Hard as it is to believe, Former President Donald Trump is outdoing his 2016 campaign tarring of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug runners, as well as his 2018 bombast as president that Haitian and African immigrants come from “shithole” countries. He now says migrants are “not humans, they’re animals.” Channeling Adolf Hitler more than ever, Trump says immigrants from South America, Africa and Asia are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump viperously hissed to TIME magazine last week that if he returned to the White House, he would ignore a whole gang of laws to deport millions of undocumented people of color back from whence they came. He would sic the U.S. military on them — despite laws clearly stating that undocumented people are civilians and that the military can’t be used on civilians.
He makes no mention of blood poisoning by undocumented Europeans and Canadians, even though they more than double the number from Africa, according to the Pew Research Center. Instead, at a fundraiser last month, he repeated his call for more immigration from “nice” (and very white) countries such as Denmark, Switzerland and Norway.
This makes it important to remember the consequences if Trump won the 2024 election and truly evaporated undocumented people of color — the overwhelming majority of the estimated 11 million undocumented people, including 900,000 people from the Caribbean and Africa.
The gut punch would be quite literal: We’d be hungry in a hurry.
The Center for American Progress estimates that 1.7 million undocumented workers are in the nation’s food supply chain — from the farm to your kitchen and the restaurant table — doing brutal work most people abhor. By conservative federal estimates, the undocumented are about half of farmworkers in the United States and 75 percent in California, according to the University of California Merced. The Farmworker Association of Florida says 60 percent of farmworkers in that state are undocumented; Florida farmworkers include a notable Haitian presence.
It’s a similar story in the meat and poultry industry — one of the most dangerous occupations for sharp equipment, slippery floors, noise levels and musculoskeletal injuries. The Associated Press has reported that at some plants, the majority of workers are undocumented.
The meat industry is a very brown and Black world. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, people of color are 81 percent of frontline meatpacking workers. Meatpacking is 48 percent Latino while poultry processing is 37 percent Black.
Remove undocumented people and you’ve also just wiped out 40 percent of the staff at big city restaurants. A feature by the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism says half of New York City’s dishwashers and more than 30 percent of cooks are undocumented.
Yet Trump keeps whipping up hatred for these hard-working people of color. Despite being undocumented, workers in the food supply pay $21 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes. They pay $3.5 billion a year into Social Security and Medicare.
Remove them and what happens? Grocery store price hikes might be the least of it. The CUNY report said that in New York State alone, if all undocumented people were deported, it would put 1,080 farms at risk of severe closures and cutbacks and trigger a cascade of 45,000 job losses on the farm and in off-the-farm services.
It takes no imagination to predict what would happen if farms shut down around the nation. What happens, for instance, to the jobs on the poultry line, so dominated by Black people?
Trump says undocumented people are poisoning the blood of America, but the undocumented are our life blood. We don’t want to see what happens if he gets his way.