Immigrant farm workers harvest broccoli on March 16, 2006, near the border town of San Luis, south of Yuma, Arizona. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON – Deportations ordered by President Donald Trump could hit Arizona’s agriculture and construction sectors hard, pushing up prices for homebuyers and grocery shoppers.
One in five agricultural workers and one in eight construction workers in Arizona lack permanent legal status, according to Pew Research Center data.
“If you remove a significant portion of the state’s labor force, what results are labor shortages,” said George Hammond, director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the University of Arizona. “That creates supply chain issues (and) shortages of goods and services.”
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Arizona’s undocumented population was about 250,000 out of 7.3 million in 2022, according to Pew.
“Losing part of the workforce could have economic implications,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew. “In terms of housing costs like house building, but also in terms of food costs.”
The construction, hospitality and agriculture sectors would be affected the most by mass deportations, Lopez said.
Construction accounted for almost $33 billion of the state’s $534 billion economic output in 2023, according to data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. Agriculture accounted for $2.6 billion.
There were 21,617 agricultural workers in Arizona in 2022, the most recent figure available, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data released a year ago.
The construction industry employed about 214,000 people statewide as of December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The leisure and hospitality industry employed 355,000 at last count.
Michael Vazquez, executive director of the 20,000-member Arizona State Building and Construction Trades Council, doesn’t expect deportations to impact unionized construction workers, because they’re screened through the federal E-Verify system.
Nor does he see any looming shortage of workers.
“Having people come in from a different country to do construction work is not needed, because we have the workforce here,” he said.
But the state’s unemployment rate is just 3.8%, according to BLS. And employers are worried about what would happen if the pool of potential workers shrinks.
“Everybody needs help,” said Paul “Paco” Ollerton, a third-generation cotton farmer in Pinal County. “Everywhere you go, there is a shortage of labor.”
The problem gets worse for farmers during housing booms, when workers leave to work for contractors who pay “$4 to $5 an hour more than we can afford,” Ollerton said.
Expanding a guest worker program or temporary visas for unskilled workers would take the sting out of a mass deportation policy, some business groups say – but that has been a tough sell in Congress.
Just over 310,000 visas were issued in 2023 under the H-2A program for temporary agricultural workers, according to State Department data. All but about 26,000 of those went to workers from Mexico.
The one-year visas can be renewed three times. Workers can start again after leaving the country for 60 days.
There’s also an H-2B program for unskilled workers in industries other than agriculture. Nearly 132,000 of those were issued in 2023.
But these temporary programs aren’t good enough for many employers.
“It just doesn’t work,” Ollerton said. “It won’t work in the retail world. It won’t work in the restaurant field. It won’t work in manufacturing because you will lose that person that you spent a lot of money to train.”
The impact of mass deportations on the cost of housing is a matter of some debate.
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president of economic and social policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, expects demand and prices to drop as people vacate homes.
“The effect would be to diminish the value of the most valuable asset most Americans own, which is their home,” he said.
But Geraldine Miranda, an economic policy analyst at the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, expects higher housing prices as the construction industry struggles to find workers. That, she said, would far outweigh any reduction in demand for housing as immigrants leave.
“Arizona’s economy has been booming,” Miranda said. “There are lots of other people that are coming into Arizona from other states.”
Census data shows that only four states saw higher net migration than Arizona in 2023 – the number of people moving in from other states minus the number of Arizona residents who left.
For industries that rely on immigrant workers, economists generally expect shortages that push wages higher. That would benefit the workers who remain – a longstanding argument for curbing immigration.
But higher wages mean higher costs for employers, which they would pass along to consumers, Nowrasteh said.
“The net economic effect would be negative,” he said.
Immigrants provide a disproportionate share of labor: 77% nationwide were of working age, 18 to 64 years old, at last count compared to 58% for people born in the U.S., according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“Immigration is one way that we can keep our labor force growing, and this is important for keeping our standard of living growing,” Hammond said.
As of 2022, around 11 million people were living in the country unlawfully, according to Pew Research Center data, down from a peak of 12.7 million in 2007. In Arizona, the estimated population dropped by half since 2007.
The American Immigration Council, which advocates for reduced levels of immigration, estimates the number rose by 2.3 million in the last two years, pushing the total to 13.3 million.
The group says Trump’s mass deportation goal would cost $968 billion – and would require 24 times more detention capacity than currently exists, tens of thousands of additional agents and at least 1,000 new immigration courts.
And that assumes that authorities could somehow round up and deport 1 million people a year for 11 years, and 20% of those eligible for deportation leave the country voluntarily.
“These deportations have a significant impact on the way that people are living their lives,” Lopez said. “Not only the people who are here undocumented but also the people who think they are at risk of being accidentally picked up and deported.”
Matthew DeWees reported from Washington. Katrina Michalak reported from Phoenix.
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