Former President Donald Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants if he wins a second term would decimate the agricultural workforce, farm group leaders say.
Trump has made deporting immigrants a key part of his campaign rhetoric, which has frequently included disparaging remarks about people who come to the U.S. from other countries. Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have repeatedly said they are planning the biggest deportation in U.S. history.
Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in July. Photo: Lydia JohnsonWhether this is feasible is unclear, given the logistics of trying to remove an estimated 11 million people from the country. But GOP fundraiser and activist Charlie Kirk insisted early this year on a podcast, “I want everybody to understand this is going to happen. If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately.”
The impact of such an operation “would be absolutely devastating to America's farmers and ranchers,” said Michael Marsh, president and CEO of the National Council of Agricultural Employers. Among the hardest hit: specialty crop growers, dairy farms and meat processing plants.
The farm workforce numbers about 2.2 million, Marsh said, of whom about 300,000 are H-2A workers. About half of the remaining 1.9 million workers are in “unauthorized status,” he says.
“So if we were to deport 950,000 workers in very short order, as Project 2025 lays out, the agricultural community in the United States would be absolutely devastated,” Marsh says, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for a new GOP administration.
“There would be no way that you could ever get the Department of Labor, Homeland Security and [U.S. Customs and Immigration Services], as well as the State Department, up to speed in that short a period of time to allow another, almost million people in on H-2A visas,” he says.
Chuck Conner, president and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, agrees. “The simple truth is, no, we could not provide the food and fiber for Americans and people all over the planet and lose that workforce. It just couldn’t happen.”
Wisconsin dairy farmer John Rosenow, owner of Rosenholm Dairy, says “probably 80% of the milk that's harvested, or more, is harvested by immigrants” in the state. “So we'd be cutting production by 75%, let's say, and that would devastate the industry. … And I think you can extrapolate that throughout the country, maybe even more so. And so what it basically would do is make ice cream and cheese and stuff scarce, extremely expensive.”
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Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller told the New York Times last year that “mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”
But Michael Clemens, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and an economics professor at George Mason Univer
Chuck Conner, National Council of Farmer Cooperativessity, has written that “the best economic research on past deportations suggests the opposite” of Miller’s predicted outcome.
“The immigrants being targeted for removal are the lifeblood of several parts of the U.S. economy,” Clemens wrote. “Their deportation will instead prompt U.S. business owners to cut back or start fewer new businesses, in some cases shifting their investments to less labor-intensive technologies and industries, while scaling back production to reflect the loss of consumers for their goods.”
Research shows that when immigrants are deported, as about 500,000 were from 2008 to 2014 under the Secure Communities program during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, 88,000 U.S. workers lost their jobs, Clemens said.
“The U.S. labor market is more complex than the cartoon economy in the minds of some politicians, who think that business owners faced with loss of immigrant workers will simply hire native workers to replace them,” Clemens added. But, in reality, “Business owners hit by sudden reductions to labor supply invest less in new business formation. They invest their capital in other industries and in technologies that use lower-skill labor less intensively, reducing demand for U.S. workers, too,” he pointed out.
The result is both less income for businesses and less tax revenue for the government, making mass deportation “a net fiscal negative.”
Marsh points out that native workers do not want to do farm work. In a survey NCAE conducted shortly after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, only 337 of nearly 98,000 applicants for H-2A positions in 28 states were native workers.
Marsh said at that time, some in the GOP had floated the idea of getting rid of the H-2A program, thinking the domestic workforce would fill the gap. But, he explained, that’s simply not the case.
“We have to have a workforce, and we just can't pick apples with a combine,” he says, pointing to a section of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership that says Congress should “encourage the establishment of an industry consortium of agricultural equipment producers and other automation and robotics firms interested in entering the sector and match funding invested by the industry, with intellectual property developed within the consortium freely available to all participants.”
Kamala Harris grills pork chops at the Iowa State fair in 2019 during her campaign for president. But robots designed to pick fruit and vegetables are “not quite there yet,” Marsh says. Machines cause too much damage to make the technology feasible at this point.
“You end up with a lot of waste,” he says.
Project 2025 also would cap and phase down the H-2A program, a proposal unlikely to get support in the farm community.
A 10- to 20-year phasedown would produce “the necessary incentives for the industry to invest in raising productivity, including through capital investment in agricultural equipment, and increasing employment for Americans in the agricultural sector,” the “mandate" reads.
Conner and Marsh, however, would like to see legislation addressing the issue.
“Obviously, we can't have the legal status for our existing workforce that we seek without legislative action and so in terms of our focus, it's been much more in Congress,” Conner says. “The permanent fix, the right fix here, is a legislative one.”
No matter who wins the White House, “we're going to press them very, very hard to fix this problem,” Conner says. Like Trump, Harris has not put forth specific proposals on ag labor, but she told the American Farm Bureau Federation recently that she and running mate Tim Walz support the H-2A program and the Biden-Harris administration's recent rules administering it.
"Instead of reckless calls for the mass deportation of workers and families deeply rooted in our economy and communities, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe in tough, smart solutions to reform our broken immigration system," the candidates said in a letter to AFBF. "This means improving our legal immigration system to function better for our economy, farmers, and workers, and reform that includes both strong border security and an earned path to citizenship."
Indiana farmer Kip Tom, former U.S. ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture and chief of the U.S. Mission to the UN Agencies in Rome, and co-chair of the Farmers and Ranchers for Trump 47 coalition, pointed to the Republican platform for information on the issue. The platform says a Trump administration would protect farmers from unfair trade and boost domestic manufacturing, but does not mention ag labor issues.
Kip Tom speaks on the Republican agriculture platform at an informal debate in September 2024.
In an interview with Agri-Pulse in June after a coalition fundraiser, Tom was asked about Trump’s comment that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.” He said, “If you get Donald Trump aside and you start having these conversations, I think you'll get a more refined answer.”
He said speakers at the fundraiser pointed out the importance of immigrants to agriculture. “I mean, let's face it. We need immigrants in this country — whether it's to pick our fruits and vegetables [or] to work in our meatpacking plants.”
But “there’s a legal process,” Tom added. “And we need to probably look at some reforms to make sure we can allow legal migration to be more successful. Just unabated control of our borders isn't going to work.”
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