Chipping Away at Guac

Two big plans for the administration include trade war threatening tariffs and the deporation of millions of undocumented workers. As economist Rebecca Patterson explains in the NYT (Gift Article), if these two things happen, Prepare for Guacamole to Be a Luxury Item. “The American food ecosystem, including farms, ranches and processors, has heavily relied on immigrant labor for decades. More than half of farmers reported labor shortages in 2022, up from 14 percent in 2014, according to surveys conducted by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State. In 2022, about seven in 10 farm workers were foreign-born, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey. Many of those workers obtain seasonal visas. The rest of the immigrant labor pool, as much as 44 percent of foreign farm workers, are undocumented and have no work authorization.”