President Trump proposed $1.5 billion to begin construction this year of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico — a signature promise of his campaign — ramping up to $2.6 billion in the fiscal year that opens on Oct. 1. The wall would be a concrete part of Trump’s policy of strict enforcement of immigration laws, which could drain the farm labor pool because many farm workers are believed to be undocumented.
“This is the America First budget,” said White House budget director Mick Mulvaney. “We wrote it using the president’s own words. We turned those policies into numbers.” The package unveiled by the White House covers discretionary spending, which is roughly one-quarter of federal outlays. The administration will present in May its plans for mandatory programs, such as farm subsidies and food stamps, and for tax law changes.
To offset the proposed $54 increase in military spending, discretionary spending in the rest of the government would be cut by 10 percent. There are “fairly dramatic” reductions at EPA and the State Department, Mulvaney said, while a lot of agencies “were in the 10 to 12 (percent) range.”
Funding for the border wall “is coming out of the Treasury,” said Mulvaney, although Trump has said he expects Mexico to pay for it eventually. “We went looking for the most inefficient, wasteful and indefensible programs” and used savings from them to pay for the wall.
“We haven’t settled on construction types. We haven’t settled on where we’re going to start,” said the budget director. The administration will experiment with materials and construction methods. “They may be different in different areas. The $1.5 billion allows us to start the program. We come along with additional funding of $2.6 billion in (fiscal) 2018.”
The May budget document will provide a 10-year cost for the wall, he said.
Craig Regelbrugge, co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, says there are from 1-1.5 million undocumented farm workers. Asked about the importance of foreign workers, he told the Boston Globe, “We will lose our food security, we will lose a major piece of our rural economies, and we will lose jobs” without them. Farm groups supported the comprehensive immigration reform bill of 2013 and since it died, have said undocumented workers should be given some sort of legal status. They also want an overhaul of the guest worker program.
The largest farm group, the American Farm Bureau Federation, says agricultural production could fall by $60 billion a year if there is a crackdown on undocumented workers without a source of replacement labor. During the presidential campaign, Trump aides said they would try to avoid damage to agriculture while weeding out undocumented immigrants.