Will Trump’s Deportation Walk Back Hurt American Workers?

As soon as President Donald Trump won last year’s election, Big Agriculture—the lobby that in 2017 spent more than the military industrial complex’s lobby—immediately started begging him to spare its illegal alien workers from deportation.

Unfortunately, it appears Trump is listening to the struggling multi-millionaire farmers and the equally hard-pressed billionaire hotel owners. He recently announced his administration is working on a “temporary pass” for immigrants “who are good, who possibly came in incorrectly”:

What we’re going to do is we’re going to do something for farmers, where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows. He’s not going to hire a murderer. When you go into a farm and he’s had somebody working with him for nine years doing this kind of work, which is hard work to do, and a lot of people aren’t going to do it, and you end up destroying a farmer because you took all the people away. It’s a problem.

Their argument on immigration runs something like this: If not for illegal aliens, Americans wouldn’t be able to afford fruits and vegetables or hotel stays while on vacation.

But Trump, never one to obfuscate, stated plainly that the pivot aims to help the farmers and hospitality magnates, not the general public: “Our great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”

The president is understandably trying to patch together the post-Biden economy wreck and help everyday Americans. But this walk back on deportation will have the opposite effect.

If Trump’s right that it’s “almost impossible” for hotels to replace illegal aliens with legal labor, the same holds for every other job that doesn’t require a college degree.

Wealthy farmers and hotel owners are not public servants. In a free market, they offer nothing to the American people that can’t be replaced if they can’t make their businesses work with legal workers, immigrant or native-born.

Trump didn’t win his historic comeback victory because a few thousand multi-millionaire farmers and hotel owners flooded the polls. It’s doubtful many of them even opened their checkbooks to his campaign, considering he’s been promising for years to take away their illegal workers—who amount to indentured servants, owing everything to their employers.

Rather, Trump won because millions of disaffected, impoverished, hardworking Americans—who usually stay home or vote for Democrats—turned out to elect someone who was going to eliminate their cheap, foreign competition.

Voters are still sour on the economy former President Joe Biden left. For a while, immigration remained the one on which Trump received approval.

That’s because immigrants quit their jobs in droves thanks to high profile deportation blitzes and Trump stripping hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants of the temporary protective status and parole Biden conferred them. This opened low-skilled jobs to Americans, causing real wage growth, slowly but surely returning the American working class to its glory days of 2019.

Recently, however, even Trump’s approval on immigration enforcement has slipped, despite remaining concern about illegal immigration.

If Trump backs off immigration enforcement for agriculture and hospitality, there’s no logical reason why landscapers, construction companies, retail, fast food, or even homecare companies should have to give up their illegal aliens. They can make the same argument regarding replacing illegal aliens who build Americans’ homes, mow their lawns, point them to available self-check-out kiosks, or care for them in old age.

Why Do We Deport Immigrants, Anyway?

The U.S. deports legal immigrants when they engage in criminal behavior. If that’s the only reason to deport illegal aliens, then there is no difference between the two, and we already have de facto amnesty.

In the wake of vociferous outcries from Trump’s base, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins tried to clear up his policy, so conservative social media influencers would have a propaganda clip with which to quiet their frustrated followers.

“There will be no amnesty,” she announced in a press conference. “The mass deportations continue but in a strategic way, and we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation."

USDA SEC. BROOKE ROLLINS:

"There will be no amnesty, the mass deportations continue but in a strategic way, and we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation." pic.twitter.com/Yjd8qrzlES

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) July 8, 2025

This would be news coming from a Democrat administration. But who thought Trump would offer any illegal aliens amnesty? If those are the goalposts, American workers are in trouble. Additionally, if ICE is “strategically” deporting illegal aliens by ignoring the ones who pick apples, that is, in fact, amnesty.

Rollins suggested farmers could hire some of the millions of unemployed Medicaid recipients. But farmers won’t willingly transition to mechanization and American labor unless coerced.

Her press conference apparently didn’t quite do the PR trick, because ICE immediately raided a couple of a marijuana farms in California. Agents then posed in front of 10 captured teens, and Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Rodney Scott posted, “These are the juveniles found in the marijuana facility—almost all unaccompanied, one as young as 14. California are you ready to partner with us to stop child exploitation?”

First, no honest person considers teen farm work “child exploitation.” It’s legal in America for 14-year-olds to work on farms without mommy holding their hands. If anything, conservatives want more unaccompanied teenagers working on farms—only we want them to be Americans.

Secondly, the optics of raiding a marijuana farm are obvious. Republicans generally don’t support legal recreational marijuana, while the farmers lobbying Trump to go easy on their illegal aliens aren’t running marijuana farms. This allows the administration to “disprove” Trump’s public statements by targeting a niche industry that doesn’t anger the agricultural lobby.

In the first five months of Trump’s administration, ICE detained slightly less than 100,000 illegal aliens. That’s good progress, but it’s barely half a percent of the total illegal alien population in the country.

Trump’s administration was wise to prioritize foreign gang members, but they haven’t even found enough to fill up Florida’s newly opened “Alligator Alcatraz.” Additionally, ICE is starting to run low on violent criminals and sob stories, partially because most illegal aliens are not violent criminals or unaccompanied minors. And, unlike farm workers, foreign gang members aren’t standing in the middle of a field waiting to be caught.

If the administration is serious about continuing mass deportations, it will have to inevitably wage a two-front communications war with the media and big business. Overemphasizing criminal records and teen labor cedes the moral high ground to the Left and allows big business to run roughshod over America First advocates who want mass deportations of any and all illegal aliens.

Trump is trying to keep a coalition together that includes the Chamber of Commerce Republicans who stand to lose with mass deportations and his voter base, which consists of workers who stand to gain from mass deportations. Carefully worded press conferences and raiding marijuana farms will only delay the showdown for so long.

Emphasizing dangerous elements Biden let in sounds sensible to everyone and gains the most support. But even legal immigrants are eligible for deportation in those circumstances. The U.S. like every country that enforces its laws deports illegal aliens because they’re in the country illegally and take jobs and benefits to which they have no legal right.

Don’t Illegal Aliens Provide Services Americans Can’t or Won’t?

Some Republicans in Congress are already openly pushing for de facto amnesty.

“I do believe that the president promised that the illegals who are criminals were going to be kicked out of the country,” Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) told Fox News. “Now, there is another mass of people, who most of them are Hispanics, who have been here for more than five years, they have been contributing to the economy, who do not have a criminal record, and those are the people who deserve some type of dignity.”

She added that she’s backing a GOP-sponsored bill to give these illegal aliens “dignity,” not amnesty because they’re allegedly contributing to our economy.

GOP Rep. Maria Salazar: "There is another mass of people, most of them Hispanics, who have been here for more than five years contributing to the economy, who do not have a criminal record, and those people deserve some type of dignity and deserve to stay." pic.twitter.com/o5t6oXd3G9

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) July 15, 2025

Like business owners and farmers, however, no one “contributes” to the economy in a free market. People engage in profit-earning enterprises, whether running a business or working a job, to better their lives. Free market nations—except for wartime economies—do not “owe” farmers, business owners, or landscapers a debt of gratitude. The market provides them all the gratitude they seek or deserve.

When countries dump products on a foreign economy, the price of that product drops and hurts domestic producers. Likewise, when countries dump labor on America’s economy, the cost of that labor drops, hurting American laborers who need jobs.

Illegal aliens will always be able to undercut American workers because they come from countries where wages are five to 10 times lower than what the poorest Americans earn, and their employers don’t have to abide by pesky regulations like child labor laws or pay into entitlement.

Some would ask, what if the government let the workers stay, but taxed them and made employers pay them like Americans?

Then, those employers would find new illegal aliens, knowing the government is never going to deport them. That’s what currently happens with agricultural work. The government provides unlimited temporary farm visas to but farmers don’t want to pay legal immigrants the required wages or deal with the paperwork.

Agriculture and Hospitality Must Be Forced to Adapt to America First Immigration Policies

When a source of labor is removed, industries adapt. Incompetent business owners who can’t make it work cut their losses, and competent business owners eat the temporary costs and adjust accordingly.

The fall of American teen labor over the past quarter of a century is due largely to the explosion in low-skilled immigration. Employers in all industries prefer a 40-year-old illegal alien with over 20 years of work experience to a 16-year-old American who needs instruction and oversight for the same wage. But if ICE removes the 40-year-old, the employer must then put in the work to train the 16-year-old or take a financial loss by hiring someone older at a higher wage point.

This is not a hypothetical. High immigration states have teen employment rates below 30 percent, while low immigration states have teen employment rates as high as 70 percent. Recently, in Colorado, American college students have been applying in droves to seasonal ski resort jobs after Trump canceled a visa program, which allowed the resorts to hire foreigners.

A recent report by Restoration News showed that farm labor too is something Americans do not consider beneath themselves. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens do the same type of hard fieldwork that supposedly only immigrants will do. In fact, farmers pay these Americans less than they pay legal H-2A guestworkers.

Americans’ culture and economy were stronger when employers were forced to train and oversee American teenagers and unskilled workers. Trump should not sacrifice his Make America Great Again goal because of the pain it will cause these business owners and farmers who built their business models on the continual supply of illegal foreign labor.

Trump’s bowing to pressure from wealthy agricultural and hospitality lobbies risks undermining his commitment to American workers. This shift could erode the real wage growth and job opportunities that have benefited the working class under his administration. While Secretary Rollins denies amnesty and urges farmers increase the use of automation and American labor, business leaders aren’t going to sacrifice profits to do this out of civic virtue. Enforcing immigration laws are not just about protecting Americans from violent foreigners but protecting American workers and taxpayers from exploitation. Any retreat from this position will weaken the economic progress Trump has made for hardworking Americans who supported him and his MAGA movement.

(READ MORE: Make Food Great Again by Making Farmers Hire American Again)

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