After projections that the mass deportations of President Donald Trump would negatively affect the US economy, the nation is seeing a leap into the prices of wholesale vegetables and decelerations in industries that depend on immigrant workers.
The economic measures that are resorting are leading some to point out the repression of immigration of the administration, together with the tariffs, as at least in part responsible for the fall in some economic sectors and the increase in prices.
The latter comes from the Office of Labor Statistics, which on Thursday reported an increase of 38.9% in wholesale prices of dry and fresh vegetables from June to July, the largest since March 2022.
Phil Kafarakis, president of the IMF The Interior Food Association, which represents food producers, suppliers, services and industries outside the groceries, said that warning signs should be taken seriously.
Due to deportation efforts, “now you will run out of enough workers in the fields to collect and collect products as it is collected,” he said, adding that it is Contributing to the current effect “horribly, incredibly shocking” of tariffs.
Combined with drought, excessive floods and forest fires, deportations are supporting and will become a major problem at the end of summer and crops of autumn principles, he said.
“I don’t think people say,” there will be an increase in vegetable costs in restaurants, in groceries and other places, Kafarakis said.
Although the administration has not yet reached the levels of deportation that Trump promised in his campaign, the number of people arrested by the application of immigration and customs in June was his greatest monthly arrest in at least five years.
This week, the Federal Reserve of Dallas issued a report that indicates that Texas’s economy has softened in the midst of uncertainty. Business owners told the Dallas Federal Reserve that uncertainty about tariffs and immigration policy raised investment and hiring challenges.
“Immigration application actions are also affecting the ability of some companies to recruit and retain workers,” the agency said in their report.
The Federal Bank regularly surveys Texas companies. In his July survey, the inability to hire qualified workers because they lacked permits or legal status “was the most widespread impact indicated among companies that experienced interruptions of the workforce,” said the Reserve Bank.
The report cited a machine manufacturer who said in response to the survey questions: “Workers born abroad do the job. We need them, we use them and like them.”
Immigrant workers are a large part of the Texas workforce. In an April report, the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank said that the participation of Texas companies reported their survey that trust workers who moved to Texas from a different country increased from 15% by 2023 to 25% in 2024.
“The increase has been in all sectors, with approximately one third of manufacturing respondents that depend on immigrant workers,” said the bank.
In a report published Thursday by the America’s Voice Immigrant Defense Group, the authors indicated that the cycling of immigrant workers inside and outside the country has stopped, mainly due to border restrictions that reduce the entry of immigrants.
“The country is losing workers without being replaced, with adverse economic consequences,” says Robert Lynch’s report, Michael Ettlinger and Emma Sifre. Lynch is an economy professor at Washington College. Ettlinger is the founding director of the Faculty of Public Policies of the University of New Hampshire Carsy, and Sifre is data analyst at the Institute on Taxes and Economic Policy.
Lynch said that the number of workers in agriculture and related industries increased from March to July in 2023 and 2024. But employment in industries those same months of this year fell into 155,000 workers, 6.5%less.
In construction, the 10 states with the highest concentrations of unauthorized workers saw employment fall .1% from June 2024 to June 2025, while other states saw it increase 1.9%, according to the report. In addition, growth in the United States not in the Top 10 was lower than a year ago, below the growth of 2.3%.
About 7% of leisure and hospitality workers are undocumented and focus mainly on restaurant and hotels, Lynch said. The states with higher concentrations of unauthorized workers are experiencing a slower growth in this area, he said.
The use of food service grew .2% in high immigrant states during the past year compared to 1.5% in other states, according to the report.
“It is likely that a loss of a significant part of this workforce is particularly harmful, since there were almost 1 million jobs without filling in leisure and hospitality in as recently as April of this year,” said Lynch.
The number of workers born abroad in the country fell from 33.3 million in January to approximately 32.1 million in July, a loss of approximately 1.2 million workers, according to the analysis of the labor statistics numbers of the National Foundation for American Policy, a commercial research group and immigration.
Stuart Anderson, executive director of the Foundation, said so far that there has not been a corresponding increase in the labor participation of US workers.
“The reason you see deceleration is because when employers cannot find enough workers, they will invest less,” he said.
Antonio de Loera-Burs, spokesman for United Agricultural Workers, questioned whether there really is a shortage of work in agriculture.
He said that the workers are scared and that there have been incursions recognized in some fields and work sites related to agriculture.
But “many workers with whom I talk are desperate for work. There is not enough work,” said Loera-Burs. They are cut hours and are told workers to do in six hours what they used to do in eight, he said.
“We are against deportations,” he said, referring to UFW.
He said that what seems to be happening is that the producers are using the interruptions of the immigration rags in their businesses “as their last argument of why Congress should give them their long -standing priority, which is to bring more invited workers and pay them less.”
Trump has been under pressure from companies that depend on immigrant workers, particularly the agricultural industry, to ensure that they have a safe and reliable workforce.
Trump has changed his plans on how to respond. Initially, he stopped the arrests of workers in the agriculture and hospitality industry, then restarted the raids, and then said he was considering creating temporary passes for certain workers.
