President Donald Trump gained strong support from rural Americans in last year’s Presidential election for his pledges to build a wall on the border between the US and Mexico, and to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
The reality is that many farms and businesses in rural areas of the country are heavily reliant on immigrant labor, needing more rather than fewer foreign workers. The deputy director of economic and domestic production for the National Pork Producers Council, Dustin Baker, says that the agriculture industry has a serious worker shortage, with the same applying to his own industry. Baker, who made the comments in early June at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, says that there is no supply of domestic workers and that the pork producers cannot find American workers to hire.
The shortage of workers has ripple effects throughout the industry, including the management of pigs in barns in Iowa, and meat-cutting positions in the Tar Heel, California processing plant, which is the largest such pork plant in the world. The biggest pork producer in the state is Iowa Select Farms, which has 114 vacancies listed on its website, almost all for sow farm technicians.
Baker says that while the exact percentage of immigrants who work in the pork industry is unknown, it is nonetheless a significant amount. Of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, around eight million are believed to be in the workforce.