A Trump-Voting Farmer's Warning: Mass Deportations Would Be a Disaster

(Bloomberg) -- Florida tomato grower Tony DiMare is all for President-elect Donald Trump slapping tariffs on the Mexican farmers who undercut him by paying workers a fraction of what he does.

He wants to stop illegal border crossings and likes the idea of deporting migrants convicted of serious crimes. But when it comes to Trump’s broader promises to expel all 11 million undocumented people living in the country, DiMare thinks it would be a disaster for American farmers.

“We have to secure our borders south and north, but you have to have a workforce in this country,” said DiMare, whose family has 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of tomato farms in Florida and California. “There’s no doubt that is going to restrict and put pressure on farming and many other industries that rely on this workforce.”

That’s because US farms run on an army of more than 850,000 crop workers, almost half of whom the Department of Agriculture estimates are undocumented. Some 160,000 of them move with the seasons, harvesting vegetables during Florida’s winter before moving north to pick crops such as snap beans in North Carolina or blueberries in New Jersey.

This complex system that sustains America’s relatively cheap food supply is now at risk as Trump promises the biggest deportations in US history, surpassing the notorious 1954 operation that forced 1.1 million people to return to Mexico.

A nationwide crackdown could drive labor costs higher for farmers already struggling to compete against cheap imports and reignite the kind of inflation that tanked Joe Biden’s presidency. Fresh fruit and vegetable production has been moving to Mexico and Canada in recent years, in part due to lower labor costs
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