”
Naerebout, the Idaho dairy farm executive, agreed that these are jobs that domestic workers “aren’t pursuing and really don’t have a desire to fill.”
“It’s a demanding job. Physical in nature. It’s dirty at times,” he said. “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.”
Robert Lynch, an economics professor at Washington College in Maryland, has studied previous periods of mass deportations and found that neither jobs nor wages increased for American-born workers after mass deportations.
In fact, Lynch found that native-born workers often lost jobs after deportations as the economy suffered from the loss of complementary workers who strengthened productivity.
If anything, farmers say they need more immigrant workers not fewer.
The current immigration system does not allow for green cards for farm workers. Although temporary farm visas known as H-2A do exist, there is no legal way to have year-round foreign workers.
Naerebout wants the incoming Trump administration to give the industry’s existing workforce legal status and access to visa programs to get more immigrant workers.
“That’s the piece that a lot of people don’t understand: We don’t have enough workers to fill all the jobs we have,” Naerebout said. “We need foreign-born workers.”
