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.
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 CNN that if Trump keeps his deportation promises, groceries will get more expensive — perhaps much more expensive.
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.”
