Summary
Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies, including heightened ICE raids, are disrupting the U.S. agricultural sector.
In California’s Central Valley, a key food-producing region, undocumented farm workers—over half the workforce—are staying home out of fear, leaving crops like citrus unharvested.
Bakersfield saw up to 75% of workers absent, sparking concerns of economic devastation and rising food prices.
ICE is also targeting sensitive areas like schools and churches after rolling back Obama-era protections.
Experts warn these policies could lead to widespread economic repercussions.
This issue is annoying because everyone is doing everything wrong. The workers shouldn’t be here illegally. The government shouldn’t be disrupting the food supply and should maybe loosen up legal migrant worker processes. And the farms shouldn’t be hiring them either.
There’s not really anyone to root for.
There shouldn’t be such a thing as illegal immigration. If people want to come and work, let them. This whole bullshit system and narrative was set up to create a permanent underclass of labor to exploit in the first place.
The problem is, if immigration is uncontrolled, how do you ensure that a place has the necessary and safe infrastructure to support them?
The same way we build infrastructure to support population shifts between states or growth via birth rate. We have a market economy, and in a normally functioning market economy, the market will respond to changes in demand with new supply. Yes, we have issues with our housing supply, but that’s because we artificially restrict our housing supply via exclusionary zoning policies and NIMBYism, not because of immigrants. I’d love to have that conversation if you’re interested, and I have LOTS of media resources to share.
Yeah, but it can take decades to build necessary infrastructure. People move around much faster than that.
So? By that same argument, people shouldn’t be able to move from California to Texas because building infrastructure is hard :( We’ll do what functioning societies have always done and figure it out.