FORT BRANCH — Steve Obert’s family-run dairy farm has assembled the best team of workers it’s had in years.
The crew is made up of well-trained people managing feed supplies, running the milking parlor and treating sick animals to ensure the 1,200 cows there continue producing about 10,000 gallons of milk a day.
But Obert worries the team that is essential to the farm’s success could soon be gone.
They’re all immigrants who could be targeted under President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to undertake the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.
“It’s absolutely concerning,” he said. “We just can’t deport these people.”
While some business owners like Obert question the cost and logistics of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, Trump on Monday confirmed his commitment to the plan, which he promised to implement the first day he takes office, Jan. 20.
On social media, he posted “TRUE!!!” in response to a conservative commentator who wrote that Trump would declare a national emergency and use military assets to lead “a mass deportation program.”
Obert, who serves as the executive director of the Indiana Dairy Producers, said the organization is offering an online seminar reeducating farmers about how to maintain the required documents to ensure immigrant workers are audit-proof and can remain in the U.S.
That’s especially critical in an industry where migrants make up about 80% of the workforce. A mass deportation could lead dairy farms to close in droves and milk tanks to run dry, Obert explained.
“You won’t just see a ripple effect,” he said. “It’ll be more like a tsunami when it comes to food production, agriculture and so many other industries.”
NO MIGRANTS, MORE INFLATION
Across the state, farmers, builders, manufacturers and other businesses that rely heavily on immigrant workers are closely watching how new policies could disrupt the workforce that keeps operations running. In Indiana, undocumented workers make up about 2.2% of the entire labor force and just under 25% of the state’s total immigrant population, according to the American Immigration Council. Foreign- born people in total make up nearly 8% of Indiana’s employees.
But those numbers are much higher in the construction industry, in which immigrants make up around 25% of the workforce, equaling more than 43,400 employees in Indiana, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Rick Wajda, CEO of the Indiana Builders Association, said the construction trades are already in the middle of a workforce shortage. Without immigrants, it could become insurmountable.
“The immigrant workforce is essential to meeting the demand and sustaining Indiana’s economic and housing market,” he said.
Removing any portion of the construction labor force would only deepen the state’s severe housing shortage that’s led to skyrocketing home and rental prices, explained Michael Hicks, director of Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research.
“It’ll be more expensive to fix your home or to see a new home built and delay the American Dream f o r s ome families of owning their own home,” he said.
The same holds true for food prices, which have climbed sharply because of record-high inflation following the COVID pandemic. A study conducted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that mass deportation could affect agricultural labor and lead to a 10% increase in food prices.
Nationally, undocumented people composed roughly 41% of all hired crop farm workers in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Obert said he trusts that Trump and federal legislators understand that deporting large swaths of the agricultural workforce would only hurt Hoosiers already struggling to afford food.
“They all ran on the fact that they would tame inflation and improve housing,” he said. “You’re not going to tame inflation and you’re not going to fix housing if we have a mass deportation.”
‘WE WANT TO WORK’
Gurinder Kaur, CEO of the Immigrant Welcome Center, was leaving her Indianapolis office earlier this month when she saw a man standing outside holding a suitcase.
The client said he had just arrived from Haiti with the proper paperwork and was looking for a job.
“‘I’m here to work.’ That’s what he said,” recalled Kaur, who immigrated to the U.S. from India. “I think that is the crux of the immigrant spirit. We want to work hard. We want jobs, and we want to make an impact.”
That stands in stark contrast to Trump’s view that undocumented people drain public resources, drive up housing costs and bring crime and drugs into communities around the nation.
In reality, immigrants, regardless of their legal status, have lower unemployment rates and fewer criminal arrests than natural-born citizens.
About 77% of foreign-born men participated in the labor force in 2023 compared to 66% of their native-born counterparts, while foreign-born women worked at about the same rate as native-born women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In Indiana, immigrants paid $4.3 billion in taxes in 2022 — $647 million of which came from undocumented workers, according to the American Immigration Council.
Undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes, and a quarter the rate of for property crimes, according to a study in Texas covering 2012-18 and released in September by the National Institute of Justice.
Add it all up, and Hoosier immigrants work at greater rates, commit fewer crimes, make less money and take fewer state and federal benefits despite having higher rates of poverty, according to a 2019 study by the Center for Business and Economic Research.
“This is not the dominant narrative in the current immigration debate, but is one that is born out by the data,” the study says.
Jenifer Brown, an Indianapolis-based business immigration attorney, said the question isn’t whether immigrants want to work; it’s whether the nation’s immigration laws will allow them to work.
Current policies don’t make it easy for migrants to obtain and keep work visas, she noted, and many worry that it will become even harder under Trump, who put more restrictions on some visa programs during his first term as president.
That’s a major concern for businesses and industries who need foreign-born labor but are in a holding pattern as Trump pitches varying ways he might change immigration policy, Brown noted.
Companies that use the most highly regulated visas to hire skilled employees, such as software developers and mechanical engineers, could be especially impacted by new visa policies, she explained.
“The business community may be in for a rough stretch,” Brown said. “Businesses like stability and consistency, and I think we’re entering a phase where we’ll probably have more uncertainty and unpredictability.”
PATHWAYS VS. DEPORTATION
Trump has aimed his immigration policy at deporting illegal immigrants, but the state’s business community almost unanimously agrees that more migrant workers, not fewer, are needed.
That’s why nearly every industry is calling for a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration system that would allow current undocumented workers to gain legal status while legally streamlining new immigrants into unfilled jobs.
“Many business groups are pro-immigration,” said Hicks, the Ball State economist. “They want folks to come in.”
The Indiana Chamber of Commerce, as part of its 2024 legislative agenda, pushed lawmakers to increase quotas for highly skilled and seasonal migrant workers, while decreasing processing times that can constrict the pipeline of undocumented workers.
At the same time, the chamber requested the creation of a new program that would require undocumented workers to earn legal status rather than deport them, as Trump proposes.
Industry groups for decades have advocated for an updated work visa program that encourages immigrants to come to the U.S. legally, and at times those changes appeared close to becoming reality.
A 2013 proposal from a bipartisan coalition in Congress created a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the U.S. while also improving work visa options for low-skilled workers. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House.
The Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021 proposes similar policies to the 2013 bill and has been approved by the Senate, but the House again has yet to approve the legislation.
Despite Trump’s promise of mass deportation, many groups advocating for a business-friendly immigration policy are hopeful such a policy could happen now that Republicans control the House, Senate and White House.
Obert, with the state dairy association, is one of those who sees a real opportunity for major reforms from GOP lawmakers whose policy goals include boosting the economy and helping businesses.
But if Trump’s mass deportation scheme becomes a reality without a comprehensive immigration reform bill to offset the loss of labor, businesses and consumers in Indiana will suffer, he argued.
“The cost of getting rid of millions of immigrants will be astronomical, but I think that’s crumbs compared to the economic impact of not having an adequate workforce,” Obert said. “Inflation won’t be your issue. It’s whether store shelves will be stocked or if they’re going to be empty.”
© 2024 Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.