Editor’s Desk: Deportations and Trump’s ‘visa reform’

By Theodore Ross

We have now entered the first week of the second Trump administration, and for foreign-born workers in the food system and their families — and for news organizations such as FERN that document their experiences and issues — a looming sense of foreboding prevails. The ways in which we are able to report labor, migration, and deportation stories that will profoundly affect America’s food-system workers is the great challenge of the coming years.

Today, I would like to call attention to two recent FERN works with new media partners. In “How Trump’s deportation plan could actually increase migrant labor,” co-published with Politico Magazine, FERN staffers Teresa Cotsirilos and Ted Genoways look at what will happen if the Trump administration begins mass deportations of food-system workers. The short answer is that it will replace those people not with American-born labor — but with more immigrants:

Rather than improving the quality of food industry jobs to attract more American-born workers, employers will continue hiring low-wage immigrants. And the real development that we expect? The Trump administration will provide food industry employers with low-wage immigrant workers by expanding the existing H-2 visa program. While this would be a boon for employers, this expanded H-2 workforce would likely be more vulnerable to abuse than many of the undocumented workers, asylum recipients and other immigrants it would be replacing. 

“At Colorado meatpacking plant, a vulnerable workforce braces for Trump 2.0” is a radio feature, written and produced by Ted Genoways and longtime FERN contributor Mary Anne Andrei, in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a network of Midwest and Plains states radio stations. Published before the inauguration, it tells the story of a group of Haitian meatpacking workers in Greeley, Colorado, who are in the country legally, doing one of the most dangerous jobs — and who could be deported:

The JBS plant in Greeley has a night shift made up of about 1,200 Haitian immigrants. They arrived in a wave about a year ago, fleeing gang violence in Haiti and drawn by the promise of a steady job with good pay at JBS. Now their future is in doubt.

Both of these stories are early examples of a shift in editorial priorities at FERN that we are calling our multi-format plan. Our mission is to make the food system more sustainable and equitable through powerful journalism and storytelling. We believe the best way to do that is through taking our stories to as many discrete audiences as we can, via the platforms that they use to consume those stories now. We think that will vastly increase the number of people we reach and the impact our stories will have. So we will publish a shorter, argument-based article on immigrant workers in one outlet and accompany it with a radio feature for another audience. There will be longer stories, and audio — and in some cases, video and social media content.
The multi-format strategy is new for FERN, and we think it is the best way to meet the moment. What I’m drawing your attention to now is the first step. There will be much more to come, very soon, and I’m eager to tell you all about it. Until then, please know that at FERN we don’t make this journalism for you — we make it with you. Your support is more crucial than ever — working in multiple formats can be costly, and I hope you will consider making a donation to help us keep digging.