The first presidential debate of 2024, taking place Thursday night in Atlanta, will likely feature two opposing visions for America. President Joe Biden Laws introduced offered a path to citizenship shortly after taking office and has in recent weeks announced action to protect hundreds of thousands of eligible spouses of undocumented U.S. citizens and ease the process for some DACA recipients to receive sponsorship from their employers. Republican candidate and convicted felon Donald Trump has pledged to create mass detention camps and deport millions of long-term immigrants from the country and will likely take the stage tonight to continue spreading lies and dangerous anti-immigrant rhetoric.
But one need look no further than the state of Georgia to see the economic and humanitarian costs of the kind of anti-immigrant policies Trump wants to implement from coast to coast.
In 2011, Georgia Republicans passed HB 87, an Arizona-style bill That made it a crime to knowingly transport undocumented immigrants — even if they were a friend or loved one — and instituted a “papers please” policy that allowed local law enforcement to harass anyone who they had “reasonable suspicion” that he was in the country unlawfully based on legal immigration status, America's Voice wrote in 2021.
But Georgia also relies on its immigrants, who make up “16.1 percent of the service industry, 23.1 percent of the natural resources, construction and maintenance industries, and 16.6 percent of the manufacturing, transportation and material handling industries,” according to the Georgia Budget and Institute for Politics said in 2021. Like other farm-rich states, Georgia's agricultural industry is powered by immigrant workers, making it the “consistently leading state in the nation” for peanuts, pecans, blueberries and green onions, according to the Georgia Farm Bureau said.
The state is also a top producer of broiler chickens. The tragedy in Gainesville in 2021 highlighted the dangers of working in meat processing plants during a nitrogen leak killed six workers and injured many others. Five of the six workers who lost their lives maintaining our food supply were Latino.
HB 87 hit these vital industries and essential workers. The headlines that followed in the months that followed said it all. “Georgia farmers say immigration law keeps workers out” NPR reported in 2011. “The crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, the agriculture chief tells U.S. lawmakers” Associated Press reported that same year. “The Law of Unintended Consequences: Georgia's immigration law backfires“said Forbes in 2011. A report appreciated Crop losses of $300 million. So you can imagine the relief felt by Georgia's agriculture industry and other business leaders when the bill was blocked. Of course not many would say it publicly (Also check out Iowa this year.)
Now imagine this on a national level when Trump returns to the White House in January 2025 and begins the mass expulsion of millions of people from the country, including workers who maintain our nation's food supply, teach our children, care for the elderly and our country build houses and repair our roads, care for our children and work in our hospitals. More than a million agricultural workers have disappeared. More than 200,000 food and manufacturing workers have disappeared. 1.6 million workers in the construction industry are gone. More than 20,000 teachers protected by DACA have disappeared. More than 200,000 frontline workers have disappeared. More than 140,000 child care, personal care and home care workers have disappeared.
Trump's plan for mass deportation would take us over an economic cliffwhich negatively impacted the U.S. economy by worsening labor shortages, reigniting inflation and forcing the Federal Reserve to keep borrowing costs high for even longer, according to CNN reported. Experts say this would cost hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers their livelihoods. “From a calculation“Deporting 1 million immigrants would lead to 88,000 additional job losses among other Americans, suggesting that Trump's program could cost up to 968,000 Americans their jobs, in addition to the 7.1 million jobs held by immigrants subject to deportation.” said Robert Shapiro, former Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs, wrote in Washington Monthly in May.
Immigrants were also essential to Trump's personal interests, He worked at his resorts and his family's winery and even washed his clothes and fed his family. “There are millions of us here without papers, and the country depends on us,” said his former housekeeper, Victorina Morales said in 2019. “He knows this because his business depends on us and he knows how hard I worked.” Is the Trump Organization still exploiting undocumented workers? That's a question we'd like to hear from him tonight. Will he let Stephen Miller send the National Guard to his golf courses and vineyards to round up workers?
Trump knows he can't win the debate if he talks about deporting farmworkers, teachers, caregivers and other essential workers who are crucial to our daily lives Willie Horton style dog whistle attacksPromoting anti-immigrant conspiracy theories undermining trust in our electoral processand ignoring his record during his term, This also includes the traumatic separation of thousands of children from their parents at the border.
We don't need to imagine the nationwide consequences if Trump returns to power next year. Georgia's history after the passage of HB 87 has already previewed the economic, humanitarian, and political consequences attacking our friends, neighbors and colleagues.
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