Deportations Are Set To Explode — A Huge Worry For Farmers Already Facing A Labor Shortage

By Frank Morris

The Trump administration’s push to deport millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status is about to surge.

Washington will pump an extra $170 billion into Immigration Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and the Border Patrol between now and September 2029. With a massive budget behind the effort, the goal is to ramp up deportations to at least 1 million immigrants a year.

That poses a huge threat to immigrant-dependent industries, like agriculture, which has been dealing with an acute labor shortage.

Brandon Raso grows blueberries in New Jersey. Ideally, he would hire 600 workers to harvest the delicate fruit, but this year he could fill only a third of the positions.

“We lost  2 1/2 million pounds of blueberries last year to falling on the ground, just due to the fact that we couldn’t harvest,” said Raso, describing what he said amounted to a $5 million loss.

(Raso and other farmers quoted in this story spoke on a webinar hosted by Grow It Here, a nonprofit advocating for changes in the H-2A visa program).

More than 70 percent of farm workers were born overseas, mostly in Mexico, and more than 40 percent of them are in the country illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers claim they turn to foreign nationals because native-born Americans just do not want to do farm work.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve probably had 150 people apply for a job here. Two of them have been Americans, and those two were just fulfilling a need for their unemployment to apply for a job,” said John Rosenow, a Wisconsin dairy farmer. “So, we really, really appreciate the immigrants that are working for us. They do a wonderful job.”