On recent earnings calls, shareholders of some publicly traded meat companies have asked whether the Trump administration’s deportation plans – among other things – could pose a challenge to their industry. “We’ve been there before. There was no impact on our business,” said Tim Klein, CEO of National Beef, owned by Brazilian food company Marfrig, in response to shareholder’s question. In response to a similar question in A Tyson Foods earnings callCEO Donnie King, said: “There is much we don’t know right now, but let me remind you that we have successfully run this company for over 90 years, regardless of who is in control.”
It is unclear whether the Trump regime would target meatpacking plants operated by the industry’s largest companies, given the favorable treatment these companies received at times during Trump’s first presidency. During the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump issued an executive order that allowed this to happen plants for further workeven as some of them were meat packers most affected by infections. The U.S. House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis later determined that Tyson’s legal department drafted the text of the bill proposed order.
“These large meatpacking companies have prevented additional safeguards from being put in place to protect workers, in part through concerted efforts with Trump administration political officials to isolate themselves from oversight, force workers to remain in unsafe conditions, and protect themselves from liability for the resulting disease or death of an employee,” the commission concluded in the report released December 2022
Labor supply is tight in meatpacking plants and across the agriculture industry, says Cesar Escalante, a professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. The industry needs more workers, according to Escalante, who says the United States should expand the H-2A seasonal agricultural worker visa program to include more livestock workers. Smaller farms are more likely to lack workers, Escalante says, while larger farms may turn to mechanization.
If meatpacking workers are deported en masse, this could translate into higher prices for consumers. Report from Texas A&M Agrilife Research estimates that eliminating immigrant labor from U.S. dairy farms would almost double retail milk prices. It is unclear what effect Trump’s deportation plan will have on meat or food prices more generally, as much about the plan remains unknown. “We don’t know yet how this will all play out,” Hubbard says.