Letter from Chip Northrup

Mass Deportation Will Raise Prices

For generations and continuously without a break, my family has employed undocumented workers as ranch hands, farm hands, cooks, yard men, factory workers, construction crews, maids and clerks. We have helped them get green cards. We met their families. We took care of them when they were ill. I remember their names: Carmen, Luiz, Moises, Olga, Diego, Carla, Esteban. I remember their hard work, their children, their good sense, their smiles.

In all of the Southwest and much of the South, all manual skill-intensive industries have relied on undocumented workers. The plurality, and in some cases, the majority of employees at some businesses, particularly food processing, seasonal farm labor, meat packing, slaughter houses, industrial scale dairy farms and feedlots, landscaping, roofing, framing crews, drywall crews, boat crews, hotel cleaning crews, kitchen help, maids, waiters, cooks and textile workers are undocumented.

If undocumented workers are deported en masse, the price of almost everything, not just eggs, will go up. Because the demagogues behind the deportations don’t care about grocery prices or the value of skilled labor. To paraphrase LBJ, “Give the lowest white man someone to look down on and he’ll vote for you every time.”

The erroneous assumption is that any immigrant that arrives legally may be beneficial to the country, but one that arrives illegally will not, that they are “bad people.” The fact is that they can both be beneficial to the county. We can have undocumented workers and low prices or we can have stricter immigration laws and higher prices. Americans won’t see the impact on the costs of goods and services until it hits them in the wallet. The compromise is a guest-worker program, like H-2A, but greatly expanded and enforced.

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown