Trump Voting Farmers Are Mad They’re Getting What They Voted For

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, “In 2020–22, 32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization.” Any farm owner who voted for Trump’s mass deportation regime was voting against their own business interests (to say nothing of putting their now plummeting and critical soybean sales to China in the middle of his trade war), and if they didn’t know that, then my cold-hearted finance brain has little sympathy for people who have proven to not understand the business they have been trusted to manage. I took a whole class in school about what happens to managers like this.

“People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” said Tim Wood, a dairy farmer and a member of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau board of directors. Yes, and a lot of those people who oversee that labor voted to expel it from the country, and are now upset that they have to deal with the repercussions of their actions. I have long been told what is happening now is the fairness of the market punishing inefficient operations. In fact, I was told that it’s a good thing to get new managers into these operations so they can be run more efficiently and create more economic growth for the rest of us.

Politico notes that “The U.S. agricultural workforce fell by 155,000 — about 7 percent — between March and July, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.” There are countless stories about immigrants being terrified and not showing up to work across the country because of Trump and ICE’s vast kidnapping operation, and the BLS data and recent Dallas Fed Surveys backs up what logic tells us. If people who owned businesses wholly dependent on undocumented labor supported a man telling them he will deport every undocumented person in the United States, what else should they expect for their businesses other than the mounting desperation that is unfolding right now?

It is not Americans who are too “spoiled” to do backbreaking labor on the cheap for Trump-voting farmers. Trump-supporting farmers voting to deport their own labor force and then getting mad when it happens are who are spoiled. Stories like these are turning me into a pre-Trump Republican, where I really do believe in personal responsibility and have little sympathy for powerful people who should know better and still vote against their own interests. If you fail at your fiduciary duty atop a business in America, then the world that Republicans have endorsed for years tells us that the destruction it will bring is just the wise invisible hand of the market doing its thing to make it more efficient.