Opinion: The effects of deporting millions of undocumented workers

When I was young, back in the late 1960s, my mom’s dad, a CPA by trade, owned a couple of cherry orchards. When the cherries got ripe, they needed to be picked within a two- or three-week window, hauled to the packing plant and shipped off to various destinations around the United States. Grandpa never made much money off the orchards, but they had been in his family since pioneer days. Grandpa’s workforce consisted of me and my friends, other kids looking for summer employment and a few stay-at-home moms seeking to supplement tight family budgets. Picking cherries was hot work, which is why we started at first light and worked till early afternoon, and it was not very lucrative. We were paid a few cents a pound, but if we worked hard, we could earn some much-desired spending money.
When I turned 16 and was old enough to drive, I was promoted to orchard manager. Then I got to supervise the younger kids, many of whom were either goof-offs or started strong in the cool of the morning but fizzled when the sun rose in the sky.
When I graduated from high school, I left home for college, then an LDS mission, and then more college. When my dad retired, he took over the orchard from my grandpa. I can remember a conversation we had about the cherries one summer. Times had changed. He couldn’t find any local kids willing to pick cherries anymore, so he had to hire “the Mexicans,” as he called them. They were migrant farm workers, likely in the country illegally, but without them the fruit would have rotted on the trees. The upside was that they worked very hard and were very efficient. They could clean a tree a lot faster than we suburban kids ever could have.
I’ve thought a lot recently about my early cherry-picking days and my dad having to hire migrant laborers because no local kids were willing to do hot, sweaty work that didn’t pay all that well. Why? Because Donald Trump is threatening to deport millions of people who are in the country illegally. Two recent articles — one in The New York Times and one in Mother Jones — have delved into the ramifications of mass deportation that Trump and many of his followers obviously don’t understand.
Trump’s rhetoric paints these immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” but consider the following statistics detailed in the Mother Jones article:
• Half of all farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. (How much do you really want to pay for a peach or a gallon of milk or a head of lettuce?)
• One quarter of workers who process meat, fish and poultry are undocumented. (How much do you want to pay for a pound of hamburger?)
• 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care. (Who’s going to empty your bedpan when you end up in the hospital?)
• One in five undocumented workers (about 1.4 million people) are employed in construction. With the industry already needing a half-million more workers, mass deportations would pretty much crater the industry. (You think housing prices are through the roof now? Just wait.)
• Unauthorized workers pay $13 billion a year into the Social Security system, even though they receive no benefits.
• In 2022, undocumented households paid $35.1 billion in taxes. (Maybe Trump doesn’t care about the federal debt, but I do.)
• During the pandemic, more than 5 million undocumented immigrants were employed in “essential” industries.
Trump claims that undocumented immigrants are stealing “Black jobs,” but the unemployment rate has been at historic lows. It appears they are not stealing anyone’s job. They are picking the cherries that American citizens refuse to pick.
Because undocumented workers not only harvest our produce and build our houses and staff our health-care facilities but also pay taxes and purchase goods and services, the New York Times article points out that simply deporting them will do a lot more than tear families apart (many undocumented workers have spouses and children who are U.S. citizens). “For every one million unauthorized immigrant workers seized and deported from the United States, 88,000 U.S. native workers (will be) driven out of employment.”
As Brian Turmail of the Associated General Contractors of America put it, “You can’t build things in the United States without people to build them.” Representative Greg Casar of Texas was more blunt: “The economy would collapse.”
Fortunately, it is very unlikely that Trump will be able to pull off his mass deportation. It will be like the wall he didn’t build. But that won’t stop Americans from voting for him because they like his reckless rhetoric.
Roger Terry is a writer and retired editor who lives in Orem, Utah.