Artificially Interpreted

[The Grand Nudger]

The more you look the weirder it gets, because things true of the agricultural industry as a whole are rarely representative of just the farm sector, or individual farms for that matter. So, for example, we can get numbers like that only if we specifically focus on getting them* - as the majority of the us crop is not picked by any human hand, brown or otherwise. Then, if in whatever targeted segment a study overrepresents positions like hand pick or processor by number of people rather than amount of food produced, we will get higher numbers of people from mexico...but then not all people from mexico are still immigrants in a legal sense, and fewer still are migrant labor. Mechanization skews the whole thing because, by default, a small number of operators regardless of their ethnicity or national origins do the vast majority of farm labor even on farms that heavily employ hand labor.

Further militarization of the border would primarily effect migrant labor, but not the agricultural industry as a whole, as most undocumented workers are also in a category called settled. As in they live here, and have for some time. Mass deportations would primarily effect the (much larger) processing sector of the agricultural industry, but not effect migrant hand pick. They just cross again. Mass deportations along with the family of the targeted deportee would effect all of it but particularly cripple transportation and retail (and from both ends, producer and consumer).

None of these things means much to the largest farms or the wealthiest operators not just because their wealth affords them influence, but because that category of the ag industry isn't in the same crop. Even this conclusion is based on terms of art...because the most profitable farms -per acre- are often small...and in recent years...run by tech bros, if you can believe it. Niche farms for niche consumers run by niche operators. The big winners in the deportation game end up being massive grain producers and tiny affluent farmers market types. The first because the supply of human labor is a rounding error to their operation..and the scond because they are small enough and their product comes with a high enough premium to run on family labor or a small number of temporary employees (in recent years..we found that people in these markets will actually volunteer to do this work, agritourism, lol). I guess livestock is a tossup because of it's relationship to processing and specifically hand processing. It all depends on how much people are willing to pay for bacon.

*not that I think this is a bad idea, especially if you're working for farm worker justice