Contributor: ICE raids and migrant pay cuts are devastating California economies
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Along the southern stretch of California’s Central Coast, President Trump’s crusade against immigrants has left a visceral mark.It seems these days that almost everyone there has seen or felt the aftermath of an immigration raid: cars with shattered windows left idling and businesses emptied of their usual employees and patrons.
The human toll is stark.Raids around Christmas removed at least 100 people from our communities, leaving children without parents and families without primary earners — creating crises that cascade far beyond the moment of enforcement.The economic consequences of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are equally severe.
Recent farmer surveys have shown that immigration raids and the fear they generate have caused farmworker shortages, particularly in labor-intensive crops such as strawberries — the region’s most valuable agricultural commodity — where fruit rots on the plant without the immigrant workers who pick it.Early research quantifying the economic impact of ICE raids in Oxnard estimates direct crop losses of $3 billion to $7 billion with significant spillover into other sectors of the economy.As families lose income to raids — whether through the direct loss of a working family member or in the form of lost business production or sales — they spend less in the local economy.
The ripple effect means that the total economic impact of ICE raids is much greater than unpicked crops, with harm most concentrated among the most vulnerable: farmworkers.Recent changes to a foreign worker program threaten to deepen the wound.The federal program, known as H-2A, allows growers and farm labor contractors to recruit temporary foreign workers to meet seasonal labor demand.
It has become the fastest-growing work visa system in U.S.agriculture.
It carries with it a well-documented history of wage theft, abuse and trafficking enabled, in part...