While securing the southern border and deporting illegal immigrants remain among President Donald Trump’s top concerns, some leaders in food service, health care, and agriculture are asking him to reconsider his policies to protect law-abiding workers who came to the U.S. illegally.
The call for Trump to protect those who follow the law and remove “dangerous individuals” only comes from a bipartisan campaign called “Secure Our Borders and Secure Our Workforce.”
The campaign was launched on Monday by the Chicago-based American Business Immigration Coalition. The group represents 1,700 employers nationwide who are warning that Trump’s pledge of mass deportations would gut their industries and worsen inflation.
“Mass deportations would not only cause havoc in our communities and split up families, but it also would disrupt the workforce and raise inflation for everyday Americans,” Rebecca Shi, the CEO of ABIC, said.
The business leaders represented by the coalition are urging Trump’s administration to come to a bipartisan agreement that would create more legal paths for their immigrant employees, enabling them to continue working in the US.
Some are warning that the risk of deportations might create more issues than the country currently has.
“We can import workers and continue to produce our food here in the United States, or we can import food,” Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association, said.
The call to action from business leaders comes after Homeland Security Chief Tom Homan, who is also Trump’s “Border Czar,” was in Chicago this week leading deportation efforts that resulted in almost 1,000 arrests on Sunday alone.
Homan has made clear that at this time, federal officials are only targeting people charged with crimes who are in the country illegally.
However, the Trump administration has suspended the United States’s refugee resettlement program for at least the next few months, as it also looks to revamp the system.
When it comes to the impact Trump’s mass deportations may have, Shi said that removing undocumented immigrant labor could result in gross domestic product falling by 4.2%.
Shi also stressed that if the entirety of the country’s undocumented workforce were to be deported, there wouldn’t be enough workers to fill the positions, if they were even filled.
“Even if every unemployed American found a job today, we would still have 1.7 million open positions,” Shi said, citing federal data.