Photo Credit: Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local (2025)
In the 2024 election, Trump had the most support from rural America, winning 93% of rural counties. Rural Americans have been supporting Trump since his first election in 2016 due to his pro-gun policies, tax cuts, and direct agricultural support. However, these supporters now face economic hardship, healthcare cuts, and agricultural harm with the new initiatives by the 2024 Trump administration. Additionally, the immigration enforcement by the Trump administration has led to ICE raids across farmlands, which has been detrimental to farmers. With mass deportation of immigrant laborers, the agricultural business has been suffering because many immigrants come to the U.S. and are hired as farmers.
Read more blog posts about Trump’s support from rural Americans and effects of that support during 2016 here, here, and here.
Figure Credit: Pew Research Center (2025)
While immigrants do not make up an exceedingly large portion of the rural population, they do play an important role in the rural workforce, especially in the healthcare, agriculture, construction, and service industries. Additionally, rural areas need migration to prevent their populations from dying out, and many rural areas rely on immigrants – not only to keep the local economy afloat, but also to have stability in their populations. In this post, I will be focusing only on agricultural workers, but I want to flag that immigrants come to America for all types of opportunities, Immigrants are not only farmers or farmworkers.
Figure Credit: KFF; Authors: Drishti Pillai and Samantha Artiga (2025)
Pew Data research also shows that in general undocumented immigrants make up 5% of the US workforce and 53% of hired labor on farms. Agriculture seems to be the industry most reliant on undocumented workers. Farm owners have suggested that the only people showing up for employment on these farms tend to be immigrants. Farm owners do not care whether the workers are properly documented or not because they need people who are willing to work. To be frank, undocumented workers are being exploited because of the fear of being “caught.” Undocumented workers will take a lower wage, no healthcare and social security in order to have any work available to them. They take jobs that don't pay them enough to have a sustainable family lifestyle, just for the sake of having a job. And farm owners would hire them because of that very reason, paired with the fact the immigrant workers are willing to do the manual labor. And the reality is American citizens do not want to be farmers nor farm laborers anymore.
Interestingly, many farmers voted for Trump, knowing that the immigration policies could potentially affect their employees. Many farm owners rely heavily on immigrants. Now, undocumented farm workers are afraid to show up to work, in fear of being caught by ICE and getting deported. There has also been an increase in self-deportations as well due to the fearmongering by the Trump administration, and undocumented immigrants not wanting to take the risk of being detained by ICE and potentially getting criminally charged (which would hurt any potential for becoming naturalized down the line). The agricultural economy depends on immigrants to help harvest the crops and send produce out to stores. The immigration policies and raids, while heavily affecting agriculture, is (in reality) affecting all Americans’ lives. The inhumane treatment of immigrants by ICE needs to be discussed, maybe then people will be more empathetic to what is happening by this administration. People are risking their lives to come work in the states, people who take the lower pay wages, and we need to protect those people.
If rural American farmers were more aware of how these policies could have affected them, perhaps would they not have voted for Trump in 2024? That seems to be mostly untrue. While a few rural farmers may be regretting their vote, most are staying loyal to Trump saying that they think “tariffs eventually will make [them] great again.” Only some farmers have recognized that Trump’s immigration policies are hurting the American agricultural business. What will happen if Trump continues to ignore that rural America is dependent on migrant settlement and labor?
I'll close with a quote from a Wisconsin dairy farmer:
“We built an economy that relies on people, but we have a public policy that demonizes them” - Hans Breitenmoser discussing immigrant agricultural workers and Trump’s policies
2 comments:
I agree that this is difficult to explain. I wonder if given the two-party system, a farmer could believe they are making a rational choice given constrained options. They could believe a Democratic admin would bring harsher policies on environmental regulation, and therefore supporting Trump may be preferable. I also wonder, how the trade policy plays in to the calculus, as you mentioned in your piece, and in that BBC link.
As arose in our Rural Livelihoods class this past week, voting against one’s own interests is an idea that confounds, but also permeates one of the common narratives surrounding rural voters and Trump voters alike. Although there are myriad experts who, I am sure, have a greater voice to lend to this issue than I do, I find myself often considering what the greatest factors are here. Education. Misleading legislative wording. ‘Old-fashioned’ stubbornness. A lack of trust in the system and the power of one’s vote. In this particular case, I wonder if one element is the concept of laborers as an inexhaustible resource. That voters believe that even if their farmhands are deported, someone will come to take their place. I want to end on the note that while the Trump Administration may have resurrected the idea of voting against one’s interest, it is by no means a new phenomenon. In high school, I recall being taken aback by the fact that during the Civil War, a large majority of white soldiers fighting on behalf of the South were not wealthy enough to own enslaved individuals. However, years prior, wealthy landowners had realized that they were outnumbered by their laborers, White and Black alike, and began to sow the seeds of hatred, eventually manifesting in the lines of war.
Post a Comment