Raising cattle is tough. Nearly every day, Kansas ranchers and feedlot operators have to wrestle with drought, disease or blizzards. But the biggest problem is labor — the industry is chronically short-handed. That is especially true in southwest Kansas.
“If the immigrants weren't there to help out, there wouldn't be an operation functional in any of those places,” said Micheal Feltman, an immigration attorney in Cimarron, Kansas, just west of Dodge City.
Feltman helps the feedlots and mega dairy farms near there find workers. He said people funneling into southwest Kansas, from at least 40 countries, are the lifeblood of the beef industry and the regional economy.
Close to half the people who process meat in the U.S. were born someplace else, and immigrants do much of the work feeding and tending animals. Most of these workers are here legally, but a significant percentage aren’t, and documented immigrants often support close family members living with them illegally.
That’s why President-elect Donald Trump’s promises of a sweeping crackdown on immigration, sealing the border, and deporting 11 million people have many people in the meat industry worried.
Mass deportations would trigger a cascade of hardships across the chronically short-staffed meat industry, Feltman said. Processing plants would slow down, causing meat shortages that economists worry would drive consumer prices to record highs. Farmers would find themselves with more livestock than they could sell or care for, and the value of their animals would plummet.
“If every immigrant … over the last 20 years disappeared immediately, it would be a ghost town,” Feltman said. “I don't know how the businesses would survive.”
The beef industry runs on imported labor
For one recent Haitian immigrant, who said she was afraid to divulge her name because she fled hunger and horrific violence at home, the stakes seem like life and death. The woman and her 4-year-old daughter made their way to Garden City three months ago. They’re here on temporary humanitarian parole. That gives her two years to apply for asylum.
She’s still waiting to be granted a work permit, but said she’d be willing to do any kind of labor, including the dangerous, uncomfortable, smelly jobs at the Tyson packing plant on the outskirts of town. Through an interpreter, she said she’s following the letter of the law to stay in the U.S., and has an appointment for a screening that should clear the way for her work visa, and financial independence.
“It will bring me a lot of joy,” she said. “Because I have a kid to take care of, I have myself, and if I could invest in the country, it would bring me a lot of joy.”
Given Trump’s rhetoric during the election and since, she now fears she’ll be sent back to the violent chaos in Haiti instead of joining a workforce that badly needs her.
“It’s not safe. The gangs are killing people,” she said.
Despite hefty pay hikes for meat processing workers in recent years, the industry cannot hire people fast enough. In places like southwest Kansas, employers say there aren’t nearly enough native-born people willing to show up reliably and do the hard, dirty work necessary in the meat industry.
The complicated immigration system doesn’t allow in enough legal immigrants to make up the difference, so some companies turn to undocumented workers to get by.
University of Arkansas economist Jada Thompson said mass deportations would exacerbate the problem, sending shockwaves up and down the meat supply chain. For one thing, deporting meat-packing workers would slow down the plants, triggering shortages.
“I think we're going to see higher prices (for) the retail (customer),” said Thompson.
But farmers wouldn’t see any gains from soaring retail prices, she said, because there would be too many animals in the system for the meat processors to use, a glut building daily as more pigs and cows mature.
“I think you'll end up eventually seeing lower prices (for) farmers,” said Thompson, “because it will eventually be oversupply because, effectively, they just can't harvest that many animals.”
Thompson said the same thing happened a few years ago, but it wasn’t an immigration crackdown causing the labor shortage — it was the COVID pandemic.
“And what happened in that supply chain?” Thompson asked. “It backed it up. Prices went up. All of a sudden, you had people with pigs and cows that could not go to market because there was nowhere for them to be slaughtered.”
Those animals still had to be fed, and they still needed space to live in, but nobody wanted to buy them for meat, meaning farmers were spending extra money every day to keep more pigs and cows alive. Eventually, some farmers had to cut their losses, shoot their livestock and bury it. Everybody loses.
Kansas State University economist Glynn Tonsor said losses like those would spread broadly through southwest Kansas towns that depend on big feedlots, dairies and packing houses.
“They very often are one of the largest employers and local tax generators, so there's relevant implications for funding of schools, funding of libraries, funding of anything you want to talk about that's publicly funded in local areas,” said Tonsor.
It’s not clear yet how Trump administration deportations will work, if they happen at all, but Kansas Livestock Association CEO Matt Teagarden hopes they move slowly, and that they somehow shield the immigrant-dependent meat industry.
Teagarden said he believes border security should be tightened, but he’d like the system of granting work visas streamlined, not shackled. It’s either import people or import food.
“One of the alternatives is our food production goes overseas or moves outside the country,” said Teagarden. “If we don't have an adequate workforce, can't produce the food that we all want each day, each week, each month, that food production will go elsewhere.”
