"70 Percent Of The Workers Are Gone"

 

Much like the dire downstream economic impacts of the Malignant Fascist's America- sabotaging tariffs, the impacts of his ICE goon squads targeting immigrant farm workers are already starting to be seen:

Lisa Tate is a sixth-generation farmer in Ventura County, California, an area that produces billions of dollars worth of fruit and vegetables each year, much of it hand-picked by immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

 

Tate knows the farms around her well. And she says she can see with her own eyes how raids carried out by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the area’s fields earlier this month, part of President Donald Trump’s migration crackdown, have frightened off workers.

 

“In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”

 

In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura County into the state’s central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the ICE raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up.

 

That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said.  [snip] 

Most economists and politicians acknowledge that many of America’s agricultural workers are in the country illegally, but say a sharp reduction in their numbers could have devastating impacts on the food supply chain and farm-belt economies.

 

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the U.S. were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said.

 

“This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry,” Holtz-Eakin said.

Over a third of U.S. vegetables and over three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The state’s farms and ranches generated nearly $60 billion in agricultural sales in 2023. 

And the chill extends beyond undocumented immigrants:

ICE operations in California’s farmland were scaring even those who are authorized, said Greg Tesch, who runs a farm in central California.

 

“Nobody feels safe when they hear the word ICE, even the documented people. We know that the neighborhood is full of a combination of those with and without documents,” Tesch said.

 

“If things are ripe, such as our neighbors have bell peppers here, (if) they don’t harvest within two or three days, the crop is sunburned or over mature,” said Tesch. “We need the labor.”

The MF's disastrous "One Big Beautiful Bill" for billionaires, likely to be pass in one egregious form or another, contains money for hiring an additional 10,000 ICE goons by 2029, and $59 billion for detention facilities and deportation operations, meaning the problem will only get much worse.

The sheer cruel inhumanity of the MF's indiscriminate, mass deportation policy -- the real impacts it's having on families all over the country -- should be more than enough for anyone with a conscience to be deeply offended.  But, add to that the impact the MF's immigrant dragnet will have on food prices and availability, and many Americans who couldn't find their moral outrage over the immigration raids may soon find their pecuniary outrage when their wallets get a lot lighter.

 

(Photo:  immigrant workers in Florida harvesting a zucchini crop / Joe Raedie, Getty)