How much longer can lawmakers milk their intransigence on immigration reform?

Authored by Loren Steffy and originally published on rationalmiddle.substack.com

Got milk? Perhaps not for long. The U.S. dairy industry would face a crippling employment crisis if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump implements his proposal to round up all the migrants working in the country illegally.

A recent article in The New York Times Magazine reported that dairy farmers—already squeezed by rising costs for equipment and services and falling wholesale prices for milk—are worried that Trump’s plan would target a large segment of the dairy industry’s labor force. The farmer at the center of the story said that while he doesn’t know the immigration status of all his workers, without his foreign-born employees his dairy could not stay afloat.

The farm in question is in Idaho, a deep-red state, and one in which many farmers are conservatives. Some of those conservative farmers have pushed back against politicians’ anti-immigrant policies, saying lawmakers don’t appreciate the impact their efforts would have on a major state industry (Idaho is the nation’s third-largest dairy producer). The Idaho Dairyman’s Association in 2017 organized a pro-immigrant coalition of faith leaders, elected officials and law enforcement that called for immigration reform in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

The economic devastation of Trump’s plan stretches far beyond dairy farms. The Peterson Institute for International Economics found that Trump’s plan to deport 15 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product, and it would have a disproportionate effect on the food industry, cutting the available workforce in agriculture by 16 percent. That, in turn, would trigger a 10 percent rise in food prices.

Other industries such as construction would also be hit hard. Construction companies have been struggling with labor shortages for years, and homebuilders now say that deporting undocumented workers will lead to significantly higher home prices.

“It would be detrimental to the construction industry and our labor supply and exacerbate our housing affordability problems,” Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, recently told NBC News

My co-author, Stan Marek, told NBC that while many in the construction industry simply don’t believe mass deportations will happen, he worries that the impact will be quick and profound.

“You’d lose so many people that you couldn’t put a crew together to frame a house,” he said.

Nationwide, the construction industry is looking for workers to fill about 370,000 positions. Foreign-born workers make up about 30% of the industry’s workforce, though no one knows how many of them are undocumented. Eighty-eight percent of construction firms say they’re struggling to find workers, which is undermining building efforts from offices to infrastructure.

Meanwhile, in Texas, our politicians rely on undocumented immigrants for the construction boom that serves as the foundation for economic growth. As Texas Monthly reported recently, while Gov. Greg Abbott spends billions on his border security charade, he has turned a blind eye to the construction industry’s reliance on the very people he claims he wants to stop from coming into the state.

The folly of Operation Lone Star is well-documented. In counties that are the most active participants, illegal border crossings actually rose.

The conflict between wanting to appear tough on border security and encouraging economic growth has left Texas politicians doing a hypocritical dance. As Texas Monthly notes:

 Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber. Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings. So an inviolable relationship has developed between new construction and migrants: If you build, they will come.

Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

Immigration has become a defining issue of the presidential election, but as has been the case for more than a decade, politicians prefer that voters don’t think too hard about it. Without meaningful reform, the broken system will continue. Politicians are happy to look the other way, which means that despite all the political rhetoric, nothing is likely to change regardless of who wins the election.

Loren Steffy is the co-author of Deconstructed: An Insider’s View of Illegal Immigration and the Building Trades and executive producer of the Rational Middle Immigration series.